The visual representation of tourism destinations in the Internet era: multiple constructions and circulations.

Photographs play paramount role in visual representation of tourism destinations, partially because tourism involves a uniquely visual experience. Photography and mass tourism emerged at around the same time, and both are now recognized as being part of the everyday life of ordinary people. The link between photography and tourism was fostered by the Kodak Corporation, which encouraged people to go on vacation and bring back pictures of exotic peoples and places by running advertisements with tag lines such as"a holiday without a Kodak is a holiday wasted."From a traveler's perspective, photographs confirm that the traveler has physically visited a place and provided evidence that they experienced some form of authentic, exotic, or‘other'life. From a destination marketing organization's perspective, photographs are the result of an"active signifying practice in which mediamakers select, structure, and shape what is going to be registered on film and further alter and edit what is eventually printed." Since the late 1990 s, after the international human geography academia experienced a"cultural turn,"many western scholars began to use a variety of research methods to explore the human visual experience. Their major conclusion is that the destination is the result of visual representation and is socially constructed. Meanwhile, the tourist experience is also socially constructed. The ubiquitous images of the tourism destination continue to guide tourists' appreciation of the scenery, how to take pictures, and even how to produce the"right"emotions.The sample used in this research included online photos posted on the official websites of Guizhou Province and by tourists who had visited Guizhou Province previously. We used NVivo qualitative analysis, content analysis, and semiotic analysis methods to explore whether there are differences between tourism destination images constructed and represented by the official websites and the images perceived and represented by tourists. The results show that the two represented types of images were distinctly different in several aspects. First, there are significant statistical differences shown by the photo- content attributes in the 10 node categories. Second, the photo combination model to identify visualization preferences also demonstrates that the two represented types of images are not the same.The official images appear to be more"pure"and orderly compared with the more diverse and complex tourist images. The variety of tourist images results from the diversity of tourists, who produce three combinations of images. However, the semiotic analysis of the local iconic images shows consistency between images from official websites and tourists' representation of the tourism destination in images.The local iconic landscapes that the tourists choose to capture are similar to the representative images shown by the official websites. However, the consistency of images is not absolute. Overall, this case only partially supports Urry's hermeneutic circle of representation, which is mainly reflected in tourists' natural landscape photographs. The study also shows that since the development of the Internet,government and destination marketing organizations are no longer the only channel of representation,and the diversity of tourists' travel experiences and production of destination images has evolved Urry's single-group circle of representation into a multigroup circle of representation.