Must-See
Framing the Remnants and Rituals of Tourism

Bound by time and space, the act of travel is fleeting and transitory. But for the tourist, the experience of place is rooted in the material world. From the way that sites are endorsed to the way that they are seen, visual culture constructs and orchestrates the tourist’s understanding of locality. Advertisements fuel the desire for authentic experience. Photographs, postcards, and souvenirs prolong and memorialize temporal events. While these visual artifacts validate individual experience, they are also indicative of a larger collective awareness of tourism. When circulated and distributed, these forms connect tourists in a perpetuated ritual of anticipation, pilgrimage and remembrance.

Given the pervasiveness of these visual artifacts and their influence on the practice of tourism, what is revealed when they are more closely analyzed? Using graphic design as a mode of critical inquiry, this thesis examines the framework and rituals of tourism through its visual culture. Drawing on current anthropological and sociological discourse, it aims to identify and clarify the complexities of tourism by re-evaluating and repositioning its visual forms. Some works rebuke the mechanisms of tourism, exposing unseen agendas and incentives and calling attention to the designer’s complicity in staging tourist expectations and realities. Others feed off of the system, proposing new ways to propogate and expand its patterns.

Together these works represent a collection of perspectives that traverse tourism from industry to individual in an effort to make sense of a rapidly shifting and growing industry at the human scale.