Exercise - The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes - Catherine Lutz

Read the article which can be found..here..


The National Geographic Magazine is of tremendous potential cultural importance.  Its photographs have voraciously focused on the third world scenes. Its an idealogical practice that powerfully relates to the history and structure of the society in which it has developed.

Some of the issues raised are particular to this specific genre of photography while many others illuminate photographic interpretation more generally.

National Geographic photographs of the non westerner can be seen not simply as captured view of the other but a dynamic site at which gazes or view points intersect.  This intersection creates a complex and multi dimensional object.  It allows viewers to negotiate a number of different identities both for themselves and those pictured.

The article is exploring the significance of the gaze, and the seven kinds of Gaze that can be found in the photograph.  The seven are...

1. The Photographers Gaze
2. The institutional Gaze, magazine gaze.
3. The Readers Gaze.
4. The Non - Westerners Gaze.
5. The Explicit looking done by westerners.
6. The Gaze returned or refracted.
7. Our own academic gaze.

The Gaze and its significance.
The photograph and the non western person share two attributes, they are objects at which we look. The photograph has this quality because its usually for beautiful attraction or documentary interest. The look is necessary to cross the span created by perception.  Some see the gaze as an act of mastery or control. The gaze can be seen by some as masculine.  John Berger points out gender ideologies and envisages men as active doers and women as passive presence.  Men by what they do to others and women by their attitudes towards themselves. (men act and women appear ).
The unique vision of the female spectator is explored, and seen as multiple because it can move between identification with the object and with the spectator.

There is no single masculine spectator position for viewing the ethnic representations in the National Geographic. While the image makers at National Geographic are overwhelmingly white and male.
Lacans view of the Gaze can be helpful as a model for the potential effects of looking.  Lacan speaks of gaze as something distinct from the eye of the beholder.

What can be done in the photograph is to manipulate the gaze of the other - via such a process as photo selection - so that it allows us to see ourselves reflected in their eyes in ways in which are comfortable, familiar and pleasurable. This taming of the gaze occurs when we move and realise that the picture does not change as our gaze changes.

Foucaults analysis of the rise of surveillance in modern society is also relevant to the understanding of the gaze in photography.
The magazines gaze at the Third World operates to represent it to an American audience in ways which can shore up a western cultural identity.  The gaze is not, however, a singular or monolithic - we might say the gaze is meaningless.

Many gazes can be found in any photograph in the National Geographic - this is true whether the photo is of a landscape with no people or a single person looking straight into the camera - the gaze is not simply the looking of a photographed subject.

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS GAZE 
This is represented by the cameras eye and laves its clear mark on the structure and content of the photograph. As photographers give people and imaginary possession of a past that is unreal they also help people to take possession of place in which they are insecure. The photographers gaze and the viewers gaze overlap somewhat.  Photographers feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever remarkable they encounter.  Conventions of photography force us in ways to follow the cameras eye and see the world from its position.

THE MAGAZINE GAZE
This includes the whole institutional process by which some portion of the photographers gaze is chosen for use and emphasis.1. The editors decision, to commission articles - 2.The editors choice - selection of photographs. 3.The editors - layout and design.
The magazine gaze is the most evident and accessible to the National Geographic reader 4. The caption writer - verbal fixing of a vantage on the pictures meaning.

THE MAGAZINE READERS GAZE
The photograph is not only perceived, received, it is read. The public consumes a stock of signs, independent of what the photographer may intend. The reader is invited to dream in the idealogical space of the photograph.  This fact distinguishes the readers gaze from that of the magazine gaze and led them to investigate the former directly by asking a number of people to look at and interpret the pictures.  Anything that draws the readers attention to the fact that a camera ( rather than the readers eye alone ) has been at work - Jarring, un natural colours, off centre angles, photo retouching.
The readers gaze has a history and a future and it is structured by the mental work of inference and imagination .. is the woman smiling or smirking..  The readers gaze is structured by a large number of cultural elements or models.


There is not one readers gaze, each individual looks with a unique personal, cultural and political background or set of interests.
On the one hand, photographs allow participation in the non western scene through vicarious viewing. On the other they an always alienate the reader by first alienating the reader - first they create or require a passive viewer and second they frame much of an actual viewer would see, smell or hear.
The presumed consent of the other to be photographed can give the viewer the illusion of having some relationship with the other.  The viewer doesn't choose where he or she enters the photo, but is forced to take the route of the cameras eye.

