Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins in the article, "The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic" speak about photography as a crossroads of gazes and a scenario by which gazes manipulate and have power over other gazes. The view by National Geographic that allows for many cultural actions to take place as views are created about "the other". On this topic of the photos of the magazine they state that it "threatens to break frame and reveal its social context.
When westerner is in fact looking at the non westerner, cultural approaches are made. A feminist and psychoanalytic critique is that the act of looking is an active/male/modern/scientific action while the one being looked at(the nonwesterner) is the subject/female/passive/emotive receiver.
The science or art or photography is a sacred cultural posistion for the westerner. These are the disciplinary locations that give knowledge of how to analyze culture with a certain narrative key. This makes the western looking a patriarchial view.
For this reason, our sacred sets of knowledge are untouched and used as devices to analyze and peer into "the other" even if the subject is sacred or significant to their culture. Our science of distinguishing the sacred from the profane of every culture is legitimized and takes precedence over how culture (its definitions, views, made legitimized, made illicit) is viewed by its people.
This is not unlike the female (the other/feminine) who walks in nyc and is met by gazes behind her. The female is made conscious of the other view (westerner's view/active.)
and 1.) is powerful because she can look back and disrupt their view (of scanning her) and their fun/authority
2.) is powerless because to look back would break the dialogue formed by the men. The self accourding to Foucault is cultural and mostly those who oversee power over ourselves are ourselves. The female not wanting any informal social sanction against her keeps walking. (She internalizes the active/male view which places restrictions on how she acts-She becomes self-conscientious.)
Lacan describes the gaze as a way to look at "the other" the other is also constitutive of a separate object (body of knowledge) that the gazer uses in approach when looking. This is often altering because the person gazing is not met with his own expectations of what he thinks and wants to see from the gazes in the picture.
National Geographic is said to break fram and reveal social context. The powerful viewer who has an academic background and a history of a liscense to look shifts in his or her seat. The new distinctions that can be made are powerful for the "masculine/western" viwer for the picture becomes more of an academic object to be examined or arise inteterest.
However, in this entire context, is the need for the westerner/exerter/academic viewer to see and locate the "viewed" as not entirely an object for understanding but a subject and a subject of structural forces that we all endure. In the photos, the westerner searches for facial expressions like his own so that he can feel like the exhibited reactions from stressors, feelings, interpretations all arise in the sameway elsewhere. Westerners and non-westerners alike are subject to the same driving forces of reality and are workable objects within reality so we can understand reality, so that we can obey its rules, so that it can inhibit us. Or this is what the westerner wants to believe.
It is either an action by National Geographic or the Western lens or anthropology to understand cultures as the same and as different.
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