Tropicality How Colonialism/Photography Changed the Views and Aspects of Native Workers.

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Tropicality How Colonialism/Photography Changed the Views and Aspects of Native Workers

Transcript of Tropicality How Colonialism/Photography Changed the Views and Aspects of Native Workers.

Page 1: Tropicality How Colonialism/Photography Changed the Views and Aspects of Native Workers.

Tropicality

How Colonialism/Photography Changed the Views and Aspects of Native Workers

Page 2: Tropicality How Colonialism/Photography Changed the Views and Aspects of Native Workers.

Background Information

• In order to attract more tourists, governments and officials had to get creative.

• Locals did not take to being photographed well. If asked to be photographed, some would demand compensation, engage with you in a staring contest, or physically attack you by biting your ear.

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Main Themes

• Native workers were not well represented. Pictures would emphasize the fruit the women were selling instead of them.

• “...in some representations the laborers are completely subsumed by the burden of the banana, made literally invisible beneath the banana stems,” Krista Thompson says in her book An Eye for the Tropics ( 77).

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Adolphe & Sons Duperly, pg 48-49

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Themes (cont.)

• Turned workers into commodities

• Photographers will make workers stop mid-job to pose for a photo

• “The very process of formally positioning laborers against the photographic backdrop of cane…rendered the laborers tourist commodities,” Thompson comments (Thompson, 77)

• “…The land and the people who work in it must still submit themselves to be looked upon”-Peter Osbourne (Thompson, 77/Osbourne, 113)

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Themes (cont.)

• Women were sexualized-photos showing them “swaying graceful hips” and flashing bits of their legs while washing clothes.

• The men, although were not common in landscape photos, were popular in photos deemed for the sea or marine life types. They were sexualized by having to pose semi-nude in short swimming trunks.

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Adolphe & Sons Duperly, pg 55.

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Works Cited

Duperly, A. & Sons."Picturesque Jamaica." 1-76.19 Apr. 2015. http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00103316/00001/1j.

Thompson, Krista. An Eye for the Tropics. London: Duke University Press, 2006. http://reader.dukeupress.edu/an-eye-for-the-tropics/22

Osborne, Peter. Traveling Light: Photography, Travel, and Visual Culture. New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.