It’s never easy to summarize one hundred years. For National Geographic, a magazine translated into 20 languages and read by over 40 million yearly, this task involved paring down the 10.5 million published and unpublished images in the society’s archive-a priceless record of world history-into 250 images.
Through the Lens: National Geographic’s Greatest Photographs, a seven-pound hardcover book published in October, is not simply a greatest hits of the best loved images. It is a thorough survey of those images that have defined the magazine and captured the quintessential National Geographic style.
The National Museum of Natural History is currently displaying a small selection of those 250 images. The exhibit is dominated by vivid colors and exotic locales. It avoids the black and white photographs from the early era of the publication and focuses on the work of modern photojournalists.
Unlike the book, the exhibit is presented simply and without much accompanying text. It takes images from the book’s six sections (Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the Americas, Isles and the Universe), and stresses candid portraits of individuals over fantastic landscapes.
The persistence of traditions and customs and the role of women in society are reoccurring themes in the National Geographic body of work. As expected, dramatic, rigorously composed natural shots and depictions of wildlife compose, for the most part, the remainder of the exhibit.
Jodi Cobb’s “Geisha in Japan” (1995), which was selected as the cover image for the book, captures a porcelain-white geisha with vibrant red lips, her eyes covered by a wide-brimmed, beige hat—-a representation of cultural peculiarities in an increasingly homogenous, global community.
A hunter in Pakistan, fully submerged in the Indus River, wears as a decoy a mask made from a white duck. One almost wonders what sort of game a duck decoy would possibly help him hunt; it would seem that waiting for any big game disguised as a duck would make him more of a target. A bit of an optical illusion, this photograph demands a second and a third look.
In one of Joel Sartore’s photos, an Alaskan gray wolf defends a fresh kill, hovering menacingly with his fangs bared over a sea of blood red flesh. Its ferocity and raw power is a well-chosen contrast to Flip Nicklin’s familiar image of a majestic humpback whale breaking the ocean surface and scattering startled seabirds.
An enormous blow up of Annie Griffiths Belt’s “Sydney Harbor During New Year’s” (2000) drew an awestruck crowd. However, as arresting as some of the pictures were, I found myself walking quickly through this exhibit, spending no more than half a minute on each, and wishing there was background information accompanying the images. Sometimes pictures can use a few thousand words.
Nevertheless, “Through the Lens” asserts, if nothing else, that National Geographic has traversed the world, bearing witness, oftentimes when no one else could, and capturing life at its most candid. That is certainly an accomplishment worth celebrating and admiring.
Through The Lens will be at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History through May 1. NMNH is located at 10th St. and Constitution Ave., N.W.
