Tourism, stock photography and surveillance: a Foucauldian interpretation

Abstract

In recent decades, scholars working from a variety of disciplinary, transdisciplinary and adisciplinary perspectives have focused on photographic images as a rich source of research data. Much of the work on photography in tourism studies has been concerned primarily with the analysis of the content of photographic representations. Studies which examine the production and distribution of ‘stock’ photographs in place promotion are less common. The stock photographic collections of Official Tourism Organisations (OTOs) are an aspect of contemporary consumer and visual culture that has, for the most part, been neglected in the literature on visual cultural and consumption in tourism. Yet, it is these institutional procedures which to a large extent determine the content of promotional photographs, as well as how these are made available for consumption. Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of Panopticism (Foucault's central vehicle for discussing the social relations of power, surveillance and related disciplinary regimes), this article explores aspects of the ‘editorial gaze(s)’ of stock photographic images within the context of OTOs in the UK. It is suggested that the commissioning, production, storage, retrieval and consumption of stock photographs by OTOs (and by other institutions) are all aspects of a panoptic dispositif through which both bodies and spaces are scripted and put to work through the governing apparatus of tourism.