that decisive first instance in Hegel's allegory when the master first looks upon the slave).

[T]here is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph is to violate [those photographed], by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. (14)

According to this logic, the photographer is always already (if unknowingly) the predator, the photographed helpless, hapless, powerless prey, tattooed with a bull's-eye. Sontag thus sees photography as a particularly dense transfer point of power/knowledge and identity formation; but clearly, she affords little room for agency or mobility, given the lopsidedness and the abstract nature of the relationship she posits between photographer and photographed.

Lutz and Collins argue that photographs peppering the pages of National Geographic "call up and then reinforce or challenge shared understandings of cultural difference" (2). Like Sontag, Lutz and Collins locate their discussion

   
squarely in the Hegelian dialectic--specifically at the interchange of identity, looking, power and knowledge:1

The National Geographic Society . . . positioned itself as a key actor in presenting "primitive" peoples for western perusal . . . . National Geographic reinforced America's vision of its newly ascendant place in the world by showing "how far we've come." While its photographs detailed, and occasionally lingered on, one or another aspect of native life, its underlying story was always the evolutionary chronicle, with its contrastive work, its encoding of hierarchy and power relations, and its projections of an inevitable outcome. (19)

Their conclusion is rather unsurprising, given that this dialectic would seem to presuppose a retrograde photographic practice or, in other words, a practice constantly (re)producing an overdetermined Western teleology (the colonizer-colonized alterity) based on Enlightenment evolutionary narratives. Lutz and

 
p h o t o g r a p h y / c i n e m a

 
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