Visitor-Employed Photography

Visitor-employed photography (VEP) is a participant-generated visual method in which visitors themselves take photographs of what is meaningful, appealing or notable to them in a setting, and the resulting images, together with the visitors' own explanations, become the research data. Introduced by Cherem and Driver (1983) to measure common perceptions of natural environments, VEP hands the camera to the visitor rather than relying on researcher-chosen images or words alone, capturing place perception through the visitor's own eyes. In tourism it has become a key tool for studying destination image, as MacKay and Couldwell (2004) demonstrated by using VEP to investigate how visitors actually picture a site and how that compares with official promotional imagery. By combining what visitors photograph with why, VEP yields a visitor-centred, relatively unobtrusive window onto how people see and value places.