The National Geographic magazine is of tremendous potential cultural importance. Its photographs have voraciously focused on the third world scenes. It's an idealogical practice that powerfully relates to the history and structure of the society in which it has developed.
Some of the issues raised are particular to this specific genre of photography while many others illuminate photographic interpretation more generally.
National Geographic photographs of the non-westerner can be seen not simply as captured view of the other but a dynamic site at which gazes or view points intersect. This intersection creates a complex and multi-dimensional object. It allows viewers to negotiate a number of different identities both for themselves and those pictured.
The article explores the significance of the gaze, and the 7 kinds of gaze that can be found in the photograph. The 7 are...
1. The Photographers Gaze
2. The Institutional Gaze, magazine gaze.
3. The Readers Gaze.
4. The Non-Westerners Gaze.
5. The Explicit looking done by westerners.
6. The Gaze returned or refracted.
7. Our own academic gaze.
The Gaze and its significance
The photograph and the non-Western person share two attributes in the culturally tutored experience of most Americans, they are objects at which we look. The photograph has this quality because its usually intended as thing of either beautiful attraction or documentary interest (surveillance).
Some see the gaze as an "act of mastery" (Williams 1987) or control.
Laura Mulvey discusses feminist film theory in relation to the gaze in her essay "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema". She focuses on way in which looking in patriarchal society is "split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects it's fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly." Therefore, the spectators position belongs to the male and allows for the construction of femininity.
The unique vision of the female spectator is explored, and seen as multiple because it can move between identification with the object and with the spectator in comparison to the male gaze. For example, there is no single masculine spectator position for viewing the ethnic representations in the National Geographic. While the image makers at National Geographic are overwhelmingly white and male, the magazine's readers come from a wide range of social positions within American society.
The gaze can also be seen by some as masculine. John Berger points out in his book Ways of Seeing (1972), contemporary gender ideologies and envisages men as active doers and women as passive presence, men by what they do to others and women by their attitudes towards themselves. (men act and women appear).
Both Mulvey and Berger alert us in the ways in which the position of the spectator has the potential to enhance or articulate the power of the observer over the observed.
Lacan's view of the Gaze can also be helpful as a model for the potential effects of looking. Lacan speaks of gaze as something distinct from the eye of the beholder. For him, the gaze is "something [which] slips...and is always to some degree eluded in its vision." (Lacan 1981)
What can be done in the photograph is to (unconsciously) manipulate the gaze of the other - via such a process as photo selection - so that it allows us to see ourselves reflected in their eyes in ways in which are comfortable, familiar and pleasurable. This taming of the gaze occurs when we move and realise that the picture does not change as our gaze changes.
Foucault's analysis of the rise of surveillance in modern society is also relevant to the understanding of the gaze in photography. When we look at the National Geographic magazine's gaze at the Third World, we notice it operates to represent the Third World to an American audience in ways which can shore up a western cultural identity. The gaze is not, however, a singular or monolithic - we might say the gaze is meaningless, but it does open up certain possibilities for the reader interpretation of a photograph with these centring around issues of intimacy, pleasure, scrutiny, confrontation, and power.
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AN EXPLICIT WESTERN GAZE
Through the years National Geographic has been publishing articles on the non-Western world. Their photographs show the westerners engaged in a variety of activities: they view the local landscape from atop a hill, hold and closely study an artifact, show a local tribal person some wonder of Western technology, such as a photograph, mirror or the camera itself, or interact with a native, in conversation, work or play.
These pictures form a fascinating set as they represent more explicitly and directly than do the others the kinds of inter-cultural relations it is thought or hoped obtain between the West and its global neighbours.
The effects of this type of photograph on readers are potentially important and complex, both in representing and teaching the National Geographic audience about that relationship and in perhaps allowing for a kind of identification with the Westerner in the photo and through that allowing for more intensive interaction with, or imaginary participation in the photo.
The pictures of westerners can serve a validating function by proving that the author was there. The reader can be convinced that the account is a first hand one, brought from the field rather then from the archives.
In her analysis of the role of the gaze in the cinema, Mulvey (1985) argues that it takes three forms - the camera, the audience and the characters, the first two forms have to be obscured or invisible.
If the viewer becomes aware of his or her own eye or that of the camera they will develop a distancing awareness rather than an unconscious involvement.
As more and more people travelled to exotic locales of the NG articles, staff saw that the picture of the intrepid traveller no longer look intrepid and so had less interest.
Whether or not Westerners appear in the picture, we 'are' there, but in pictures that include a Westerner, we may see ourselves being viewed by the other, and we become conscious of ourselves and relationships. The act of seeing the self being seen is antithetical to the voyeurism which many art critics have identified as intrinsic to most photography and film
THE REFRACTED GAZE OF THE OTHER
(To see themselves as others see them )
In a small number of NG issues, a native is shown with a camera or mirror. These are both tools of self-reflection. Each creates a double of the self, a second figure who can be examined more closely than the original — a double that can also be alienated from the self, taken away, as a photograph can be, to another place. For many Americans, self knowledge is a central life goal. There is a childish naivety when a native gets to see his reflection.
There have been changes, where the Indians may have stood unwillingly for photographs they are now charging 80 cents a person as they pose. It depicts the act of looking at unwilling subjects, suggesting two things. The first, voyeurism of the photograph of the exotic. The camera gaze is doubled in this picture, not the native subject as in the photos above where the camera enters the frame in some explicit sense, and this doubling underlines that western gaze.
