Staging portraits: Tourism’s panoptic photo-industry

• This article addresses the visual turn in tourism.
• Photographic practices on cruise ships are examined closely through ethnographic methods.
• The corporate’s display of tourists’ images is examined in light of tourists’ ways of visually consuming their images.
• Visual production/consumption is understood in light of Foucauldian and neoliberal theories.
• Methods and procedures in visual ethnography and (auto)ethnography are highlighted.

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.