ABSTRACT
The advent of photography in the nineteenth century gave added exposure to an existing categorization of human types that had prevailed for centuries. It made available to a viewing public a visual simplification of the knowledge that had developed colonialism and, in turn, had been further reified by it. The new graphic accessibility served to modify, convince, clarify, denounce, sensitize, question and accord credence to already existing beliefs. Photography was rapidly adopted as a recorder of truth and a conveyor of history. It also became one of the discourses of choice for the modern tourist industry, a visual text for defining other humans. The vivid images in photographs, the exotica that they promised were, in themselves, invitations to tourism. Thus tourism, photography and colonialism converged in the nineteenth century as they continued to do in the centuries that followed. While tourism and photography grew to be towering presences, colonialism came to be seriously undermined in many quarters, but it managed, nevertheless, to hang on as a deeply ingrained characteristic of Western sensibilities. Each of these three very complex discourses placed its own distinguishing stamp on a basic episteme. I refer to the enduring awareness of human differences and its unhappy legacy of race and racism. The notion of empire itself was clearly dependent for its existence on the politics of these differences. The role of tourism and photography in this particular relationship is much less obvious.
