BOOK DISCUSSION: An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque by Krista A.

Thompson

Solving Caribbean Mysteries: Art, Embodiment and an Eye for the Tropics
Leon Wainwright
ABSTRaCT: This article discusses various perspectives on image-making in the Anglophone Caribbean with reference to the economy of relations between its visitors and inhabitants during the modern colonial period and its aftermath. It evaluates the framework of the tropical picturesque as a locus of embodied visual practiceswith a significant, if often mysterious past and debates Krista A. Thompsons notion of an eye for the tropics by reference to recent art historical insights drawn from fieldwork in Trinidad.

I shall begin my account with news of a murder. Or, at least, the news of discovering the tale of a murder in the form of a not-so-simple work of ction. On the back cover of Agatha Christies opaquely entitled A Caribbean Mystery, in the edition I have at least, is a line of quoted speech from the story: Would you like to see a picture of a murderer? It was put there to catch the attention of even the most indierent reader, yet I found the question incongruously placed in a popular novel, professionally occupied as I am with histories of image-making and the visual turn in study of the Caribbean and its diaspora. I was even more intrigued to nd that Christies entire plot in fact hinges on the mystery of picturing and the question of who may be pictured. At a certain moment it turns to the matter of the whereabouts of a snapshot which is oered for show to one Miss Jane Marple, holidaying on the ctional West Indian isle of St. Honor. Soon after which the image predictably disappears from the coral beachside cabin of its owner, a dead army major and English club bore. Yet the plot returns, nally, to the same intractable mystery of pictured identity and an ever-elusive search for photographic proof of a motive behind not one killing but four. Like all good murders the Caribbean ones are solved in the end. But not before Christies plot thickens a little too much, running into a delta of distractions. One distraction that she
1. Agatha Christie, A Caribbean Mystery (1964; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2000).
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did not schedule for this reader was a small but notable discrepancy. I wondered why the dustjacket quote was nowhere to be found in the narrative itself. After a thorough magnifying-glass search of the body of the text what I actually read was the modied invitation: Would you like to see the photograph of the murderer? (Emphasis added).With this, Christie provides a literary instance of the popular basis for images of the Caribbean, directing attention illuminatingly, if mysteriously, to photography. It is this transition from picture to photograph, from attention to an image apprehended as a singular object to its mass reproduction, that is signicant both of her popular novelitself a distributed snapshot for popular referenceand any debate of the place of modern images connected with the Caribbean. Through her remarkable recent study, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Krista A. Thompson has addressed this important historical distinction between the general practice of picturing (such as painting and engraving, the predominant forms of tropical visual record before the advent of the photograph) compared to the specic qualities of the photographic image. The materiality of the photograph, an inexpensive form which is ready, if not actually intended for wide distribution, enabled an economy among images in which photographs achieved greater currency over their handrendered precursors. Thompson shows the consequences for the Caribbean when the material production of pictorial techniques began to x upon the photographic trace, appearing to promise access to vision in a more evidentiary mode. By way of extended historical research, An Eye for the Tropics also amply responds to the questions raised in my tropical thriller; it assists by solving several of its riddles. It explains why the ragged royal palms on Christies cover, in silhouette against a jade sky and dusty full moon, should have reappeared so often as a generic tropical referent. Initially, this didactic work is lent by the very physical presentation of Thompsons study. The row of palms in pointillist print on its cover advisedly replays the same formal composition of Christies, except that this dotted colour separates, reminding of the fabrication of all forms of imaging. Each of the volumes has its author and title lettered in white, sans serif and cursive. But understanding this familial relation between the formal devices used on the covers of the two books emerges only from going on to read their content. The incidental backdrop to Christies plot is borrowed from the same archive of associations that Thompson has mapped, in which tourism and the tropics collide at the locus of vision and the painted, printed and photographic picture.

2. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 3. See, for instance, the studies anthologised in Geo Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (eds.) An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 16601830 (Manchester and New York: University of Manchester Press, 2003).