National Geographic. The United States of America

This is a heavy object, the kind of oversized TASCHEN volume that arrives like a paving slab and settles onto a table as furniture as much as reading matter. Inside are hundreds of photographs of the United States drawn from the National Geographic archive, state by state and region by region, printed large and bright on thick stock. As production it is hard to fault, and as editing it is where the doubts begin.

The problem is the house style. A century of the magazine trained one very particular way of seeing the world, saturated, heroic, faintly touristic, the landscape always at its most photogenic and the people always at their most picturesque. Gathered by the hundred, the pictures blur into a single glossy mood, and the country gets smoothed into a brochure.

Turn enough pages and the sameness sets in. A grand canyon at golden hour, a lobsterman in flawless weather, a skyline from the ideal angle, each image competent and calibrated to impress, few of them willing to be strange or difficult. The archive holds far harder pictures, yet this selection mostly reaches for the ones that reassure.

The organizing conceit is geographic, a march through the states, and it exposes the weakness further. Some states draw sweeping natural set-pieces while others get whatever the assignment desk happened to file, so the coverage reads less as a considered portrait of a nation than an inventory of what was on hand. Breadth stands in for insight.

The captions do not help. They lean reverent, the tone of a magazine that has always sold wonder, and the effect is a running voice-over insisting the pictures are more astonishing than the eye quite finds them. Left to speak plainly, several of these frames would land harder than the breathless text allows.

None of which means the archive lacks depth. Buried in the franchise's long history are genuinely major photographers and images that changed how the country pictured itself, and a few surface here with real force. When a single frame is allowed to breathe, the quality of the underlying material shows at once.

The trouble is that the format works against exactly that. A volume built to overwhelm by accumulation is the wrong container for pictures that reward slow attention one at a time. The companion survey Around the World in 125 Years has the same virtue and the same flaw, the archive's richness delivered by the pound.

So it ends up easy to admire and hard to love, a lovely surface with a great archive trapped inside it. Which raises the question worth carrying into any survey this size. When a country is shown only at its most photogenic, what has the picture quietly agreed not to see?