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This paper explores recurring images in Israel photobooks and travel guidebooks from 1948 to the present and offers a typology of various kinds of repetition. It is claimed here that mechanisms of repetition and circulation of images in both photobooks and tourist guidebooks are places where attempts to build the image of a nation and its tourist imaginaries are visible. Drawing on scholarship on national imaginaries on the one hand, and nation and destination branding on the other hand, it seeks to show how Israel's national image and branding is reflected in repeated images in photobooks and travel guidebooks, which are here considered as material conveyers of both national and tourism imaginaries. Through a semiotic study of some recurring images of people and landscape - both natural and cultural -, this paper demonstrates that in the course of its short history as a state, Israel's self-image was formed through a repetition and circulation of locally produced stereotypes in photo albums. These same stereotypes are reproduced in travel guidebooks and become Israel's external image. They absorb in the process stereotypical and iconic images of the visiting culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction to « Images of a country. Iconographic Circulation and National Identities », Image & Narrative n°22.2 (2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]