We live in an age where tourism is common practice, whether one travels or hosts. It comes coupled with specific rituals, one of the most mysterious of which is pressing down the shutter button of a photographic camera. Indeed, it seems we can’t quite believe that we’ve visited a place unless it has been visually recorded. Stored in shoeboxes and albums and on hard drives, these banal images are the reminder (and remainder) that we were there. Most of us own such pictures and have bored friends and family with illustrated accounts of visited places (are these ever enjoyable for anyone but the traveller?). We have all posed or performed in front of must-see sites. We have humoured tourists by taking a photo of them in front of local attractions. And even if we can’t quite remember the last time we got away from our usual routine, we have participated in armchair tourism by consuming media images of paradise destinations, by fantasising about the stereotypical empty beach, the palm tree and the blue sea, or by receiving postcards from friends, arousing our imaginary construction of places. Mike Robinson and David Picard’s edited volume The Framed World shows us that there is nothing innocent in these acts.

 

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/the-framed-world-tourism-tourists-and-photography/409139.article