Reading National Geographic

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 all the wishes, assumptions, and fears it brings
to bear on our
armchair explorations of the world.