American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination

6. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S ROMANCE IN RUINS: From the Catastrophic Sublime to Camp

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S ROMANCE IN RUINS From the Catastrophic Sublime to Camp National Geographic’s evolution from scientific journal to popular icon was in large measure a result of the romantic stereotypes it perpetuated . But iconic status had its downside. If in 1896 the magazine’s photographs of the exotic and little-known parts of the world made National Geographic a novelty, by the late 1920s the magazine’s conventions seemed predictable, clichéd. From exotic images of the Far East to local-color regionalism, National Geographic’s formula had grown downright tiresome for some American readers. With “articles on Chickens, very familiar States, wild flowers, and etc., it certainly is losing its interest,” wrote a reader. “Why not let the poultry journals handle this subject?” protested another. A third agreed that National Geographic had “gone down with the chickens.”1 If these readers were bored by local color, others were equally weary of foreign spectacle. “Too much Asiatic stuff entirely,” sniffed one reader. “We are surfeited with it.” Then followed an eloquent tirade on just how fatigued this member had grown with its more exotic fare: We are fed-up with Holy City pictures, with camels, with the great unwashed swarms of peoples, their turbans, their market-places, their squatting in the sunshine to have their pictures taken, their temples, their mosques and shrines and homes and clothes and pies and vehicles. We are tired of Chinamen and Mongols and Hindu snakecharmers and drear, Biblical landscapes that give no ray of hope to one who likes a dollar limit game once in a while. In fact we are weary of everything Asiatic, for a time at least; the great unwashed have 6 National Geographic’s Romance in Ruins ■ 173 lost their appeal. Turn ’em over to the Salvation Army and the Near East Relief and you give us another Cruise of the Dream Ship, or the Big Trees of California, or another article like the recent one about Maryland, or fishing off Catalina Island; anything modern with pretty pictures where we do not have to think of all the dirt and smells that must accompany these Asiatic and wonder how in Sam Hill we would ever get a bath if we were foolish enough to go a-visiting there. No more Mount of Olives, please, and no more Jerusalem, or Algeria, or Egypt, or China. Let the desert sands blow where they listeth and the camel graze, if he can find anything, but Rabbi, sheik and priest we have seen aplenty and want to forget—in their native habitat anyway.2 The pleasure this reader takes in caricaturing the magazine’s clichéd portraits of the Orient is in keeping with the many parodies of National Geographic then entering the mainstream media. Popular media satirized what one reader termed its “chamber of commerce style” of focusing on America’s homelier attributes and pastimes—including reading National Geographic—on the one hand, and exotic spectacle on the other, what I term the “catastrophic sublime,” an epic narrative that dramatizes the heroic conquest of nature and the indigenous groups who dwell within it.3 While National Geographic readers watched their magazine devolve into self-parody, popular appropriations of its trademark aesthetics acknowledged the iconic status the magazine had achieved. As Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites have shown, popular appropriation of iconic images is the most tangible sign of their iconicity. Adaptations of iconic images, like the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, they observe, are “strategic improvisations” that both reflect social norms and perform “satiric mimicry ” to challenge its conventions.4 Humorous adaptations of an iconic image in political cartoons and other popular media comment critically on the present historical moment’s failure to fulfill the civic and cultural ideals represented in the original image. Such images become expressive of a broad “range of attitudes” toward national interests, particular social groups, and ideas circulating in public discourse more generally.5 Certainly, National Geographic’s iconic place in the popular imagination derived from its historic association with photographs of the exotic thought to express its readers’ cosmopolitanism and highbrow aspirations . Cartoon spoofs of National Geographic’s trademark motifs similarly exhibit public disenchantment with its readership’s pretensions as well as its outdated portrayals of so-called “primitive” cultures. In this 174 ■ American Iconographic spirit, National Geographic spoofs take spectators behind the scenes and, winking at its audience, show what is...