Iain Wilkinson
The provocation of the humanitarian social imaginary :
This article reviews recent attempts to analyse the visibility that is brought to human suffering within ‘social imaginaries’ committed to humanitarian concerns. It questions the conventions of critique that operate to cast the humanitarian social imaginary as a negative development within our political culture. It is designed to encourage a more critically reflexive and historically informed approach to the work of critique. It also argues that it is possible to trace a tradition in which humanitarian campaigners operate with the aim of appropriating the critical reaction to their work as part of their political strategy. In this regard, campaigners are more concerned to provoke moral controversy than to fashion ‘winning arguments’. Here the visualization of human suffering is valued more for its potential to generate value conflicts than for the extent to which it serves as an authentic or ideologically uncontaminated representation of social reality.
Karen Wells
The melodrama of being a child: NGO representations of poverty :
This article shows how NGO films deploy melodramatic modes in constructing the narrative arcs of their campaign films and it explores the potential of this mode for generating solidarity between the spectator and the suffering subject. The author analyses how, through the use of music, colour and gesture, a visceral emotional response is evoked that produces an identification of the spectator with the experiences of the suffering subject. She argues that the criticism of melodrama as a mode or genre that substitutes politics with compassion is misplaced; compassion for distant others may be at least as critical to the formation of solidarity as a politically informed understanding of the structural causes of social injury.
Shani Orgad
Visualizers of solidarity: organizational politics in humanitarian and international development NGOs :
Discussion of the visual politics of solidarity, in relation specifically to the representation of suffering and development, has been grounded in analysis of images. This article seeks to expand this debate by exploring the organizational politics that shape and are shaped by these images. The article is inspired by production studies in the cultural industries and draws on interviews with 17 professionals from 10 UK-based international development and humanitarian organizations that are engaged in planning and producing imagery of international development and humanitarian issues. The author discusses how power relations, tensions and position-taking shape the arguments and choices made by NGOs producing images of suffering and development. She focuses on two arenas of struggle about how to visualize solidarity: (a) intra-organizational politics – specifically tensions within NGOs between fundraising and/or marketing departments, and communications, campaign and/or advocacy departments; and (2) inter-organizational politics: the competing tendencies towards convergence, cohesiveness and collective identity of the humanitarian sector, and competition, distinction and divergence between organizations on the other. She shows that NGOs’ visual production is an area of conflict, negotiation and compromise, and argues for the crucial need for attention to organizational politics in the production of visual representations of distant suffering in order to uncover diverse and competing motivations, and the forces driving current humanitarian and development communications.
Lilie Chouliaraki
The humanity of war: iconic photojournalism of the battlefield, 1914–2012 :
This article examines the changing ethics of war photojournalism. It provides a review of the major paradigms of war communication studies, propaganda and memory studies, to argue that, despite their contributions, neither focuses on historical change in the ethics of war. In the light of an analytical discussion of iconic images of the First World War and Second World War as well as the War on Terror in terms of how they portray the battlefield the article argues that there is a historical shift towards an increasingly explicit visualisation of war, which today tends to emphasise the emotional, rather than physical, impact of the battlefield upon both soldiers and civilians. This shift, it concludes, reflects the contemporary political context of humanitarian wars fought with a view to alleviating suffering, rather than wars fought over national sovereignty.
Kari Andén-Papadopoulos
Media witnessing and the ‘crowd-sourced video revolution’ :
Focusing on the critical case of the mobile phone footage of Gaddafi’s death in the context of Swedish television news and its audiences, this article considers how the nature of ‘media witnessing’ is being transformed through the employment of user-generated footage. On the basis of a combined text/audience analysis study, it shows that citizen video encodes an extraordinary sense of presence and participation. Critically, however, its facilitation of ‘pseudo-eyewitnessing’ is not enough in itself to sustain practices of bearing witness. Rather, the author shows that moral responsibility is fundamentally conditioned by the symbolic management of distance – which, audiences stress, is most efficiently provided by professional news packages. Importantly, then, this empirical study corroborates the so far mainly theoretical claim in literature on media witnessing which advocates that media representations need to maintain a ‘proper distance’ in order to construct scenes of suffering and violence as a moral cause to spectators.
Bolette B Blaagaard
Post-human viewing: a discussion of the ethics of mobile phone imagery :
This article discusses the relationship between theories of photography and mobile phone footage. In doing so, it asks if theories of photography still apply in a technologically saturated world of imagery. Technology is an increasingly important part of viewing imagery today and enables imagery to become part of a global cultural flow, thus calling into question the physical connection between viewer and image. This article analyses what happens to that connection when not only the image but also the physical body is mediated and challenged in post-human relations, and examines the ensuing ethical implications. The author takes photojournalism and, in particular, mobile phone footage as a starting point for an exploration of the (post-human) body as evidence and sign of authenticity in the modern age of digital communications and journalism.