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Photographic representations in tourism tend to depict vacant and
pristine spaces awaiting the tourist. And potentially, it could be
suggested that any tourist market would interpret the representation in
terms of an experience, awaiting fulfilment at that destination.
Specifically, photographic representations in tourism define “groomed
spaces” that are readily identified as a tourism product – part of a
destination completely commodified and ready for consumption (Hunter
2008, p. 360).
Also the tourist imaginationing needs to be groomed for particular
tourist and tourism purposes. The story about Iceland as a tourist
destination that we have now told cannot be separated from our own
representation, our selective use of sources for our own purposes here.
Tourism imaginationings as they appear in promotion and marketing
material, advertising, policy documents, books, research articles in tourism
studies, or whatever the medium, are not the same as the imaginationings
of tourists.
Nevertheless, there may also be a cartographic pattern which
connects. For if there was no other place to imagine, that is, “to form a
mental destination image of”, then why and where should one travel? The
point is that without the faculty of human imagination, without the ability
to make the absent present and vice versa, there would be no tourist
destination images and no tourism as we have come to know it. In other
words:
Modern tourism is based on the reproduction (and re-enactment) of the
coming together of representation and (bodily) experience, of
abstraction and materiality (Minca 2007, p. 434).
In condensed form this suggests that the impetus to travel and to
become a tourist in the modern sense is driven by imagined possibilities
in-between map and territory opened up through cartography and
“cartographic reason” (Olsson 2007). In effect this inevitable gap produces
a desire as impossible to resist as to realize completely.
Our own conceptualization “tourist imaginationings” now appears
as situated in the abyss between abstract cartographic representations and
the material geographies on the Earth. Triggered by the difference between
map and territory many now travel extensively for touristic purposes, yet it
is important to remember that for the majority of the world’s population
there is still in practice no-where else to.
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