Tourism and floating resorts.

"Today's mass tourism is still driven by romantic notions of the far away, the pristine and the untouched, and by the desire to escape a social reality that is increasingly perceived as limiting and suffocating. Paradoxically, this desire falls victim to its own inherent dialectic: the longing to be free from society is exploited by the very society it seeks to escape; the pursuit of the authentic inevitably leads to its destruction,” H.M. Enzenberger.

The arrival of cruise ships is a dominant feature of Geiranger, a small village in Geirangerfjord. There is not- hing more extreme in tourism than floating resorts. As they are excluded from their surroundings, passen- gers stare passively at the landscape. Their lives are taken care of on board the ship, and they see a constant stream of images of a foreign world that they prevent themselves from engaging with.

Norway attracts a lot of tourists every year. The majority of them arrive by car or by cruise ship. What are the ways in which tourists interact with their travels and ”see” their surroundings?

This is similar to Adornos «Culture industry», the tourist industry presents the tourist with a reality they are excluded from, and passively accept as reality. It is a simulation of reality. (Meurs 2014, p 4)

Photography, then, is part of the process of postmodernisation, a ‘society of spectacles’ where circulating and instantaneous images overpower reality; ‘reality’ becomes touristic, ready for visual consumption.

The consumption and production of images become all-important, and participating in events is tantamount to seeing and capturing them as spectacular ‘imagescapes’