An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, by Krista A. Thompson (Duke University Press, ISBN 0-8223-3764-9, 366 pp)

“Even landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product.”
— Simon Schama, quoted in An Eye for the Tropics

Ceiba or Silk Cotton Tree, Nassau (1900), by William Henry Jackson

For decades, the tropics have been picked apart, deconstructed, and then reconstructed, but, as Krista Thompson states in the introduction to An Eye for the Tropics, it is been done so extensively and almost exclusively through literature. She quotes Barry Higman: “historians [of the British West Indies] . . . rely on words on paper . . . seeing pictures as mere illustrative devices rather than appropriate vehicles for analytical discourse.” With a lively voice that is at once lucid and probing, Thompson approaches this unique critical and art historical standpoint, convincingly arguing that social, political, and racial issues are embedded in postcard imagery. From that point of departure, she then steps neatly into contemporary times, linking those now faded images to the brilliant work of specific artists practicing in the post-colonial era. Her nuanced observations centre primarily on tropicalisation, which she describes 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”.

Although it frequently seems that the old adage holds true, and there really are no new ideas under the sun, only new writers (or something to that effect), An Eye for the Tropics reads as a maiden, thoroughly researched, and highly successful journey over previously unexplored territory. Throughout the book, Thompson — an assistant professor of art history and African American studies at Northwestern University — astutely observes and dissects visual representations of the Caribbean through the specialised medium of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century postcards. Interesting to note, she didn’t start off writing this particular book, but while thinking about how the Caribbean is imagined, her interest was drawn to a set of recurring visual icons, such as the beach and the palm tree, to name a couple. Musing on the origin of images of the Caribbean picturesque, Thompson then set out to understand their history. She traces their historical production while also positing them in relation to their wider implications for continued notions of Caribbean society.

Weaving the interpretation of images with amusing anecdotes and excerpts from long-obsolete publications, Thompson lays out the first three chapters of her book chronologically, focusing on the earliest tourism campaigns in Jamaica and the Bahamas, during the 1890s. She then works through to the 1930s, the first decades of travel trade to the islands, looking at specific companies who benefited financially by promoting the picturesque of the islands, notably “The New Jamaica”. Among these were the American United Fruit Company and the British El. . .

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