Politics of Representation in National Geographic

(original source here)

National Geographic is a magazine held in higher esteem than most; yet because it is mass-produced for a middle-class readership, the journal is largely ignored by academia. As both a product of mass culture and a reputable information source, National Geographic magazine occupies a strange “middlebrow” cultural niche. Its spectacular photography acts as a lens to the world and gives us access to sights that everyday Americans would not normally see, but it is important to remember that these images are not a direct reflection of the people and regions they represent. The politics of representation in these images of the wider world often goes unnoticed, and readers can easily develop conceptions of regions without considering the mass culture aspect of the image.

This photo, “Tuareg Celebration,” was taken by Brent Stirton and was National Geographic’s Photo of the Day on August 26, 2011. It depicts a group of Berber nomadic pastoralists called the Tuareg. From a purely artistic standpoint, the photo was likely chosen for its rich colors and texture, interesting composition from its angle, and evocation of a sense of beauty. With deeper reading, though, “Tuareg Celebration” is an example of how an image in National Geographic can exoticize the people it represents using indexical dress and ritual, thus forming raced, classed and gendered bodies all at once. The photo subjects are in the midst of a birth celebration, wearing traditional clothes, with the women sitting and the men mounted on camels. Even the photo’s caption draws attention to the gender difference that exists in Tuareg traditional dress:

“Their hands stained by the indigo dye in their new clothes, Tuareg women celebrate a birth. Tuareg females rarely cover their faces, while men traditionally wear turbans that conceal all but their eyes.”

While these components of the picture add to its “interestingness,” they also distance the non-West from the West. According to Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins in their book Reading National Geographic, “[e]xotic dress alone often stands for an entire alien life-style, locale, or mindset” (p. 92). Similarly, “[t]he non-Westerner comes to be portrayed as a ritual performer, embedded (perhaps some would read encrusted) in tradition and living in a sacred (some would say superstitious) world” (p. 90). So, the photograph’s exoticism of Tuareg culture, marked by depicting ritual and indexical dress, entraps the culture in a world separate from that of the reader. It is this separation that creates the raced and classed, and by noting the differences in clothing for men and women, gendered bodies.

In conclusion, by selecting eye-catching photos for mass distribution, National Geographic produces images that put the culture of the portrayed region in a separate light from that of the magazine’s audience.