The Changing Faces of Canada: Images of Canada in National Geographic

Abstract

National Geographic's Canada is a place we are all familiar with. Whether through a subscription of our own, or issues found in a school library, or perhaps flipping through magazine in a doctor's waiting room, most of us have seen Canada in its pages. And many amongst us would confess a guilty secret: that when we read National Geographic, we really only look at pictures. This essay takes such reading as its subject. Rather than dismissing magazine because it is known primarily for its photographic content, this essay takes a serious look at pictorial representation of Canada in National Geographic. (1) It examines how this influential magazine portrayed Canada in 1960s--the decade of Canada's centenary--and compares this image to that of past decade--the 1990s. By seeking to freeze picture of Canada in two separate decades, this method allows for identification and quantification of distinct themes. And this, in turn, raises all-important question of cultural as sumptions of National Geographic's editors, as they made decisions about which photographs best conveyed Canada's distinct identity. At a deeper level, this essay is about American perceptions of Canada, and how these perceptions have changed in second half of twentieth century. Recent developments in history of popular culture indicate that National Geographic, precisely because of its enormous popularity, is perhaps one of most important sources of information on Canada available to American public. Because of National Geographic Society's stature as a research institution, it is easy to assume that Society's magazine somehow presents an accurate, scientific portrayal of America's giant neighbor to north. Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, in Reading National Geographic, demonstrated how--through editorial policy, choice of themes, use of color, and photo composition--the editors have presented a certain culturally constructed view of third world countries. The challenge, they argue, has been for National Geographic to make a distant culture seem at once strange and familiar to American audiences. But how has this formidable institution treated Canada? Canada, for most part, is a country that Americans don't think about a lot. When they do, th ey tend to think of it as America's back yard--as a kind of bigger, emptier, more natural and more polite version of United States, peopled by lumberjacks, Mounties, ballerinas, hockey players and smiling Inuit. And Canada, a large, North American country whose inhabitants are mainly of European descent, is like United States in many ways. So challenge for National Geographic has been to convince Americans of Canada's unique, i.e. non-American identity. (2) Lutz and Collins argue that editors of National Geographic were concerned that third world societies come across as different, but not so exotic as to be too different. They describe many ways in which editorial policy determined that images of the other be just sufficiently and aesthetically pleasing, to appeal to American audiences, and to project the ideal of happy life. (3) ft is main contention of this paper that when it came to characterizing Canadian society, editors faced opposite challenge: concern that Canadian society might come across as too similar to United States. Theirs, then, was not an attempt to familiarize exotic, but an attempt to exoticize familiar. (4) Ironically, same strategies that Lutz and Collins identified that served to familiarize exotic could also serve to exoticize familiar. This essay will examine how National Geographic exoticized Canada in 1 960s, and compare this to how it exoticized Canada in th e 1990s. In doing so, we shall reveal how editors' assumptions about Canada's evolving identity have changed in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. …