tourists stand / A guide-book in his pocket / A Kodak in his hand!”

Various businesses were happy to profit from the tourist boom, and so the images achieved wide circulation. The United Fruit Company, haberdasheries, and newspapers subsidized postcards that subliminally promoted the colonies as tropical paradises while directly advertising their own companies through sponsored tag-lines. Professional photographers marketed the Caribbean as “picturesque,” and therefore, as worthy of being photographed; this in turn inspired tourists with their Kodaks. Meanwhile, studios continued to thrive by processing amateur snaps as well as selling their own scenic views and portraits of local people as filler for vacation albums.

As interconnected as colonial photography became with tourism, it was deeply tied to imperialism from the start. Not long after Louis Daguerre made thedetails of the photographic process publicly available in 1839, it was used in the service of the pseudo-science of race. The first daguerreotypes compared slaves in South Carolina to slaves in Brazil in a format that became generic: “specimens,” often naked, were photographed from the front, back, and side, focusing on their anatomy and physical characteristics in order to document perceived racial differences. At about the same time and with similar ethnographic intentions, British colonial administrators in India commissioned a photographic field survey of the subcontinent’s tribes, castes, and cultures, published as the multi-volume The People of India.

International colonial exhibitions held from 1850 to 1915 in Europe, North America, New Zealand, and Australia provided another forum for these images. Drawing millions of viewers, the exhibitions were originally intended