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can researchers use photography and video cams in their study of tourism
images and how can they develop these techniques also for reporting and
communicating their research findings?
Tourist & tourism imaginationings revisited
These still images on the move, we argue are in fact part of the “new
modality of networking” (Larsen, Urry, and Axhausen 2007) that holds
tourism together, and they do not exist as atoms in a de-materialized
vacuum. They are non-human mediators and transformers, circulating
around dis/connecting the home and mind of tourists with a travel agency,
a hotel, a feeling, an imagination, a destination marketing organization, a
tourist office, a booking sheet, a country, an authentic building, a pool for
children, a hiking trail, and whatever attractions and expectations are at the
real-and-imagined tourist destination.
If that image is reasonably correct, then “what is important for future
research is deciphering the interconnections” (Larsen et al. 2007, p. 259).
That, in turn, requires research methods that are able to construct
information and knowledge about the interconnections of mobile images in
the enactment of the tourism system more broadly conceived and
fundamentally tied to the Earth.
As we have repeatedly emphasised, and tried to show in various
ways, an image is certainly not what it may often appear to be at first sight.
In the vocabulary of semiotics an image can be understood as an
inseparable duo of both signifier and signified, picture and word, meaning
and matter, what we see and what we believe, mind and body somehow
differentiated but simultaneously braided. In other words, to glue signifier
and signified together is part of what it is to be human, and as linguistic
animals humans live in a social, cultural world of meaning. Yet, they also
live on the Earth. In order to emphasise the earthly conditions that faces
humans we can rename them “earthlings”.
And tourists are earthlings too. They live and dwell in-between
meaning and matter, in-between their perceptions and whatever conditions
and facilities that are offered on and by the Earth. What we refer to as
“tourist and tourism imaginationings”, then, concern ways of bringing
meaning and matter together and apart, for particular and specific tourism
and tourist purposes. In other words, imaginationings involve processes of
signification that translate the physical matters of travelling, locations, and
whatever material resources (the Earth) that humans meet as bodies with
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