Staging Portraits: Tourism’s Panoptic Photo-industry
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2014
Keywords
ethnography, photography, neoliberalism, visual studies, cruise tourism, display
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2014.04.004
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.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Annals of Tourism Research, v. 47, p. 48-62
Scholar Commons Citation
Noy, Chaim, "Staging Portraits: Tourism’s Panoptic Photo-industry" (2014). Communication Faculty Publications. 687.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/687
