Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2. What 'dark tourism' locations do you know about? Make a list with your partner.
Are there any in your country?
3. Do you think there is anything wrong with this kind of tourism? Why are people attracted to going to places
like this?
4. Have you ever been to any places that might be considered dark tourism destinations? How did it make you
feel?
You are going to read a text from the New Yorker about a photographer who visits dark tourism locations. First, read
the text quickly and answer the two questions at the end.
Dark Tourism
The New Yorker, 1st April, 2015
The French photographer Ambroise Tézenas was travelling in Sri Lanka when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck, killing more
than thirty thousand people on the island within minutes. Four years
later, he came across a newspaper article explaining that a train from the
disaster, still sitting where the waves had deposited it in the Sri Lankan
anyone could casually visit the remnants of the horror that he had
Rather than take advantage of press access, Tézenas set strict rules limiting himself to the average visitor’s experience. He took paid
tours, spent limited time at each location, and shot only what members of the public could see. The resulting images, which are
collected in the new book “I Was Here,” are complex interrogations—of how countries deal with their past crimes, of the
commodification of tragedy, and of the human impulse to look upon death and disaster. Amid the wreckage of the Wenchuan
earthquake, a tour group gathers for a photo opportunity. In the former Soviet border zone, young people play “escape from the
U.S.S.R.” spy games. At Karostas Cietums, a military prison in Latvia, children over twelve years of age can stay overnight and “live
the life of a prisoner.” “At the end,” Tézenas told me, these sites “leave the individual with not much to understand history.”
However, Tézenas’s images belie the negative judgement that’s often used as an argument against disaster tourism. He said that he
“couldn’t help being moved” by many of the locations he visited, and his empathy extended to his fellow-sightseers. Through his
lens, they appear not as callous sightseeing pictures but as poignant reminders of the macabre memorials. In a commemorative
park in the border town of Maroun al-Ras, the site of a major battle in the 2006 Lebanon war, children play on a brightly painted
Comprehension Questions
1. Why did the photographer decide to visit these locations?
B. He wanted to meet the same people who had visited the site of the tsunami in Sri Lanka.
C. He didn't get to see what ordinary people see because he was a journalist.
Now, work with a partner to match the words in bold to their definitions.