Tourist Photography and the Reverse Gaze
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- The interaction between tourist photographer and local photographee is a dynamic site of identity construction.
- To date, this interaction has been theorized mainly in terms of the power of the tourist photographer, which has been shown to mediate and commodify local cultures and create new identities amongst those photographed.
- Data from Ladakh, a popular backpacker tourist destination in northern India, illustrates how the reverse gaze of Ladakhis can constitute the emerging tourist self, stimulating uncomfortable social emotions, such as embarrassment.
- The photographee can gaze upon the tourist photographer, and this “reverse gaze” can play an important role in constituting the emerging self of the tourist photographer.
CHARACTERIZING THE REVERSE GAZE
- The reverse gaze is clearly evident in an unusual interaction that I observed during fieldwork in Ladakh, northern India.
- In many ways she crystallizes tourists’ imagination of Ladakh.
- The tourist in the left of Figure 2 had previously been photographing the photogenic Ladakhi woman also, and he, unable to hide his camera, simply began to photograph, or at least pretend to photograph, someone or something else.
- And the manifestly social nature of his discomfort, the blushing, indicates that the mechanism underlying this re-positioning is to be found in the social situation.
- One of the most extreme strategies for avoiding the reverse gaze is to either travel without a camera or to hide one’s camera.
TAKING THE PERSPECTIVE OF LADAKHIS?
- One way to explain tourist photographers’ manifest discomfort when caught in the reverse gaze of Ladakhis comes from the tradition of Symbolic Interactionism (Blumer 1969).
- Assuming that this is how Ladakhis feel when photographed without permission, and empathizing with this feeling, could clearly explain why tourist photographers, when caught in the reverse gaze, feel uncomfortable.
- Tourism has created jobs and economic wealth, both of which are widely appreciated by Ladakhis.
- They often follow tourists chanting “one photo, one photo” – meaning that they want the tourist to take a photograph of them.
- Examining the Ladakhi construction of “Ladakhi culture” reveals that it is comprised largely of the things that tourists photograph.
TOURISTS, TRAVELERS AND POST-TOURISTS
- Generally speaking, tourists are quite self-reflective about tourism (MacCannell 2001; Prebensen et al. 2003).
- That is so pointless Travis: I just felt bad for him Travis narrates the tourist photographer as getting an elderly Ladakhi man to “pose” so that she could take a photograph.
- Second, Marten criticises tourists who “run through the country and take some pictures.”.
- Notice the similarity between the reverse gaze and tourists’ own perception of tourist photographers.
- This discomfort is arguably compounded by the fact that it simultaneously reveals a contradiction between tourists’ idealized self-position (traveler or post-tourist) and their actual behavior (just another tourist with a camera).
THEORIZING THE REVERSE GAZE
- Tourists’ attempts to positively differentiate themselves from other tourists are liable to lead to contradictions.
- The reverse gaze may make the tourist photographer aware of his or her own contradictions.
- Admiring “traditional” cultures is filled with ambiguity.
- I am not suggesting that tourists are “secretly” racist, but simply that tourists’ imagination of Ladakh is embedded in a complex stream of newer romantic representations (Bishop 1989) and older more Orientalist representations (Said 1978; Bray 1997).
CONCLUSION
- Tourism is one crystallization of this hegemony (Crawshaw and Urry 1997).
- Incorporating the second gaze into the concept of the tourist gaze reconstructs the tourist as a dialogical and questioning subject.
- The reverse gaze can facilitate the second gaze by redirecting the gaze of the tourist away from the toured and back to the tourist, making contradictions salient and questioning motivations.
- Finally, the present analysis is not only about the contradictory positionings that arise within the social field, between different social actors, it is also about multiple positionings within a single actor.
- Moreover, there is a contradiction in how tourists position themselves compared to other tourists:.
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Citations
5 citations
Cites background from "Tourist Photography and the Reverse..."
...the local photographee (Urry, 1990) but the reverse gaze of locals upon tourist photographers can result in embarrassment and other social emotions (Gillespie, 2006)....
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5 citations
Cites background from "Tourist Photography and the Reverse..."
...…that contrasting own leisure activities to those of others can help tourists to position themselves in a morally superior manner (Holloway and Green, 2011; McCabe and Stokoe, 2004) and that tourists may criticize others’ behaviour even when behaving similarly themselves (Gillespie, 2006, 2007)....
[...]
5 citations
Cites background from "Tourist Photography and the Reverse..."
...A prolonged stare or questioning look from the photographee can prompt visceral feelings of embarrassment, and ‘capture and objectify the tourist photographer as a particular type of tourist’ (Gillespie, 2006: 347; Mathers, 2010; Ntarangwi, 2000)....
[...]
5 citations
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