National Geographic

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National Geographic

The National Geographic Society was founded in January 1888 in Washington, D.C., to support “the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.” In October of that year, the society published the first issue of what was originally called The National Geographic Magazine, which was considered a way to fulfill the society’s educational mission. The generally bland and often technical articles that characterized the magazine’s early issues (which contained no photographs) scarcely hinted at the style that was to transform the journal into one of the most widely read magazines in the United States.

The National Geographic Magazine, issued erratically for its first eight years, became a monthly in January 1896. In this era, the magazine was edited by committee and had limited appeal, but November 1896 marked the appearance of something that would later become a hallmark of the magazine: a photograph of a bare-breasted (“native”) woman.

Frustrated by the magazine’s struggles to gain readership, the society turned to a young Gilbert H. Grosvenor (1875–1966), who joined the magazine’s staff in 1899 as its first full-time employee at the rank of assistant editor. Under Grosvenor’s leadership, the magazine’s circulation grew to more than five million by the time of his death in 1966. The keys to the popularization of the magazine were to be found partly in Grosvenor’s editorial principles, which included timelines, “absolute accuracy,” “permanent value,” an “abundance of beautiful, instructive, and artistic illustrations,” eschewing topics of a “partisan or controversial character,” and steering clear of anything “unpleasant or unduly critical” (Pauly 1979, p. 528). But most of all, it was the magazine’s visual presentation that cemented its status in American popular culture.

It was through the magazine’s famous photographs that Grosvenor achieved the goal of combining scholarship and entertainment. Public response to the images was strong, and an unprecedented eleven-page layout of photos from Tibet in 1905 helped to increase society membership from 3,400 to 11,000 by the end of the year.

National Geographic photographs were intended to present an unproblematic, unmediated view of reality, readily accessible to the average reader. In the 1930s, natural color photographs came to dominate its pages, enhancing the magazine’s realism; as a result, the photographs served as both evidence and spectacle. The color photographs boosted the magazine’s entertainment value at the same time that they reinforced the sense that it was truly delivering the world as it really was to its readers.

The assumptions about the production and dissemination of visual representations that underlie the magazine’s approach would later be criticized by scholars. Those who view the production of knowledge as fundamentally shaped by power relations have argued that National Geographic ’s articles reinforce a sense of Western superiority through the juxtaposition of “backward,” timeless, native cultures with a more “advanced,” progressive Western civilization. The photos and text do not simply and unproblematically convey geographic information; rather, they create geographic knowledge according to an identifiable set of cultural norms. Likewise, the regular appearance of bare-breasted “native” women in the magazine encourages a masculinized sense of access and control to “exotic” cultures that depends on and reproduces unequal power relations between those being represented and those consuming the representations.

Such criticisms have not diminished National Geographic ’s global appeal; in addition to its millions of readers in the United States, the society publishes international editions in about two dozen languages. Well into its second century of publication, the magazine is still a cultural force with few, if any, peers.