Architecture, tourism and smartphone photography in the Instagram era

In this research, we seek to understand the spatially-articulated behaviours of tourists who visit and experience built environments in the social media era. Specifically, we investigate the social practices smartphone-wielding travellers engage in when photographing architecture in tourist places. To understand the ways that tourists use smartphones to photograph buildings, we applied a qualitative research design at multiple tourist sites in the city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At each tourist site, we used a mix of ethnographic and observational methods as well as full participation in smartphone photographic practices. We describe three overlapping types of photography of architecture, which we call Instagram-style Photography, Tourist-style Photography, and Architectural-style Photography. All three orient the photographer and the photographic subject in relation to architecture, albeit in different ways, generating different meanings and deploying different competences. Architecture is a central element and driver of photography at tourist sites, perhaps more so in the Instagram era than has been previously understood. While much of the research on visual social media and architecture has focused on the circulation of images posted online, we offer a new perspective on the embodied practices people engage in when they take photographs of and with architecture.