Visitor-Employed Photography
Also known as: VEP, Participant-Generated Photography, Visitor Photo Elicitation, Tourist-Generated Imagery Analysis
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.
Key highlights
- Captures perception through the visitor's own eyes, reducing researcher framing and the limits of verbal expression.
- Reveals what visitors notice and value, including features they might not spontaneously mention in words.
- Pairs images with participants' explanations, anchoring interpretation in the visitor's own meaning.
- Enables direct comparison of visitor-generated imagery with official promotional or resident imagery.
Intuition
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
How it works
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
When to use it
Use visitor-employed photography when you want a visitor-centred, visual account of how people perceive and value a place, especially destination image, landscape and environmental perception, or experience meaning, and when words alone would constrain or distort what visitors can express. It is well suited to comparing visitor perceptions with official marketing imagery, to identifying which features visitors find representative or worth protecting, and to giving voice to perceptions that visitors notice but may not articulate. It is less appropriate when you need statistically representative, generalisable measures, when participant burden or logistics (distributing cameras, managing routes, securing consent for images of people) are prohibitive, or when the research question is about prevalence or causation rather than perception and meaning. Privacy and ethics around photographing people and places must be managed throughout.
Strengths & limitations
- Captures perception through the visitor's own eyes, reducing researcher framing and the limits of verbal expression.
- Reveals what visitors notice and value, including features they might not spontaneously mention in words.
- Pairs images with participants' explanations, anchoring interpretation in the visitor's own meaning.
- Enables direct comparison of visitor-generated imagery with official promotional or resident imagery.
- Samples are usually small and self-selected, so findings are not statistically representative or generalisable.
- Logistics, distributing cameras, managing routes, and processing images, can be burdensome and costly.
- Photographs are ambiguous without accompanying explanation, and analysis is interpretive.
- Photographing people and private settings raises consent and privacy concerns that constrain the method.
Common pitfalls
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
Applications
This section is available to Pro members. Upgrade to Pro
Frequently asked
How does visitor-employed photography differ from using researcher-supplied photographs?
In VEP the visitors take the photographs themselves in response to a prompt, so the data reflect their own framing, attention and priorities. With researcher-supplied images, by contrast, participants only react to scenes the researcher pre-selected, which can impose the researcher's assumptions about what matters. Cherem and Driver designed VEP precisely to capture visitors' own perceptions of environments. The trade-off is that VEP requires more logistics and yields ambiguous images that must be interpreted with the participant's own explanations.
Why pair the photographs with interviews or captions?
A photograph shows what was captured but not why it mattered, and the same image can mean different things to different people. Pairing images with participants' explanations, through captions, logs or photo-elicitation interviews, anchors interpretation in the maker's meaning rather than the analyst's guesswork. MacKay and Couldwell's destination-image study illustrates how combining the visual data with visitors' accounts clarifies what each photo represents, which is essential for valid interpretation and for the subsequent content analysis.
What can VEP reveal about destination marketing?
Because VEP recovers how visitors actually picture a place, it can be compared directly with how the destination markets itself. MacKay and Couldwell used VEP to investigate destination image and to set visitor photographs against promotional materials, exposing where the marketed image aligns with or diverges from the visitor-generated one. Such gaps are managerially useful: they show whether marketing emphasises features visitors find representative, and they can guide more authentic, visitor-resonant promotion and interpretation.
Sources
- 1.Cherem, G. J., & Driver, B. L. (1983). Visitor Employed Photography: A Technique to Measure Common Perceptions of Natural Environments. Journal of Leisure Research, 15(1), 65-83.
- 2.MacKay, K. J., & Couldwell, C. M. (2004). Using Visitor-Employed Photography to Investigate Destination Image. Journal of Travel Research, 42(4), 390-396.
You have read it. What now?
Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Visitor-Employed Photography. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/tourism/visitor-employed-photography