Proceedings of the 1st Arts & Humanities Conference, Venice

PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHY AS A MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION IN VISUAL TRAVEL PROPAGANDA

SIBILA PETENJI ARBUTINA, IVANA MIŠKOVIĆ , S

Abstract:

Photography, as the most powerful means of tourist propaganda and one of the strongest stimulants for travelling, has been developing almost parallel with tourist movements, continually interlacing over the time. The rapid development of photographic and marketing technology has led to the fact that today an image of every tourist destination is easily accessible for everyone. Therefore, in modern means of communication there are a number of different visual depictions of each single photographed space. Majority of those images represent “photogenic” and groomed spaces, while undesirable sights are missing, for the sake of commercial tourist market demand. In a form of an experimental research, photos containing slum images and other realistic representations of popular tourist destinations were selected and displayed to respondents, followed by questions related to their subjective opinions, emotions and intentions to visit or know more about. The aim of this paper is to contribute to tourism and anthropological research by pointing out that representing a destination as a commodity may harm the overall tourist impressions, unless we consider a non-commercial photography as a potential medium to promote a tourist destination in a more realistic way, and thus inspire the desire for traveling in order to meet local culture and experience a real “spirit” of a destination.

Keywords: tourism, non-commercial photography, slums, tourist propaganda

DOI: 10.20472/AHC.2016.001.012

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