ABSTRACT
I remember how several years ago I watched some slides with my friends back home from my summer vacations on the Adriatic coast. The photographs that captured my friends’ and, above all, my attention as the photographer were undoubtedly those that portrayed colourful wooden boats in the port, silhouettes of the fishing vessels with the setting sun in the background, tanned and weather-beaten faces of fishermen, and bits of coastal villages that I had managed to cut out from the neon advertisement signs. At the time when I joined a research project at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH) and started my fieldwork in the Upper Adriatic region, I also started to look through the tourist brochures and postcards of this region. I found that many of the photographs in the tourist brochures and postcards were very much the same as mine. Several questions piqued my curiosity. For instance, where did the interest for certain images stem from, and which mechanisms were involved to produce the aesthetic and emotional response in the viewer? What, if any, are the consequences of these ritualised images in everyday life, in the concrete dimensions of space and time? These questions were pertinent to me throughout my research on fishing and tourism in Izola.
