It’s a tidy trick, really: the photographer chooses the angle, the light, the frame, and then the editor cuts out any evidence that the place isn’t a postcard. We’re left with a single narrative – the "glorious" part – while the messy, everyday bits vanish. I ran into that in a study of colonial postcards from the 1930s: the images show a serene, genteel village, but the archival footage from the same period reveals laborers in back alleys, a whole different rhythm. The photo gives us a myth, and the myth feeds tourism, which feeds back into the myth. So yes, the gaps are there, and they’re often the most telling.