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  that decisive first instance in Hegel's allegory when the master first looks upon the slave).
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
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 | |
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  p h o t o g r a p h y / c i n e m a |
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