The voyeuristic look requires and promotes distance between the reader and the subject, while the narcissistic identification promotes the illusion that the photo is a mirror.
Finally, this gaze is also structured by the context of reading.
Amongst popular magazines, the National Geographic sits near the top of a socially constructed hierarchy of magazine types.. ( ie. High Brow), as a scientific journal presenting facts about the world, as a journal with beautiful / artistic, rather than merely prosaic photos.

NON WESTERNER SUBJECT'S GAZE
The gaze of the other found in National Geographic can be classified in at least four types, he can confront the camera, look at something and someone within the picture frame, look off into the distance, or a gaze can be absent altogether.  The look into the camera in all cases must suggest the acknowledgement of the photographer and the reader. The return of the gaze does not contest the right of the viewer to look and may in fact be read as the subject's assent to being surveyed.  Facial expression is crucial - the local person looks back with a number of faces, friendly smiling, hostile glaring, vacant, curious.  The return of the look is not normally confrontational or challenging. If the other looks back and smiles at the camera, it can be read by the viewers as the subjects assent to be surveyed.

The portrait is a collaboration between subject and photographer, despite the fact that the other is still subjected to an un returnable gaze.  Virtually all the photographers at NG saw the return of the gaze as problematic and used such pictures sparingly. They almost fake intimacy, the use of direct gaze suggest a less gritty value.  Those who are actually or culturally defined as weak - women, children, people of colour, the poor, the tribal, those without technology - are more likely to face the camera.  Historically the frontal portrait has been associated with the rougher classes.  There is a trend for the urban people to look at the camera.

AN EXPLICIT WESTERN GAZE
Through the years NG has been publishing articles on the non western world.  These photographs show the westerners engaged in a variety of activities.  Interacting with a native in conversation work of play.  These pictures form a fascinating set as they represent more explicitly and directly than others the kinds of intercultural relations between the west and its global neighbours.
The pictures of westerners can serve a validating function by proving that the author was there. The reader can be convinced that the account is a first hand one, brought from the field rather then from the archives.

In her analysis of the role of the gaze in the cinema, Mulvey (1985) argues that it takes three forms - the camera, the audience and the characters, the first two forms have to be obscured or invisible.
If the viewer becomes aware of his or her own eye or that of the camera they will develop a distancing awareness rather than an unconscious involvement.

As more and more people travelled to exotic locales of the NG articles, staff saw that the picture of the intrepid traveller no longer look intrepid and so had less interest.

THE REFRACTED GAZE OF THE OTHER
(To see themselves as others see them )
In a small number of NG issues, a native is shown with a camera or mirror.  These are both tools of self reflection.  For many Americans self knowledge is a central life goal.  There is a childish naivety when a native see his reflection.

There have been changes, where the indians may have stood unwillingly for photographs they are now charging 80 cents a person as they pose.   It depicts the act of looking at unwilling subjects, suggesting two things.  The first voyeurism of the photograph of the exotic.  The camera gaze is doubled in this picture, not the native subject as in the photos above where the camera enters the frame in some explicit sense, and this doubling underlines that western gaze.

Success in avoiding boredom is key to retaining readers interest and memberships for NG.

THE ACADEMIC SPECTATOR 
This gaze is simply a sub type of the readers gaze.  We read the NG magazine with a sense of astonishment and wonder, both as children and, in a way that is different only some of the time as adults.

We aim to make pictures tell a different story than they were originally meant to tell, one about their makers and readers, rather than their subjects.
This seventh kind of looking is guided by the idea that an alternative gaze is possible, one which is less dominating, more orientating toward seeing how a scene and its viewer might be changed than toward its imagined essential, unchanging and unsatisfactory form.
As we are invited to dream in the photograph, we are also invited to forget and be lost in it.
Our reading theory has also tutored our gaze at the photographs in distinctive ways, told us how to understand the techniques by which they work.   We are captured by the temptation to view the photographs as more real than the world or at least a comfy substitute for it.

Through attention to the dynamic nature of these intersecting gazes, the photograph becomes less vulnerable to the charge or illusion that it masks or stuffs and mounts the world, freezes the life out of a scene.  While the gaze of the subject of the photograph might be fairly lost in the heavy criss crossing traffic of the often more privileged producers and consumers gazes, very contemporary stories of contestable power are told there nonetheless.