ABSTRACT
Images produced within the arena of tourism and travel are ingrained with the performative role of a travel agent. In one sense, they serve as liaisons, visual links or points of contact between sites of here and there, setting up mental bookings long before credit card details are used to reserve accommodations and suitcases are filled. In de Botton’s engagement with a travel brochure, he marvels at ‘how a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set into motion by nothing more than the sight of a photograph of a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze’ (2002: 8–9). In another sense, as agent, such images act as vehicles for transportation, for instant travel across distances and time. Francisca Kellett (2008), the Telegraph’s Digital Travel Editor, insists that ‘really good travel photography should … take you there’. Similarly, CNN’s Ashley Strickland (2011) divulges that in choosing a travel photograph, she asks: ‘Can this one image take you there?’ Both Kellett and Strickland intimate a need for tourism and travel images to be built in a certain way that makes transport possible. Such images are most often constructed with specific components to ‘take you’: rudder, propeller and the fuselage of well-groomed Edenic landscapes or what Hunter describes as ‘a symbolic erasure of the untidy’ (2008: 364). Yet, the motor of these images, the engine of these vehicles is fantasy or the faculty of imagination.
