The Perils of Reading National Geographic

Abstract

For the past century, millions of Americans have glimpsed the farthest reaches of the earth through the eyes of National Geographic. Although popular since the turn of the century, the magazine's subscription base skyrocketed after World War Il, reaching 10 million by the 1980s, figure that does not begin to include those who skimmed the magazine in dentists' offices and beauty salons. The longstanding quest to fascinate its readers led the magazine's editors to respond to popular tastes as well as political realities, making the magazine an important, though relatively unrecognized, source of American cultural history. In Reading National Geographic, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, trained respectively in anthropology and sociology, attempt to unpack the cultural meanings of the magazine's photography during the Cold War. Ultimately, however, the history of the National Geographic Society and its monthly is more complicated than they allow. The authors confess both personal and political reasons for their interest in National Geographic. Both have rich childhood memories from the early 1960s of poring over the magazine's seductive representations of the third world (p. xi). Coming of age during the Vietnam War, the authors learned the power of photography not just to please, but to shock, educate, and motivate political change. To Lutz and Collins, the war highlighted the growing importance of the photograph in American society, which today constitutes a central feature of contemporary life (p. 4). The rise of images over print, they argue, was one of two crucial cultural shifts affecting National Geographic in the postwar era, one that transformed the medium of recording history and produced the genre of photojournalism that the magazine mastered so well. This new power of the visual, coupled with the publication's massive circulation figures, gave it exceptional influence over American perceptions of the world. But, as the authors rightly point out, any form of cultural production is itself result of historical conditions, and therefore they carefully examine the