Untitled

Image 2.3: Picture the local culture. 13
So it is that there is a difference between words and pictures and the
rivalry between what you are able to see and what you can read continues.
What you see is not always what you will get, and what you experience as
a tourist is more than what you are able to catch sight of.
The heart of the matter is that an image may both take us up to the
idealist heaven of pure imagination and down to the earthly domain full of
phenomena that can be grasped by sense perception. For most tourists this
is unsurprising. They are certainly likely to know very well in practice that
tourist destination images are both reliable and untrustworthy. In as much
as they need to engage with them, they also know the importance of
reading between the lines. Yes, when arriving at your destination you will
have a “view of the ocean”, but perhaps only if you manage to hang like a
lithe chimpanzee over the rail of the balcony.
So it also is that an image may simultaneously attract, imitate,
deceive, resemble, replace and animate. Dangerous and safe at the same
time! As Latour puts it:
If you stick to them, images are dangerous, blasphemous, idolatrous, but
they are safe, innocent, indispensable if you learn how to jump from one
image to the next (Latour, in Latour & Weibel 2005, p. 19).
When it comes to the production and consumption of images in
tourism we are then likely to find “the real and the fictional” in and of
images inevitably and irretrievably entangled. As an inhabitant of the inbetween
the concept image very much resists being trimmed down to
13 www.savagechickens.com/2006/04/tourism.html (retrieved 2009-04-15).
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