Visualising lives: “the selfie” as travel writing

ABSTRACTEnabled by the speed and ease of mobile technologies, and by the ubiquity of camera phone photography, first-person and visual forms of travel narration have become a significant mode of travel writing in the twenty-first century. Such narratives offer an almost limitless (albeit fragile) archive of travel information with a very broad reach. Numerous practices, including simple photo sharing or photo diaries or the serialised “selfie”, locate and show the author-self moving, locating, living, and playing in everyday and extraordinary spaces. This essay argues that “the selfie” is a new mode of travel narrative practice that deserves further attention in terms of how it functions within the travel writing genre. In our analysis, we return to long-standing debates over conventional definitions of “tourist” and “traveller” (Thompson 2011; Youngs 2013) and we engage in post-colonial and trauma scholarship as well as theories of life writing to discuss the ANZAC Cove selfie as it illuminates some of t...