The Story Behind the Picture: Preferences for the Visual Display at Heritage Sites

Research on heritage tourism sites often focuses on the display or, in other words, the patent as opposed to latent heritage. This line of research generally highlights the concept of ‘power relations’, emphasizing the stakeholders’ impact on the presentation and interpretation of certain events presented at heritage tourist attractions. Not surprisingly, such studies repeatedly find that the winner’s version of history is on display, while the loser’s account has essentially vanished (or has been archived far from the public eye). Such findings are not surprising given that studies of the history of history reveal an identical pattern: The winners retain the power to authorize their version of history. This chapter adopts Tunbridge and Ashworth’s approach, which asserts that the study of heritage settings ‘… must shift from the uses of heritage to the users themselves and thus from the producers (whether cultural institutions, governments or enterprises) to the consumers’ (1996, 69). Specifically, the chapter highlights the visitor’s expectations of the visual display rather than providing an analysis of the visual display. No attempt will be made to analyse how heritage site management (which in some cases is comprised of a single individual) decides about the identity and manner of the visual (picture/photograph) display, but rather, the chapter explores what the visitor would like (or not like) to see and why. The conceptualization of people’s preferences of visual displays is based on studies centring on people’s experiences of diverse heritage sites conveying diverse meanings to visitors. Examples of such sites include the Wailing Wall, Massada, Jerusalem, The Anne Frank House and Auschwitz Concentration Camp (some of which have been the focus of tourism literature studies: See, for example, Poria, Butler and Airey 2003, 2004a,b; Poria, Reichel and Biran 2006, 2007, 2009). In addition to being identified with a particular heritage, many of the aforementioned sites, as with other heritage attractions, are considered ‘must-see’ or ‘must experience’ tourist attractions or are located on the way to, and from, other tourist attractions. As will be discussed later in the chapter, these aspects are important for understanding people’s experiences at heritage sites and their expectations of the interpretation of those sites.