Deshpande Summary

Shekhar Deshpandes article “The Confident Gaze,” focuses mainly on the National Geographic magazine and the incredible lengths its photographers go through to capture the right kind of image they desire. They want these photos to capture the attention of westerners that seem to have very low interest in the truth about the people and places surrounding them. Deshpande claims “From worn out bricks to the tobacco stains on teeth, the photographs are rich in their content, but entirely dishonest in their relationship to the environment or the context. It is as if that world needs to be posed in the appropriate way to the Western observer, he could not see it in its bare essentialities.” The first part of this Deshpande is saying that the photos taken by these people seem to be very rich in culture and other areas but what they are portraying is not real, it’s merely a cover or a trap to get the attention of people. The second part of this is that in a way photographers only do this because many are so absorbed in their own minor problems or the surrounding and areas in which they reside that there appears to be nothing else wrong in the world that’s to take notice. Deshpande also claims that “Human suffering becomes worth a good image.” The point being made is that photographers will go to any extent to show the kind of pain, happiness or emotion that they are looking for. I believe there’s really two ways you could look at this, it’s either westerners fault or the photographers fault, but really they only do this to capture the attention of westerners. Although it may sound demeaning, it’s just as Robert Scholes claims in his text “On Reading Video Text”- “This is, of course how America works.”