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The National Geographic magazine is of tremendous po- done by Westerners who are often framed together with
tential cultural importance. Its photographs have voraciously locals in the picture, (6) the gaze returned or refracted
focused on Third World scenes, its over 10 million subscriber by the mirrors or cameras that are shown, in a surprising
households make it as popular a source of images as any in number of photographs, in local hands, and (7) our own,
American mass mediated culture, and its lavish production academic gaze.
capabilities and cultural legitimacy as a scientific institution
make it an ideological practice that powerfully relates to the The gaze and its significance
history and structure of the society in which it has developed.
As part of a larger project to consider the magazine's photo- The photograph and the non-Western person share two
graphs as cultural artifacts from a changing 20th century fundamental attributes in the culturally tutored experience of
American scene, we have been struck by the story told in the most Americans; they are objects at which we look. The pho-
photos via a variety of looks and looking relations. Some of the tograph has this quality because it is usually intended as a thing
issues raised in this article are particular to this specific genre of either beautiful attraction or documentary interest and sur-
of photography while many others illuminate photographic veillance. Non-Westerners draw a look (rather than inattention
interpretation more generally.1 or unremarkable and relatively inattentive interaction) to the
The National Geographic photograph of the non-West- extent that their difference or foreignness from the self defines
erner' can be seen not simply as a captured view of the other, but them as notable yet distant. A look is necessary to cross the span
as a dynamic site at which many gazes or viewpoints intersect. created by the perception of difference (a perception which
This intersection creates a complex and multi-dimensional initially, of course, also involves looking). When people from
object; it allows viewers of the photo to negotiate a number of outside the Western world are photographed, an accentuation of
different identities both for themselves and for those pictured; the importance of the look therefore occurs.2
and it is one route by which the photograph threatens to break A numberof different traditions of analysis have dealt with
frame and reveal its social context. We aim here to explore the "the gaze," looking or spectating as they occur in photography
significance of "gaze" for intercultural relations in the photo- and art. The interethnic looking that gets done in National
graph, and to present a typology of seven kinds of gaze that can Geographic photos can be conceptualized by drawing on a
be found in the photograph and its social context. These include number of the insights of these analyses. Many of them
(1) the photographer's gaze (the actual look through the have tended to see the gaze as "an act of mastery"
viewfinder), (2) the institutional, magazine gaze (evident in (Williams 1987) or control. Feminist film theory, for
cropping, picture choice, captioning, etc.), (3) the readers' gaze, example, beginning with the influential essay by
(4) the non-Western subjects' gaze, (5) the explicit looking Laura Mulvey entitled, "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,"
Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins are Associate Professors of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
Catherine Lutz1 publications include Unnatural Emotions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Language and the
Politics of Emotion (ed. with Lila Abu-Lughod; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Jane Collins1 include
Unseasonal Migrations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) and WorkWithout Wages (ed. with Martha Gimenez, Albany:
SUNY Press, 1990).