National Geographic Photo Contest 2012

Lutz and Collins in their book Reading National Geographic argue that National Geographic is intimately tied to the American establishment and "cultivates ties to government officials and corporate interests". Rothenberg suggests that National Geographic, as a part of mainstream popular culture, has historically helped to articulate a particularly American identity in opposition to "both old Europe and primitive non-Western regions... an identity of civic and technological superiority but yet, a distinctly benign and friendly identity".
The book Reading National Geographic notes how photos are sometimes electronically manipulated. In one photo of bare-breasted Polynesian women, the skin color was darkened. Women with light skin have not appeared topless in the magazine. The book also documents how NG photographers have encouraged their subjects to change costumes when their clothing was seen as "too drab" for the magazine. Summarizing an analysis of NG photographs from 1950 to 1986, the authors argue the following themes: "The people of the third and fourth worlds are portrayed as exotic; they are idealized; they are naturalized and taken out of all but a single historical narrative; and they are sexualized. Several of these themes wax and wane in importance through the postwar period, but none is ever absent."