Foreign, but Homely: What Can Be Gained from Studying Family Vacation Albums?

The phenomenon of charter tourism is a recent and still relatively
understudied historical subject related to the post-WWII welfare society,
particularly in Northern and Western Europe, In cultural geography and
sociology there has been increasing interest in tourism studies, but few
studies on ordinary people’s vacation photo albums. With such material as an
analytical prism, exemplified by close readings of Danish and British private
vacation photo albums from the early 1970s, this contribution includes a
discussion on methodology: how can one, using tools from the field of
aesthetical analysis in combination with a wider range of cultural studies
theories, analyze such non-canonized, personal, everyday material in a
broader cultural-historical context and make it mean something on its own
terms and beyond the personal? The article challenges conventional binaries
– tourist/local, home/away, representation/performance – and the author
concludes that making vacation photo albums can be considered an aesthetic
tool with which to inhabit, familiarize, perform, and experience a place.