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Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, 392 pp.
Present-day tourism advertisements for Caribbean vacations cast the region as a place of leisure, an opportunity for Americans and Europeans to escape exhausting modern-day life. Commercials on American television, for example, emphasize white-sand beaches and all-inclusive resorts, while often ignoring the other topographies of the region, to say nothing of the social and cultural landscapes. Such campaigns work by feeding into a set of stereotypes that characterize the region as a primitive or timeless tropical paradise, an idea that tourism promoters first created over a century ago. The development of these visual stereotypes is the subject of art historian Krista A. Thompson's A« Eye for the Tropics. In this book, Thompson explains the rise of these representations as she examines the intertwined development of tourism and photography in the Caribbean from the late-nineteenth century. Her goal is to determine "how certain visual icons of the Anglophone Caribbean . . . [became] symbolic of specific islands and an entire region" (p. 5). To do this, she deploys the concept of tropicalization, which she defines as "the complex visual systems through which the islands were imaged for tourist consumption and the social and political implications of these representations on actual physical space on the islands and their inhabitants" (p- 5).
The book is organized in five chapters, with a concluding epilogue. The first two chapters focus on images of the land. Thompson starts with the rise of Jamaica's tourism industry in the late-nineteenth century. Tourism promoters chose photographs that drew upon picturesque artistic traditions, highlighting the supposed "natural" landscape of banana plantations; this became standard for other islands. For example, tourism promoters in the Bahamas emphasized similar picturesque renderings, even though the topography and economy differed somewhat from that of Jamaica. Here, "tourism advocates tried desperately to fit a landscape, which in many ways physically resisted easy assimilation, into what they believed to be tourists' expectations of tropicality and tamed tropicality" (p. 93). In order to deliver what promoters had sold, organizations like...