Photographs in tourism research: Prejudice, power, performance and participant-generated images

Abstract

Photography has often been considered tainted as a source of research data, even in tourism, its natural habitat. This situation is undoubtedly a legacy of the prejudice that many social scientists held toward the use of visual data when the academic study of tourism took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Tourism research has therefore persistently favoured textual data over visual data. This paper argues that the power of photography to prove and move can be harnessed to bridge this theoretical and practical cognitive gap. Issues relating to the performance of photography, including those of timing and intent, as well as the speed of information exchange, need however to be considered when designing and implementing research using photographic data. This implies a need to review the 'circle of representation' of tourism destination images, as well as to divide participant-generated image methods into two strands: found photographs and commissioned photographs.

Taking the urban tourist activity pulse through digital footprints

“…Specifically, the assessment of tourist perceptions through the use of geolocated photographs retrieved from photo-sharing services as well as Geolocated Information Systems -GIS -(García-Palomares, Gutiérrez, & Mínguez, 2015) has been carried out to identify: (1) tourism attractivenessi.e. cultural POIs - (Giglio, Bertacchini, Bilotta, & Pantano, 2019); (2) the impact of destination photography on perception (Kim & Stepchenkova, 2015); (3) the perception of the urban environment for urban planning purposes (|Dunkel, 2012(|Dunkel, , 2015; and, (4) the tourist experience through visual dataphotography - (Balomenou & Garrod, 2019). Indeed, there is a general consensus in the scientific literature on the relevance of UGC to create tourism strategy models (Che, Safran, & Peng, 2013;Marine-Roig & Anton Clavé, 2015;Shelton, Poorthuis, & Zook, 2015).…”

Countering “Arctification”: Dawson City’s “Sourtoe Cocktail”

“…Third, the experience of the Sourtoe Cocktail is preserved through a variety of digital content consisting of videos, photographs, blog posts and articles. This also evidences the close connection between tourist experiences and technology such as photography or social media (Balomenou and Garrod, 2019;Gretzel, 2017;Kim and Fesenmaier, 2017;Lo and McKercher, 2015;Urry and Larsen, 2011). Indeed, inside the bar, participants often record themselves or ask other visitors to film them while drinking the shot (Plate 4).…”

Adapting photovoice with ESRI Survey123 for tourism disaster research in Banten, Indonesia

“…Although photovoice has received considerable attention in other academic literature, its use in tourism studies is largely underutilized. One set of similar procedures can be found in participantgenerated photography techniques (Balomenou & Garrod, 2019). The use of participant-generated photography is more commonly employed in studies related to destination images (Brickell, 2012;Garrod, 2008), tourism planning (Cahyanto et al, 2010), and tourist behaviour and experience (Caton & Santos, 2007).…”