Introduction: Constructing Humanitarian Imagery

Although questions of communicable disease and malnutrition have had significant exposure in the UN, the issue of disability – the world’s largest minority group – has never entered similar levels of public consciousness, whether in public health or in human rights.

The contexts in which we often view or visualize the disabled are through the perennial African child with the cleft lip, or one on crutches, maimed by landmines – images relayed over and over again from commercials and advertisements from charity organizations. These are images meant to jolt us – images of incomplete bodies, often marked by the physical legacies of violence. They are also images meant to elicit our most visceral emotions – disgust, pity, charity. Its subjects are presented with a child-like vulnerability and fragility that necessitates an almost paternalistic sense of deliverance.

Postwar images of disadvantaged and vulnerable people in faraway places – from photographs to documentary films – often took on the same sensibilities of the colonialist photography that preceded it. As Heide Fehrenbach notes in Humanitarian Photography: A History, “early humanitarian photography had roots in ethnographic travel literature, missionary photography, and the internationalizing ‘new journalism’ of the 1880s.” The late nineteenth century’s increasing interest in scientific classification and empiricism came as Europe scrambled for colonies and photography emerged as a viable medium. Thus, humanitarian photography matured as part of imperial projects, documenting eyewitness accounts of “individualized narratives of suffering” of exotic peoples. This early history shaped the conventions of the genre.[1] Exoticism and a penchant for depicting children of color in their ‘natural habitat’ are all facets of postwar and contemporary humanitarian imagery.

The primary historical question this project seeks to answer is one of projection and gaze during the age of decolonization: How does the UN perpetuate or problematize the same images of the disabled as objects of pity? Who populates the “disabled” world UN’s images? Where are they from and what types of people are presented as the “faces” of this issue? Furthermore, does the visual language of disabled imagery change over time?