Success in avoiding boredom is key to retaining readers interest and memberships for National Geographic. The photographer is always trying to colonise new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects–to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. Thus, images are constructed rather than found in some cases.
THE ACADEMIC SPECTATOR
This gaze is simply a sub-type of the readers gaze. We read a National Geographic magazine with a sense of astonishment and wonder, both as children and, in a way that is different only some of the time as adults.
We aim to make pictures tell a different story than they were originally meant to tell, one about their makers and readers, rather than their subjects.
This seventh kind of looking is guided by the idea that an alternative gaze is possible, one which is less dominating, more orientating toward seeing how a scene and its viewer might be changed than toward its imagined essential, unchanging and unsatisfactory form.
As we are invited to dream in the photograph, we are also invited to forget and be lost in it.
Our reading theory has also tutored our gaze at the photographs in distinctive ways, told us how to understand the techniques by which they work. We are captured by the temptation to view the photographs as more real than the world or at least a comfy substitute for it.
Through attention to the dynamic nature of these intersecting gazes, the photograph becomes less vulnerable to the change or illusion that it masks or stuffs and mounts the world, freezes the life out of a scene. While the gaze of the subject of the photograph might be fairly lost in the heavy criss crossing traffic of the often more privileged producers and consumers gazes, very contemporary stories of contestable power are told there nonetheless.
Through the years National Geographic has been publishing articles on the non-Western world. Their photographs show the westerners engaged in a variety of activities: they view the local landscape from atop a hill, hold and closely study an artifact, show a local tribal person some wonder of Western technology, such as a photograph, mirror or the camera itself, or interact with a native, in conversation, work or play.
These pictures form a fascinating set as they represent more explicitly and directly than do the others the kinds of inter-cultural relations it is thought or hoped obtain between the West and its global neighbours.
The effects of this type of photograph on readers are potentially important and complex, both in representing and teaching the National Geographic audience about that relationship and in perhaps allowing for a kind of identification with the Westerner in the photo and through that allowing for more intensive interaction with, or imaginary participation in the photo.
The pictures of westerners can serve a validating function by proving that the author was there. The reader can be convinced that the account is a first hand one, brought from the field rather then from the archives.
In her analysis of the role of the gaze in the cinema, Mulvey (1985) argues that it takes three forms - the camera, the audience and the characters, the first two forms have to be obscured or invisible.
If the viewer becomes aware of his or her own eye or that of the camera they will develop a distancing awareness rather than an unconscious involvement.
As more and more people travelled to exotic locales of the NG articles, staff saw that the picture of the intrepid traveller no longer look intrepid and so had less interest.
Whether or not Westerners appear in the picture, we 'are' there, but in pictures that include a Westerner, we may see ourselves being viewed by the other, and we become conscious of ourselves and relationships. The act of seeing the self being seen is antithetical to the voyeurism which many art critics have identified as intrinsic to most photography and film
THE REFRACTED GAZE OF THE OTHER
(To see themselves as others see them )
In a small number of NG issues, a native is shown with a camera or mirror. These are both tools of self-reflection. Each creates a double of the self, a second figure who can be examined more closely than the original — a double that can also be alienated from the self, taken away, as a photograph can be, to another place. For many Americans, self knowledge is a central life goal. There is a childish naivety when a native gets to see his reflection.
There have been changes, where the Indians may have stood unwillingly for photographs they are now charging 80 cents a person as they pose. It depicts the act of looking at unwilling subjects, suggesting two things. The first, voyeurism of the photograph of the exotic. The camera gaze is doubled in this picture, not the native subject as in the photos above where the camera enters the frame in some explicit sense, and this doubling underlines that western gaze.
Success in avoiding boredom is key to retaining readers interest and memberships for National Geographic. The photographer is always trying to colonise new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects–to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. Thus, images are constructed rather than found in some cases.
"The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthro-
pologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic
doings and strange gear. The photographer is always trying to
colonize new experiences, to find new ways to look at familiar
subjects—to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other" (Sontag 1977:42)
subjects—to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other" (Sontag 1977:42)
THE ACADEMIC SPECTATOR
This gaze is simply a sub-type of the readers gaze. We read a National Geographic magazine with a sense of astonishment and wonder, both as children and, in a way that is different only some of the time as adults.
We aim to make pictures tell a different story than they were originally meant to tell, one about their makers and readers, rather than their subjects.
This seventh kind of looking is guided by the idea that an alternative gaze is possible, one which is less dominating, more orientating toward seeing how a scene and its viewer might be changed than toward its imagined essential, unchanging and unsatisfactory form.
As we are invited to dream in the photograph, we are also invited to forget and be lost in it.
Our reading theory has also tutored our gaze at the photographs in distinctive ways, told us how to understand the techniques by which they work. We are captured by the temptation to view the photographs as more real than the world or at least a comfy substitute for it.
Through attention to the dynamic nature of these intersecting gazes, the photograph becomes less vulnerable to the change or illusion that it masks or stuffs and mounts the world, freezes the life out of a scene. While the gaze of the subject of the photograph might be fairly lost in the heavy criss crossing traffic of the often more privileged producers and consumers gazes, very contemporary stories of contestable power are told there nonetheless.
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