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Picturing Bornholm: Producing and Consuming a Tourist Place through Picturing Practices

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/15022250600658853

1502-2269

Jonas Larsen,

Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation

This paper explores the continuous making of the Danish island Bornholm as a tourist place in and through performances and objects of painting, literature, postcards, brochures and snapshot photographs throughout the last 200 years. It examines the changing "imaginative geographies" that has produced and reproduced Bornholm as a particular tourist place over time. Rather than seeing Bornholm as a unique, bounded and fixed island, it is grasped as a "place of movement" that comes into existence through relationships; it floats around within mobile, trans‐national networks of humans, technologies, images and "place myths". Photographic practices and objects are crucial components in the mobile networks producing and reproducing specific places. Tourist places are produced places and tourists are co‐producers of such places. This article is innovative as it examines the picturing of Bornholm through "ordinary" tourists' photos as much as commercial photography. The conventional idea that the camerawork of tourists are pre‐formed by commercial photography is questioned as it is shown that commercial photographers and tourists in some ways picture Bornholm differently. In a wider perspective this paper is a contribution to the study of how "mobilities of photography" produce geographical imaginations and places.