Edinburgh Napier University

  Today, travel and tourism are increasingly becoming strategies for taking and sharing photographs. This is evidenced through the exponential growth of digital social media platforms as means of recording and displaying tourism settings and experiences on an instant basis. My presentation will discuss an evolving visual arts-based approach for inverting and extending today’s digital and photo-normative tourist gaze (Urry, 1990). In the setting of Edinburgh, as Scotland’s tourism capital, and its historic and expansive cultural festival portfolio, I use drawing as an autoethnographic method (Causey, 2017). As a strand of a larger study, my aim is to understand the visual culture of Edinburgh in its self-recognised role as ‘the world’s leading festival city’ (Festivals Edinburgh, 2019). I have visited selected sites and sights of a number of Edinburgh’s festivals and recorded the act of gazing upon the festivalised city, as a researcher, an artist and a tourist. Through drawing and arts-based methods, I have produced a series of my own work. This responds to the festival city and presents an inverted and extended tourist gaze of festival sites and sights. I will discuss a small selection of this work, which is currently in progress. Reflecting upon my research process as this continues to evolve, I will attempt to unpack my own understanding of Edinburgh as the festival city.