More than meets the eye: using visitor-employed photography to explore landscape perception

Photography is closely integrated with tourism. Tourist photographs can reveal what people view in a tourism landscape, and how they make sense of it, subsequently informing destination marketing and interpretation design. However, previous research in tourism photography has adopted primarily a Eurocentric standpoint, which may be inadequate to explain the nuances of non-Western tourists who view landscape using different lenses. This study used the visitor-employed photography (VEP) method supplemented with other in-situ techniques to unravel Chinese travellers’ landscape perceptions at the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Fifty-three images were obtained with captions of images and participants’ explanations. Results illustrate that Chinese travellers are empathetic figurative thinkers, storytellers, and are prone to draw analogies to make sense of the surroundings. Nature-oriented scenery still dominates in photography. In addition, implications in relation to site interpretation and VEP’s potential to supplement other data collection techniques were discussed