ABSTRACT
The spread of photography from Europe to the rest of the world from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century is an extremely important origin point for a politically attuned understanding of visuality. This chapter explores the visual politics that connect colonialism, photography and tourism. It examines how practices of tourist photography – of capturing the everyday encounters between different cultures – often reinforce dominant understandings of global politics that further entrench long-standing colonial asymmetries. Drawing together colonialism, photography and tourism provides people with a context within which they can work out the dominant global power relations embedded in specific tourist photographs. There are two primary sets of relationships: First, there are the relationships between the photographer who frames, produces and takes the photograph, and the object that is captured within the resulting image. Second, there are the relationships between the viewers of photographs and the objects and others captured within the image.
