She provided copies of the images to the Otago Daily Times yesterday, after two young men were killed by falling ice at the glacier on Thursday.
The body of Ashish Miranda (24), a Melbourne aerospace engineer, was recovered on Thursday evening and the search for his brother, Akshay (22), a Melbourne science and engineering student, has been suspended because of dangerous conditions.
Ms Pearson's pictures were taken during a visit to Fox Glacier with her 5-year-old daughter last July, and showed tourists in an ice cave, posing for photographs with their backs to a sheer wall of unstable ice.
She took the photographs from the Department of Conservation's viewing platform, about 500m from the glacier's terminal face, because the conditions appeared "too dangerous" to risk approaching the ice.
"However, while I was there I watched every other tourist who arrived . . . walk up to and through the ropes.
"Some even had their pictures taken standing by the warning signs before going over to stand in some extremely dangerous areas," she said.
One picture showed a group of English tourists acting like "cretins", posing for a picture beneath an "extremely unstable potential rock slide", she said.
"There was every possibility that they were going to get a picture of their mates having their brains bashed out. Several other groups had also made a beeline to this area for photographs," she said.
A second image showed a German family, including two children, who walked from the roped-off viewing area to the side of the river emerging from under the glacier, to examine the ice cave, she said.
"If there had been a large ice fall during the half hour or more while they sat there then they would not even have seen the resulting wave which would have wiped them out," she said.
The same picture also showed the English tourists - captured in the first image - walking directly beneath an ice fall area where there had been a recent collapse, she said.
The images were shot just months after a tourist examining the ice cave at nearby Franz Josef Glacier, north of Fox Glacier, was injured after being struck by falling ice during a roof collapse.
Although Fox Glacier would have changed in the six months since the pictures were taken, it would still be "fairly representative" of conditions at the time of Thursday's tragedy, she said.
"While sympathising with the parents of the latest victims, if people will be stupid enough to walk through the obvious barriers and ignore the clear warning signs around the area, then there can be no cause for complaint when something like this occurs," she said.
In 2007, the Department of Conservation estimated almost one-third of 600,000 visitors to the West Coast glaciers ignored warning signs and entered the glaciers' danger zone.
Fox Glacier Guiding chief executive Rob Jewell has told the ODT people were continuing to flout the rules.
"A lot of people just like to touch the ice, which is a pretty crazy thing to do," he said.
