National Geographic

National Geographic: Reality or Myth?

The use of photography in National Geographic magazine is an attempt

to document what is happening around the world. A photographers task is to study

culture and then translate their observations through visual imagery. Viewers must

transcend their representational evidence of actual, specific human beings

and their behaviours; the goal is to come to an understanding of differing cultural

ways. It is a practice, which like ethnography itself, adds to our existing knowledge

of the many differing cultures of our world. As human beings, we do not know

what it is to be another human being, nor do we know a culture as we know our

own. We have gained understanding of other cultures through the media, such as

those articles and photographs found in National Geographic. The pictorial images

capture the reader's attention, inviting them to imagine how they might feel in the setting

depicted (Lutz, Collins, page 3). What do the photographs signify? Are they true

reflections of each culture? Does the magazine idealize and render exotic third-world

peoples, with a tendency to downplay or erase evidence of poverty and violence?