Staging portraits: Tourism’s panoptic photo-industry

Published Date
July 2014, Vol.47:48–62, doi:10.1016/j.annals.2014.04.004

Author 
Chaim Noy 
University of South Florida, USA
Received 4 January 2014. Revised 13 April 2014. Accepted 16 April 2014. Available online 14 May 2014.

Highlights

• This article addresses the visual turn in tourism.
• •
  Photographic practices on cruise ships are examined closely through ethnographic methods.
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  The corporate’s display of tourists’ images is examined in light of tourists’ ways of visually consuming their images.
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  Visual production/consumption is understood in light of Foucauldian and neoliberal theories.
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  Methods and procedures in visual ethnography and (auto)ethnography are highlighted.

Abstract 

Shifting from representationally-oriented analysis of images to analysis of practices—the production, circulation and consumption of tourists’ images, and from photos created by tourists to photos staged, produced and displayed by the industry, this article offers a qualitative, ethnographic study of tourism’s visual culture. Through observations conducted on a cruise ship, the author offers up-close depiction of photo-taking routines, and of the public display of multiple images of vacationing tourists. The article critically accounts for tourists’ desire to be photographed and portrayed by the industry in terms of visual surveillance (Foucault) under contemporary neoliberal visual regime. It is further argued that public displays of tourists’ images create, through collective mediation/mediatization, a commercially assembled touristic collective or public.

Keywords

Ethnography

Photography

Neoliberalism

Visual studies

Cruise tourism

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