The Silence of Seeing

Ece Uygan / Journalist

On the Jomtien beach in the late afternoons, the fluid nature of time seems to vibrate with a different rhythm. As the smoke from street vendors mingles with the scent of the sea, small gestures within the everyday weave a web of meaning, almost unnoticed. Children play in the sand, and the elderly watch the sea in silence from their plastic chairs. Everything is ordinary, yet within this ordinariness, there is an intense awareness.

One evening, as I was leaving the market with bags in my hands, a Thai woman working at the local restaurant gestured for me to get on her motorbike. She just smiled. We didn't speak. I got off at the top of the hill; the gesture was brief, silent, and unrequited. Yet, at that moment, I felt that an encounter had taken place that went beyond the tourist experience. Perhaps that day, I arrived at a place no guidebook could ever recommend.

As John Urry states in The Tourist Gaze, the "gaze" is not an individual act but a form of social construction. The tourist gaze, as conceptualized by Urry, reminds us that seeing is not innocent. It is not we who determine where to look or what to consider beautiful or meaningful, but cultural codes, economic forces, and desires. The travel industry establishes the economy of this gaze; thus, even the act of a place being deemed worth seeing is a capitalist gesture of selection.

That is why, while watching tourists on the streets of Pattaya extending their latest-model phones to take photos with monks, this "economy of the gaze" is always on my mind. A moment that begins with emotions like compassion, spirituality, or curiosity turns into visual consumption within seconds. For the tourist, the monk's walk is not a praying body, but an exotic image, a postcard-worthy scene of the East. For me, however, that moment carried a strange duality.

At this point, I am reminded of how Roland Barthes speaks of the two components of photography in Camera Lucida: studium and punctum. Studium is the field of culturally shared, agreed-upon meanings; punctum is a personal, inexplicable, piercing moment. That small detail in an image, the needle point that stabs the heart. The Thai woman's smile was exactly like that—a punctum seen not through the tourist's gaze, but through a human encounter. At that moment, it had moved beyond the social gaze as Urry described it, and transformed into an individual explosion of meaning, as defined by Barthes.

THE EROSION OF EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF SPECTACLE

The trip organized by the Englishman Thomas Cook from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841 is accepted as the beginning of modern tourism. In the 20th century, tourism became an industry. Like everything that becomes industrialized, traveling, journeying, and discovering new places have also fallen under the dominance of images. Yet, we are dealing with a concept that is only 150 years old—a relatively short time.

At the point we have reached, the modern travel experience has turned into an act of accumulating what is showable rather than what is seen. Temples photographed millions of times are visited more like a chore than an experience. Even walking is shaped according to the logic of algorithms and sharing.

The influencer economy accelerates this spiral of spectacle. According to 2024 data, sixty percent of travelers determine their routes based on influencer content. A vacation turns into a stage, and the body becomes an image producer. Lives, people, and places that remain outside the visual fall into the blind spot of representation. Reality retreats from visibility.

Richard Linklater's film Waking Life (2001), while discussing the permeability between dreams and wakefulness, ironically holds a mirror to the forms of experience in this age. In an age where everything turns into an image, is the pure experience of existing, settling into a moment, and just looking still possible?

I must confess; I am sometimes drawn into this economy of spectacle as well. When I travel the world, people ask, "Why do you share so few photos?" I find it hard to answer, because to be honest, I am also afraid of missing that frame. But then, when I just sit and listen to the wind on the beach, I realize that all this noise of fear subsides.

As Lauren Elkin points out in Flâneuse, wandering aimlessly in the city is a form of existential resistance, especially for women. Aimlessness is not a state of being lost, but on the contrary, a stance against the world's ways of producing meaning. My walks in Thailand are approaching this form more and more each day. Sometimes I return to the same street for three days. My goal is not to see something new, but to look at the same thing with a different attention.

We reconstruct cities, spaces, and the structures we touch not only with our eyes but also with our consciousness and unconsciousness. A life that shapes the meaning we attribute to them follows us. That is why, sometimes, certain details are candidates to find a place in the most protected rooms of our minds. Sometimes even the humidity in the air can be a critical detail of our new self, which is taking shape toward the future. Most of the time, these are invisible because they are not flashy. But it is precisely in this invisibility that the trace of authenticity is hidden.

That sentence from Waking Life is on my mind: "Reality is a collective hallucination." Ever since we learned to look at the "Cave," we have been carrying the burden of this collectivity on our shoulders. Could the tourist experience also be such a mass hallucination? We all repeat the same frames with the same sentences. However, reality is like an excess that spills out of the photograph; it is still there.

Travel is not just about returning to oneself; it is sometimes a way of exiting oneself, loosening the boundaries of the self, and making contact with silence.

You don't have to travel.

You certainly don't have to show.

But you can stop. You can look. You can get lost.

And that, in itself, is a meaning.

News Source: 12punto