The Confident Gaze

                In Shekar Deshpande’s article “The Confident Gaze” he explains how because the Western world cannot handle the actuality of third world countries, magazines like National Geographic somewhat “sanitize” their photographs. Deshpande uses a National Geographic magazine that was published in 1997 on India’s 50^th year of independence. The cover of the magazine is the picture of a young boy painted in red paint staring curiously and intensely into the camera. He suggests that “[t]he “innocent” attractiveness of the photography of National Geographic, its ambiguous representation of the knower and the known as the most “natural” and inevitable parts of our world are what have made for the success of the magazine (par. 7). In other words National Geographic has caught on that in order to catch the Western viewer’s attention they need to make aesthetic situations out of the uncomfortable and different elements of other cultures. With National Geographic photographers often are taking images out of their original context in order to make the world a happy place for the Western eye. This gives the magazine the power to transform the images that no one wants to see into images that are considered beautiful representations. As Deshpande puts it, “[i]t 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” (par.  12). National Geographic in a way poses its pictures to be both pleasurable to view and still have the ability to tell the story of the “other” world.