15.4 Photography, Representation, and Memory

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Define the gaze and list important features of this concept.
• Give an example of the imperial gaze in popular photographic media.
• Describe the use of photography in colonial contexts.
• Discuss local techniques of self-representation through popular photography.

In addition to creating their own visual media, visual anthropologists conduct research on how the people they study produce visual media to represent themselves as well as cultural others.

Have you ever browsed through a copy of the magazine National Geographic? In the latter half of the 20th century, many American schools and middle-class households subscribed to this magazine as an educational resource for school-age children. Founded in 1888, the magazine has developed a reputation for its colorfully illustrated coverage of science, geography, history, and world cultures. Now owned in part by the Walt Disney Company, the magazine is published in 40 languages and has a global circulation of over six million.

What strikes many young people about National Geographic is not so much the informative textual content but rather the alluring images of non-Western peoples. Cultural anthropologist Catherine Lutz and sociologist Jane Collins (1993) set out to study how National Geographic depicted people in contexts outside the United States and western Europe. In their holistic approach, they conducted research into the production process at National Geographic, then subjected the photographs to rigorous content analysis, and finally interviewed people about how they made sense of the images.

Based on analysis of 600 National Geographic photos depicting non-Western peoples from 1950 to 1986, Lutz and Collins noted that the magazine portrayed non-Western peoples as exotic, idealized, and close to nature. Very rarely did photographs in the magazine reveal any traces of the complex colonial and postcolonial histories of their subjects or their entanglements in national and global processes. Instead, National Geographic photographs tended to depict happy people immersed in purely traditional lifeways. Without historical or political context, the apparent difference between “us” (the viewer) and “them” (the people depicted in the photographs) would seem to be developmental or evolutionary. In other words, the people depicted in the images were made to seem simpler or more backward than those viewing the images. Perhaps, the images seem to suggest, “they” have not yet achieved modernity. While emphasizing a theme of common humanity, the magazine nonetheless reproduced primitivist and orientalist stereotypes about non-Western peoples while obscuring the historical and political processes that have shaped their equally complex lifeways.