In my master's thesis, I put two visible concepts of the tourism and travel studies – Urry's tourist gaze and MacCannell's staged authenticity of tourist settings – in the context of the visual social platform Instagram. Through a review of relevant literature in the first part of the thesis, I present the changes in the tourist gaze from the first organized tourist trips to the modern travel experience, which is characterized by networked travel, digital immediacy and aesthetic consumption. I outline the role of photography in the tourism and travel industry, and the changes brought about by the availability of smartphones and the mass use of social media, especially Instagram. I present travel photography trends and some motifs, characteristic for this platform. The empirical part of the thesis consists of two methods. First, I use textual and semiotic analysis of selected Instagram profiles and posts, in order to understand the meaning behind individual photos. Then, using the method of semi-structured interviews with the creators of analysed photographs, I explore their view of travel in the age of social media. I find that Instagram is characterized by aestheticized images of tourist destinations that put the individual - the Instagram traveller - at the forefront. The performative practices used by the creators are not intended to show the (staged) authenticity, but simply to present the best possible photography.
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