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Firstly, what one consumes as a tourist is in a sense images. What<br />

one may experience at a tourist destination, an attraction, or throughout the<br />

whole adventure of travelling is very much ephemeral and temporal. This<br />

means that tourist experiences are not equal to tangible commodities that<br />

can be bought, taken home and consumed after purchase. Although tourist<br />

experiences may be transformed into travel memories and be sustained by<br />

such things as photos and souvenirs, a fundamental part of tourism<br />

consumption is also about being there and experiencing a place with one’s<br />

own body.<br />

Secondly, tourist products and services involve and depend on<br />

intangible qualities, such as a friendly atmosphere or beautiful<br />

environment. Yet, these qualities are as concrete and place-bound as a<br />

tourist destination, or an attraction, itself. Thus any destination or<br />

attraction needs to come into being in more de-materialised ways in order<br />

to distribute a sample of itself to the tourism market.<br />

It is here that images, or more generally representations, come to<br />

the rescue. Unlike tourist destinations, as geographically fixed material<br />

resources and facilities located somewhere, images are able to become<br />

circulating tourism references that can re-present potential place-bound<br />

tourist products and possible experiences in other places. To a certain<br />

extent images can re-present places for tourism, and their immovable<br />

amenities and tourist commodities such as a landscape-scenery or a<br />

particular food and service at the local restaurant, and travel to tourist<br />

generating regions.<br />

In tourism research and tourism theory images have thus most often<br />

been addressed and understood as representations of tourist destinations,<br />

attractions and experiences. Consequently, representations in the form of<br />

images of places and spaces for tourism produced for tourists, as well as<br />

by tourists themselves, have been investigated in tourism studies for a long<br />

time. This interest in the relationship between tourism and images comes<br />

in particular from the supposed capacity of images to attract tourists and<br />

potentially guide and shape their consuming behaviours (Chon 1990, Pike<br />

2002).<br />

Image 1.1: The Visuality of tourist information. 4<br />

4 www.visitcheshire.com (retrieved 2009-04-09).<br />

3

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