Tourism and lake landscapes: an aesthetic analysis of photographs of Lagoa Mirim (Brazil/Uruguay)

ABSTRACT:

Tourist experiences of landscape are highly aesthetic. Moreover, tourist photography is a geographical practice. The goal of this work is to analyze how tourists’ photographs of landscapes of Lagoa Mirim, a lake located on the Brazil-Uruguay border, function in terms of aesthetics. The photographs were taken between 2000 and 2018, and are available in the Flickr® repository. The specific goals of this work were to describe the documents under analysis, and to characterize the studied sites: Praia/Vila de Capilha and Porto de Santa Vitória, both in Brazil, and Balneário de Lago Merín, in Uruguay. In the interface between Tourism and Geography, we established the state-of-art in terms of research on the themes debated. We also analyzed, iconically, the content of 65 photographs and the available captions. From the study of Lagoa Mirim as a geographic object, we identified key aesthetic connotations of its touristscape: a predominance of picturesque and melancholic-romantic; the relevance of the sunset on the Brazilian side of the lake; a vacationscape of the seashore in Lago Merín; and the prevalence of adventure motifs in Capilha. We also found some ambiguities between picturesque and sublime. Our aim is to provide a theoretical and methodological framework for the study of touristscapes through photography.

KEYWORDS:
Tourism; Landscapes; Aesthetics; Photography; Lagoa Mirim.