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Tourist Studies
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Picturing experience

A tourist-centered perspective on commemorative historical sites

Joy Sather-Wagstaff

North Dakota State University, USA, joy.sather-wagstaff{at}ndsu.edu

While research on commemorative historical sites addresses the commodification of tragedy and the ethics of representing violent events for tourist consumption, the experiences of tourists who visit these sites are conspicuously absent. Because of this omission, our understanding of the individual and collective social significance of actual travel to commemorative places for a `heritage that hurts' is incomplete. As a means to address these concerns, this article presents how a visual and ethnographic methods-centered approach was utilized for engagement with tourists at the former site of the twin World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, both on-site and post-visit, during 2002—06. I focus specifically upon tourists' acts of `picturing experiences' at this site through both photographic activities during travel and also photo use for memory work in the post-tour everyday. In doing so, I discuss both the usefulness of and challenges with these methods as a means for working with highly mobile research participants such as tourists.

Key Words: commemorative sites • `dark' tourism • historical tourism • memory • performance • photography • visual ethnography • World Trade Center

Tourist Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 77-103 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1468797608094931
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