"The Confident Gaze" Shekhar Deshpande

For years now many people have been reading the National Geographic magazines getting all the vital information on other countries and animals. It is currently the 3rd best subscribing magazine, claims Shekhar Deshpande in his essay on “The Confident Gaze”(par 2). In his essay he explains how National Geographic magazine is a photographic magazine (par 14). When I was younger I use to just flip through the pages and stare at the pictures in the magazine, it always interested me, seeing all of the suffering of other people while I on the hand was no where near suffering. The pictures just made me see how lucky I was. According to Deshpande “Human suffering becomes worth a good image,” he is trying to get the point across that photographers know what we want to see and what we want to see is others suffering to make us feel better about ourselves (par 10). We want to see the suffering of others he explains. National Geographic editors focus their points around the "Western Eye". The pictures in the magazine are all set up, for what we want to see not the natural environment itself. Deshpande states "... 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."(par 13). Basically he is saying that the photos are set up to the way we, we being the "Western observer", want to see them to draw our attention towards the subject at matter. I found that to be a very interesting quote because I have never realized how set up the photos in the magazine are.