Gaze And Perception:Study On Photographic Tourists’ Sense Of Place

Photography is the most meaningful part of modern tourism culture,and it is also one of the most common and most important consumer behaviors of tourists.Scholars generally believe that there is a wide and far-reaching relationship between photography and tourism.From the point of external form,the general and symbolic activities like photography in the travel process,which has increasingly tend to be more "popular" and"daily" under the impetus of the digital technology and the internet.In today’s travel,there are many tourists who carry different sizes and different styles of camera equipment,they are always keen to gaze through the lens or occupy the landmark sites in the form of photos,record and prove where they have been through the pictures.Photographic practice has become an indispensable "ritual" in the travel process.In view of the inherent connection,the tourists’ photographic behavior is regarded as a "ritual" or "convention"by Urry throughout the concept of "tourist gaze",thus photography is seen as the concretization and tangibility of tourist gaze.At present,scholars have analyzed the tourists’ motivations,preferences and psychology from different aspects,and they have explained why tourists took pictures and how to take pictures to some extent,but they lack the perceived level of discussion and research about the tourists’ photographic practice.In addition to the ubiquitous "photographic practice" in tourism,some tourists who are willing to engage in photographic practice are gradually separated from the mass tourists,formed a group of tourism groups with photography and photography creation as the main purposes.In recent years,they have been expanding to become one of the important components of the visitor market.First of all,photographic tourists are often the "pioneers" of some tourist destination.Secondly,photographic tourists use professional knowledge and camera to visualize the tourist destinations,and their discourse of tourism has played a key role in the construction of tourism space and tourist image.Meanwhile,photographic tourists,perception directly affect the way how to gaze and how to represent,the results of their gaze and representation can not only affect the decision of potential tourists,but also the development and evolution of tourist destination.This is the unique feature of photographic motivation tourists compared to mass tourists.From the popular tourism phenomenon of "photography tourism",under the theory framework of tourism motivation,tourist gaze and sense of place,this paper chooses Xiapu County of Fujian Province as the case,which is called "International Tidal Flats Photography Base".Through the binary opposition of the tourists who take photography as the main motivation and the non-photographic motivation tourists.The data collected by questionnaire and in-depth interview,and it analyzed by SPSS 20.0 statistical analysis software.By means of literature analysis,field investigation,qualitative and quantitative analysis,this paper compares the different types of gaze subjects,namely there are differences between photographic tourists and non-photographic tourists in overall differences of the social demographic characteristics,as well as behavioral characteristics and sense of place.The main conclusions can be listed as follows:(1)Compared with non-photographic tourists,photographic tourists have different characteristics in social demographic characteristics and tourism behavior,which is characterized by the large proportion of male photographic tourists and the middle and old age people,and the relatively high monthly income level.(2)Compared to non-photographic tourists,photographic tourists are expected to stay longer in the tourist destination,and they are more likely to choose the group tour than non-photographic tourists.(3)There are significant differences between photographic tourists and non-photographic tourists in the the sense of place.And the degree of place identity and place dependence of photographic tourists are significantly higher than that of non-photographic tourists.(4)The difference between the cognition of the photographic environment,and the difference between the motivation and the involvement are the main factors that cause the difference between the photographic tourists and the non-photographic tourists.(5)The differences in cognition,motivation,and involvement affect the formation of differences in sense of place,which being integrated into the tourists’ gaze.