ABSTRACT
In August 1995, National Geographic inaugurated its “Flashback” feature, a backof-the-book item singling out a notable photograph from the National Geographic Society collection. Ninety years earlier, Gilbert H. Grosvenor had gambled on publishing copious photographs of Lhasa and the Philippines, and won, netting positive attention for the magazine and a bigger membership for the Society, and steering the magazine toward more photography. By 1995, the Geographic’s archives were filled with hundreds of thousands of photographs, a rich resource ready to be mined. The Flashback feature enabled the Geographic to showcase some of these photographs, some of which had never been published, and made all the more interesting because they presented not just a window on the world, but a window onto the past.
