The role the camera plays in the personal construction of place by American tourists while on holiday in Ireland.

Since its invention the camera has become the most omnipresent method of capturing the lived experience of people around the globe. There are as many reasons to take photographs as there are people in the world. More importantly from a social research point of view there are countless uses to which photographs can be put. The rationale for adopting photography as a method of data collection centres around the fact that people take photographs to help them to remember holidays, to record the growth of their children, to express themselves, to record their view of the world around them, or to change other peoples perception of the world (Badger, 2007). The purpose of this paper is to examine the role the camera plays in the personal construction of place by American tourists while on holiday in Ireland. In order to answer this question the following objectives have been identified. 1. Identify what American tourists expect Ireland to be like as a destination 2. Collect photographic evidence of what American tourists capture on their personal camera equipment while on holiday in Ireland The problem however in adopting photographs into a research study as a primary source of data is that there is no clearly established methodological framework to discuss the uses of photography in social science research (Becker, 2004). Collier and Collier (1986) argue that photographic data are the closest approximation to primary experience that researchers can gather, and therefore they want to carry this photographic authenticity from the field into analysis. Jewitt and Oyama (2008) suggest looking for the hidden meaning within photographs based on the orientation of the subjects captured on film. The themes which have emerged from this research would not have been discovered were it not for the use of VEP as a method for capturing and discussing the data. The digital camera played an integral role in facilitating this methodology in that it allowed the photographs to be viewed and discussed in the presence of the researcher before the participant left Ireland to return home. Albers James (1988) stated that all destinations are constructs in one form or another that has been put together by marketers to attract visitors. This research suggests that tourists will actively seek out photographic evidence that supports their own temporal construct of the destination, in this case Ireland, which can be used by destination marketers to further understand the attributes of Ireland that resonate with the American tourist.