Traces and Visual Representations of the Tourist Experience—Czechoslovakia, 1950–1960

Pasted images, clippings from publications, scrapbooks: the visual records of the tourist experience tell us about both travelers’ actual practices and how they preserve their memories. 

drawing on the travel journals of young French men who traveled to Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as other evidence of the reuse of printed images, this presentation will examine tourism as a visual experience—one that is lived, anticipated, and recounted through images. Produced during the Cold War, these objects also serve as spaces for visual dialogue between two distinct geopolitical contexts.