The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic

The National Geographic magazine is of tremendous potential cultural importance. Its photographs have voraciously focused on Third World scenes, its over 10 million subscriber households make it as popular a source of images as any in American mass mediated culture, and its lavish production capabilities and cultural legitimacy as a scientific institution make it an ideological practice that powerfully relates to the history and structure of the society in which it has developed. As part of a larger project to consider the magazine's photographs as cultural artifacts from a changing 20th century American scene, we have been struck by the story told in the photos via a variety of looks and looking relations. Some of the issues raised in this article are particular to this specific genre of photography while many others illuminate photographic interpretation more generally.1 The National Geographic photograph of the non-Westerner' can be seen not simply as a captured view of the other, but as a dynamic site at which many gazes or viewpoints intersect. This intersection creates a complex and multi-dimensional object; it allows viewers of the photo to negotiate a number of different identities both for themselves and for those pictured; and it is one route by which the photograph threatens to break frame and reveal its social context. We aim here to explore the significance of "gaze" for intercultural relations in the photograph, and to present a typology of seven kinds of gaze that can be found in the photograph and its social context. These include (1) the photographer's gaze (the actual look through the viewfinder), (2) the institutional, magazine gaze (evident in cropping, picture choice, captioning, etc.), (3) the readers' gaze, (4) the non-Western subjects' gaze, (5) the explicit looking