By Nell Boyce

In the 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, one scene shows an American newspaper reporter eagerly snapping photos of men looting a sabotaged train. One of the looters, Chief Auda abu Tayi of the Howeitat clan, suddenly notices the camera and snatches it. "Am I in this?" he asks, before smashing it open. To the dismayed reporter, Lawrence explains, "He thinks these things will steal his virtue. He thinks you're a kind of thief."

As soon as colonizers and explorers began taking cameras into distant lands, stories began circulating about how indigenous peoples saw them as tools for black magic. "Ignorant natives instinctively object to being photographed," wrote pioneer anthropologist and Swiss missionary Henri-Alexandre Junod at the turn of the century, betraying the casual racism of the period. People in Africa told him that "white people want to steal us and take us with them, far away into lands which we do not know, and we shall remain incomplete beings."

The "ignorant natives" may have had a point. When photography first became available, scientists welcomed it as a more objective way of recording faraway societies than early travelers' exaggerated accounts. But in some ways, anthropological photographs reveal more about the culture that holds the camera than the one that stares back. Up into the 1950s and 1960s, many ethnographers sought "pure" pictures of "primitive" cultures, routinely deleting modern accoutrements such as clocks and Western dress. They paid men and women to re-enact rituals or to pose as members of war or hunting parties, often with little regard for veracity. Edward Curtis, the legendary photographer of North American Indians, for example, got one Makah man to pose as a whaler with a spear in 1915–even though the Makah had not hunted whales in a generation.

These photographs reinforced widely accepted stereotypes that indigenous cultures were isolated, primitive, and unchanging. "I don't believe anyone questioned it, any more than we question the photos in National Geographic," says Neal Sobania of Hope College in Holland, Mich., who has studied photographs of the Masai and Zulu in Africa, which he says have remained focused on the "noble savage" stereotype for decades, rather than showing Masai kids going to school in bluejeans, for example.

National Geographic magazine's photographs have taught millions of Americans about other cultures. As Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins point out in their 1993 book Reading National Geographic, the magazine since its founding in 1888 has kept a tradition of presenting beautiful photos that don't challenge white, middle-class American conventions. While dark-skinned women can be shown without tops, for example, white women's breasts are taboo. Photos that could unsettle or disturb, such as areas of the world torn asunder by war or famine, are discarded in favor of those that reassure, to conform with the society's stated pledge to present only "kindly" visions of foreign societies. The result, Lutz and Collins say, is the depiction of "an idealized and exotic world relatively free of pain or class conflict."

Gil Grosvenor, chairman of the board of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., admits that in the past the magazine had a habit of "looking at cultures somewhat through rose-colored glasses." But that's just not true today, he says. "It hasn't been true for 50 years. For the last-half century, I'll stand by what we've done." He says that editors are constantly vigilant about biases that might creep in and work as hard as possible to accurately portray other cultures. "It's not an easy path to follow. I think that we go to greater lengths to prevent errors than almost any magazine."

Lutz actually likes National Geographic a lot. She read the magazine as a child, and its lush imagery influenced her eventual choice of anthropology as a career. She just thinks that as people look at the photographs of other cultures, they should be alert to the choice of composition and images. "It's a complicated relationship between people on both sides of the viewfinder," notes Lutz. "You have to imagine what people in another culture might have produced."