For its millions of readers, the "National Geographic" has long
been a window to the world of exotic peoples and places. In this
fascinating account of an American institution, Catherine A. Lutz
and Jane L. Collins explore the possibility that the magazine, in
purporting to teach us about distant cultures, actually tells us
much more about our own.
Lutz and Collins take us inside the National Geographic Society to
investigate how its photographers, editors, and designers select
images and text to produce representations of Third World cultures.
Through interviews with the editors, they describe the process as
one of negotiating standards of "balance" and "objectivity,"
informational content and visual beauty. Then, in a close reading
of some six hundred photographs, they examine issues of race,
gender, privilege, progress, and modernity through an analysis of
the way such things as color, pose, framing, and vantage point are
used in representations of non-Western peoples. Finally, through
extensive interviews with readers, the authors assess how the
cultural narratives of the magazine are received and interpreted,
and identify a tension between the desire to know about other
peoples and their ways and the wish to validate middle-class
American values.
The result is a complex portrait of an institution and its role in
promoting a kind of conservative humanism that acknowledges
universal values and celebrates diversity while it allows readers
to relegate non-Western peoples to an earlier stage of progress. We
see the magazine and the Society as a key middlebrow arbiter of
taste, wealth, and power in America, and we get a telling glimpse
into middle-class American culture and allthe wishes, assumptions,
and fears it brings to bear on our armchair explorations of the
world.
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