With the proposed presentation we aim to explore and suggest possible ways for studying the profound role of images in the contemporary field of tourism. Drawing from our combined work in visual research methods and multimodal ethnography, we intend to reflect on a set of concrete (visual and digital) methods for studying the visual practices of contemporary tourists.
Images have indeed always been central in human ways of communicating. And tourism, an industry and a practice historically dominated by the visual (Adler, 1989), is no exception to this. Today’s images are key mediators in the touristic experience and appear at every step of the way – before, during and after the actual travel. Also they come with a surplus of information, and thereby make the contemporary experience of tourism more mediated than ever before (Balomenou & Garrod, 2019). However, as the line between the everyday and the touristic is growing thinner (Larsen, 2019), so does the division between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ touristic images. The multimodality that comes with today’s digital images increasingly challenges their status as objects that resemble the lived, bodily touristic experience. Studying these experiences today hence comes with new challenges that require researchers to consider the balance between bodily and digital practices and the way this influences trust in images.
In our presentation we will address these issues by discussing concrete ways to study how images take up meaning in the context of tourism. Concretely we will discuss how (touristic) images are integral parts of an embodied experience (Favero, 2020), but how they can simultaneously influence, predict and re-present these embodied experiences. Additionally, we will address the methodological value of using images to elicit responses and reflect on the importance of considering the relationality of touristic images.
