The role of photographs in pre-empting behaviour of tourists in heritage sites

Abstract

Due to the ease with which one can take and share photographs, travel photography has become increasingly popular, including those of heritage sites. Since it is easy to access different sources of visual information, the cultural tourist is motivated to seek particular experiences and build certain expectations before visiting a cultural site. It is by meeting such expectations that cultural tourists deem their visit to be satisfactory. Therefore, it is assumed that the photographs produced by past tourists and the tourism industry inform the behaviour of potential tourists during various stages of their visit. This study explores how the photographs of a particular local heritage site can influence tourists’ corporeal and perceptual behaviours during their visit. Photographs generated by tourists and those used by the tourism authorities were gathered from online sources. First, these photographs were analysed using the mise-en-scène technique, in which the frequency of photographed elements was teased out. This showed the discrepancy between what is promoted by the tourism authorities and where tourists actually visit and stop to take photographs. Then, visual content analysis was carried out on both photographic samples. This technique was used in order to understand how the tourists can perceive the studied site from photographs before the actual visit. The results of the two techniques were used to determine how tourists could interpret aspects from these photographs which would then influence their behaviour during their visit. This study concludes that tourists often recreate photographs that they would have already seen before their visit, including photographs produced by both the tourism authorities as well as other tourists. The possible motivations behind the tourists’ corporeal and perceptual behaviours that emerged from the study’s findings are also discussed to substantiate the behavioural trends observed. The importance of the symbols that feature in certain photographs is also evident in this study; indeed, it was concluded that anything could be appropriated as a symbolic feature by tourists to communicate their experience of the cultural site.