The Importance Of Visuals In Tourism

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In order to be able to answer the question, ‘Does taking photos make tourists happy?’, three issues are going to be discussed to broaden our knowledge about the main subjects of research, which are tourist photography behaviour, positive emotions and openness.

Definition of tourists:

As Chalfen Richard says in his paper ‘Le Role de la photographie dans le tourisme: Quelques Rapports inexptor’, the camera is ‘a tourist’s primary identity badge’, nowadays it became a habit to walk around as a tourist having with you a camera and taking picture of what surrounds you. Photography is a visual way of communication. In his paper ‘Negative image? Developing the visual in tourism research’ (2003) William Feighey says how everyday more, also in tourism the visual part becomes more and more significant, he mostly focuses on the importance of visuals in tourism. In our research we would like to concentrate on the importance of photography, which is a visual technology, as Feighey says, but related to positive emotions.
Taking photographs as a tourist has already interested many researchers, one of them is John Urry, who in his book ‘The tourist gaze’(1990), analyzes the close relationship between photography and the tourist, defines these two elements to be inseparable. The tourist has its own view of the destination called indeed ‘tourist gaze’ by Urry, and this view is captured by the camera.
In his paper ‘Understanding the relationship between tourism destination imagery and tourist photography’, Brian Garrod recalls the same theory, but wants to study this relation deeper.
He finds out that the photographs taken by the tourist are almost the same, maybe less professional, but with the same subject and sets. The second finding was ...

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...uestion is than whether sharing and “stimulus-independent thought” are influenced by photographs and recalling holiday moments. Though some research have doubting samples. One of these is Killingsworth and Gilbert, they analysed only 2250 samples, when earlier in the text they mention their database currently contains nearly a quarter of a million samples from about 5000 people from 83 different countries with their age ranging from 18 to 88 and who collectively represent every one of 86 major occupational categories. These 2250 samples could be selected and therefore the research might not be not generalizable. Another research which has the same issue concerning generalizability is the article of Nawijn, Mitas, Lin and Kerstetter, which also used a fairly small sample. Another general problem with research on happiness is the reliability of participants and the

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