Tourism and Curating Instant Memory

When I moved to London, I immediately began to plan a visit to Niagara Falls. I booked two tours on a rainy Saturday in October.

When I arrived in Niagara, I parked next to Clifton Hill Fun Park, which looked like a child’s dream location. As I walked past the dinosaur-themed mini golf course, my nose met the sweet scent of sugar-covered popcorn and hot chocolate. Despite the rainy weather, families were out enjoying the festivities, jumping from activity to activity with busy children. I walked past a sea of people in bright red and yellow rain ponchos, making me even more excited to see and experience Niagara Falls.

My first tour was a boat cruise. I waited in line with dozens of others and gratefully accepted a poncho as I made my way to the boat's upper deck. As the tour set off, the wind and rushing water overpowered the sound of a descriptive history of the falls that crackled over the boat’s loudspeaker. People chatted, and their conversations turned to laughter and delighted screams as we floated closer to the waterfall, experiencing heavy mist. Most people around me attempted to take photos of themselves and their groups with their cellphone cameras. I also snapped a picture of the falls and turned the phone to capture my laughing face as the Falls disappeared behind me.

Selfie taken aboard Niagara City Cruises as the tour was returning to dock. (October 14, 2023).

My second Niagara Falls tourist experience was Journey Behind the Falls. I waited with other tourists for an elevator to carry us down to the tunnel's beginning. Once the elevator doors opened, revealing the tunnel to explore, I saw a line-up of poncho-covered people straight ahead. I assumed they were waiting to access a second elevator ride or staircase further into the tunnel system. After ten minutes or so in this line-up, I rounded the bend in the tunnel and caught sight of the line-up destination. The front of the line ended at a small portal, a cut-out rock exposing a portion of gushing water. The person at the front of the line turned, their back facing the exposed part of the Falls, and leaned on the metal gate, keeping them safe from the gushing waters. The individual smiled, extended their arm and snapped a photo. At that moment, I realized I was waiting in a line-up to take a selfie.

When I arrived at the front of the line, I looked at the rushing water exposed in the rock and let the next in line take a peak. I stubbornly left my phone in my pocket, not wanting to follow suit. What made this experience of taking a picture feel different than the boat ride? I began to reflect on the number of photos I had taken earlier in the day of my experience on the Niagara cruise and people capturing moments around me. What was the purpose of collecting this posed picture? How would people engage with the photo after it was taken? Where was the image going to be stored? What memory would the individual in the picture associate with it? How many opportunities were there to take photographs?

I took this photo outside the tunnel. There is a small indent in the rock where the cave is exposed, as indicated by the black circle in the photo. The circled section is where people were taking a selfie in front of while inside the cave. (October 14, 2023).

Before both Nagara Falls tours, there is a moment where visitors are asked to stand in front of a green screen, smile, and, following the shutter click, given a numbered ticket before moving on. At the end of the tour, they can stop by the closing kiosk, provide an employee with their ticket, and choose to pay for a picture of themselves standing majestically in front of the raging Niagara Falls. I didn’t think my photo in front of a green screen would portray my authentic experience and, in the future, jog my memory, like a photo of me soaking wet, gleefully grinning while aboard a boat in front of a waterfall.

Why am I talking about this experience of taking pictures and being a tourist? What is so important about my observations of others and myself? This semester, my classmates and I have pondered why people visit museums. We have discussed who regular museum participants are, the occasional visitor and the infrequent. [1] The same categories can be applied to tours of historic sites, natural wonders, and provincial and national parks. Individuals in one of the three categories choose a leisure activity based on specific criteria. A family with young children might consider what will entertain their children for an extended time, be cost-effective, fun for the entire family and an overall satisfying experience. [2] The criteria I listed can be applied as a lens to Clifton Hill Fun by the Park, as I described earlier, as it offers an array of activities close to the main tourist attraction - Niagara Falls. But a difference I have noticed between interactions in a museum space and an outdoor area like Niagara Falls is despite both presenting aspects of history, the use of photography by visitors is quite different.

So, how does the collection of photographs change the engagement and purpose of the visit? Why is taking a selfie in an outdoor learning space like Niagara Falls different than taking a photo of learning at a museum? I haven’t seen people taking selfies at museums often. If there is a camera out, it is capturing an experiential component of the museum or hoping to remember an interesting fact to share with friends and family after the fact. Wandering around Niagara, it was hard to miss the number of tourists taking pictures with the Falls as the background and relatively easy to forget the sparse informational plaques that dotted the heavily trafficked sidewalk.

In a 2011 publication, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, John Urry and Jonas Larsen devoted a chapter to photography and vision where they [“examine] the performativity or doings of photographs, how they organize gazes, constructing and mobilizing the places that tourists consume and remember.” [3] Over the years, through the development of technology and the encouragement of Kodak’s campaign, the ‘Kodak moment,’ - which was intended to capture daily moments and never to forget - photography has become self-expression, re-creation and an opportunity for memory construction that arguably might counter the person's experience in the photograph. [4] Platforms like Instagram have taken photography’s initial purpose of generating pictures for a future audience and placed present experience and curated experience into the present moment for people to consume. [5] At the publication of this book, Instagram as a social media platform was approximately a year old. One can only imagine how this chapter would change after over a decade of engagement and digital archives of photos littering individual newsfeeds alone.

Making memories is more than having a signifier of an experience; it is socially capitalizing on particular, carefully constructed memories to share with a specific audience. As scholars Mehita Iqani and Jonathan E. Schroeder have indicated, “[s]elfies, of course, often serve to claim, “I’m here!”- at a hip restaurant, a recognizable tourist attraction, some dangerous place, or just in the bathroom mirror." [6] The selfie I posted in this blog accomplished just that - I posted it to my close friends' only Instagram story, sharing the experience with them to create conversation and connection. My trip to Niagara Falls was two-fold: to experience an outdoor wonder in a new place and to generate a connection with my friends who don’t live near me. My picture prompted conversations about the experience, which was fresh in my mind.

There is a double layer of meaning for the individual and location visited: the physical experience of visiting the location itself and the experience of posting the photo on Instagram while curating a persona not only for the individual but also generating a particular narrative of the place visited. Engagement in the surrounding space exists, but what is publicized and connected to the photograph and memory has to grapple with what is considered ‘photo-worthy, ' paralleling individual self-expression.

What needs to be considered is how self-expression has impacted tourist locations. What makes a particular tourist location ‘photo worthy’? How does that ‘worthiness’ shift memories of that location and physical engagement with it?

Stay tuned next week as I look at tourists' engagement with provincial and national parks and their use of photography.

Endnotes:

[1] Marilyn G. Hood, “Staying Away: Why People Choose not to Visit Museums,” Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Ed. G. Anderson. (New York: Altamira, 2004), 151-155.

[2] Hood, “Staying Away: Why People Choose not to Visit Museums,” 151.

[3] John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2011), 129.

[4] Urry and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 146.

[5] Urry and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 148.

[6] Mehita Iqani and Jonathan E. Schroeder. “#selfie: Digital Self-Portraits as Commodity Form and Consumption Practice.” Consumption Markets & Culture 19, no. 5 (September 2, 2016): 410.