it's a cool pic, but i've been wondering why this picture has bothered me. and then i remembered talking about nat geo pictures in a photography unit in college. it's been awhile but the gist was that national geographic "exotic-fies" (not a real word but whatevs) photos of non-western peoples and cultures allowing our Western narrative to relegate them to this otherness and 3rd world level of development, which isn't always the case. and that's why i feel like at some level nat geo isn't furthering the discussion about the world but confirming our stereotyped ideas we had in the first place. and with nat geo being as popular as it is, (how many families keep issues lined on a bookshelf? that was always weird to me.) it has huge influence on the way we as a society think about other people and it can continue to dominate the conversation for generations.
i get that this landscape doesn't really fit the bill of othering people, but it still seems so stylized and contains that unreal nat geo quality that i will never really like.
good point. what bothered me about it as I stared at it more (it was my desktop background that day) was that the stars and the landform make an X in the middle. which seems dumb and contrived. it is pretty, but i wish it weren't so symmetrical or something.
ps. it was taken in Utah
but still. pics of Oceania and Latin America come up every week and I wonder how the photo's subjects feel, or if they even realize that their faces are showing up on the igoogle page of little ol' me in Raleigh North Carolina, who's never even been without air-conditioning for more than a few weeks.
2 comments:
it's a cool pic, but i've been wondering why this picture has bothered me. and then i remembered talking about nat geo pictures in a photography unit in college. it's been awhile but the gist was that national geographic "exotic-fies" (not a real word but whatevs) photos of non-western peoples and cultures allowing our Western narrative to relegate them to this otherness and 3rd world level of development, which isn't always the case. and that's why i feel like at some level nat geo isn't furthering the discussion about the world but confirming our stereotyped ideas we had in the first place. and with nat geo being as popular as it is, (how many families keep issues lined on a bookshelf? that was always weird to me.) it has huge influence on the way we as a society think about other people and it can continue to dominate the conversation for generations.
i get that this landscape doesn't really fit the bill of othering people, but it still seems so stylized and contains that unreal nat geo quality that i will never really like.
good point. what bothered me about it as I stared at it more (it was my desktop background that day) was that the stars and the landform make an X in the middle. which seems dumb and contrived. it is pretty, but i wish it weren't so symmetrical or something.
ps. it was taken in Utah
but still. pics of Oceania and Latin America come up every week and I wonder how the photo's subjects feel, or if they even realize that their faces are showing up on the igoogle page of little ol' me in Raleigh North Carolina, who's never even been without air-conditioning for more than a few weeks.
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