Visualizing Englishness through the Taiwanese Camera's Eye .

This paper is part of an investigation of the travel performing act of a set of young Taiwanese people, focusing particularly on their daily intercultural experiences in England. Drawing on fieldwork in Cambridge and London and post-tour interviews in Taiwan, I consider these experiences ethnographically, considering travel between cultures in terms of performance, identity, otherness and representation. This paper uses photography as a site from which to interrogate the connections between cultural knowledge and tourist visual consumption and representation. It focuses on photography as performance of the touristic act and seeks to examine the visual consumption of Englishness-as-Otherness through Taiwanese study tourists' photographic gaze and the images they reproduce. My purpose is to examine how photography intersects with and helps to shape the tourist's "ways of seeing" (Berger 1972). I am concerned with their representation of these visual encounters, as well as with the relations between self and others in the moment of taking the picture. What actually is the young Taiwanese tourist gaze of Englishness? Why is it important for tourists to travel with a camera and to take pictures? What are the functions of a camera in tourism practices? And what are the functions of the tourists' photographs after their tours? The functions of tourist cameras as well as holiday snapshots have rarely been explored and examined in terms of the role of visual consumption and technologies in informing and shaping cultural knowledge within the tourism context. By using photography as a site to examine tourist experiences, the paper considers photography as not only a reflection and representation of specific cultural notions but also an embodied practice of sociability. Using tourists' photographs and stories allows us to understand and enrich the interpretation of data and they give deeper research insights into non-Western views of how English-as-Otherness is visualized, consumed, collected and performed.