Humanitarian Photography: From Mediating Suffering to Visualising Peace
By Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker
10 June 2025
Context of this Blog
This blog summarises our recently published chapter in Tom Albeson, Pippa Oldfield and Jolyon Mitchell (eds), Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.
The chapter is one of the last texts that Emma and I completed while she was still alive. We had worked on it for several years. Our first correspondence with the editors was in January 2017. We completed a first draft in May 2018 and received referee reports in July 2021. Numerous revisions followed – we have a total of 23 texts that document the progress – until the present and published version.
Introduction
Visual representations have played an important role in the emergence of humanitarian sensibilities. During the abolition movement of the late 18th and early 19th century sketches of suffering slaves were used to appeal to the emotions of audiences. Suffering bodies took on new meanings, making pain and cruelty repulsive in a way that had not been the case before. Images, in this sense, became a catalyst for newfound humanitarian sensibilities and practices.
Abolitionist artwork created support by graphically depicting victims as passive and in need of outside help. Embedded in these visual representations were gendered and racial stereotypes that perpetuated existing power relationships. But these visual tropes, problematic as they were, also influenced the emergence of humanitarian sensibilities. They allowed viewers to identify with the suffering of others and generated the political impetus necessary for humanitarian action.
The legacy of these early modern visual tropes continues to shape how humanitarian issues are represented today. These representations, which are part of a broader entanglement between visuality, humanitarianism and colonialism, have also entrenched hierarchical relationships between rescuer and rescued, donor and recipient and, in a general way, between the Global North and the Global South.
In our chapter we show why humanitarian photography can – and should – move beyond this problematic visual legacy. We argue that to do so humanitarian photography needs to do more than just visualise peaceful solutions. Photography has to confront its problematic past. It has to visualise humanitarian responsibilities in ways that enable scholars, practitioners and affected communities to learn from past injustices and violence to conceptualise and initiate political action in nonviolent and more just political ways. To do so, one needs to explicitly engage the power dynamics, as well as the colonial violence, that is implicit and yet often unacknowledged in images of suffering and violence.
Visualising Suffering and the Historical Emergence of Humanitarianism
Images were among the first mediums to communicate suffering. These visual practices predate photography and are linked to the emergence of humanitarian attitudes. Once considered inevitable, pain and suffering eventually came to be seen as phenomena that should and, indeed, can be prevented.
A key turning point was in the late 1700s. At that time changes to political and moral attitudes to pain and suffering occurred, at least in part, as a result of powerful visual representations. Sketches of cruel, inhumane practices of slavery had a significant impact on public discussions.
Certain recurring visual frames were particularly influential, including stereotypes associated with victimhood. Racial and gendered tropes were widely used. Slaves were predominantly presented as passive and primitive, silently enduring unimaginable situations of cruelty and pain. This sense of passivity and helplessness was especially the case with female slaves, whose representation typically hinged on erotic and voyeuristic images that reduced them to stereotypes associated with feminine powerlessness and vulnerability.
These stereotypical depictions of suffering slaves were, paradoxically, one of the key factors that generated sympathy in viewers and contributed to the growing sense of humanitarian responsibility.
‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade: or, the inhumanity of dealers in human flesh exemplified in Capt’n Kimber’s treatment of a young negro girl of 15 for her virgin modesty.’ Attributed to Isaac Cruikshank, 1792. © Trustees of the British Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The above Isaac Cruikshank caricature, ‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade,’ is one such example. It became well-known in the 1790s. Cruikshank’s sketch depicts a case in which a captain of a slave ship (Kimber) was accused of murdering a young slave girl who refused to dance naked on his ship’s deck.
While this type of imagery was influential in raising awareness and in providing a platform to discuss the cruelty and injustices endured by slaves, Cruikshank’s sketch replicates a range of stereotypes and meanings common to abolitionist imagery at the time. Key to the image’s emotional and ensuing humanitarian meanings are those associated with gender and race. Imaging the flogging of a young woman’s naked body in this manner presents a female slave as an almost pornographic spectacle. Through her torture, the enslaved girl is presented as a primitive yet erotic object. She is passive and helpless in face of the power of the white perpetrator-captain.
A particular emotional power politics thus comes into play: her anonymity enables viewers to imagine her pain as not simply her pain, but as a universal pain: as that of every slave. This encourages a universalising form of sympathy for the plight of all slaves. By contrast, the perpetrator’s actions appear as the actions of a few. The position of their faces shifts the viewer’s attention towards emotional abjection of the spectacle, rather than an identification with white slave traders.
Stereotypical frames such as those evident in Cruikshank’s caricature were common in highlighting a moral duty to abolitionism. These visual frames resonate with audiences’ newfound and growing sense of disgust and dismay about the cruelty of slavery. They evoke an emotionally generated responsibility to do something to help.
But this ensuing humanitarian impulse is achieved a cost. While influential in gaining public attention, depicting slaves as devoid of agency renders them passive and powerless in a manner that places viewers in a new position of hierarchy and power, albeit a more ethical one. In this newly created humanitarian discourse, it is viewers – rather than victims – that have the capacity to feel, act and respond.
The Historical Legacy of Humanitarian Imagery
The struggle over the abolition of slavery was crucial to the establishment and evolution of humanitarian consciousness and politics. Subsequent periods and political movements cemented the emergence of a humanitarian order. These include the Geneva Convention (1864) and the establishment of international humanitarian law and the related institutions, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (1863). Then there is the increasing formal institutionalisation of humanitarianism in the twentieth century, manifest in a range of inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations as well as in new norms and customs.
Just like the images of slaves that circulated during the abolition movement, contemporary photographs tend to bring conflict and disaster into focus through frames that disempower sufferers, depict them as needy victims and render them helpless. Humanitarian photography invariably depicts sufferers as vulnerable, ‘struck down’ by tragedy, devoid of agency and dependent.
Employing these frames is powerful as it harks back to time-honoured humanitarian tropes that provide audiences with easily recognised points of emotional identification. Even today, survivors of catastrophic events are often depicted as passive recipients rather than active participants in processes of humanitarian intervention and aid. World-wide audiences of newspapers and websites regularly see images of victims with outstretched arms and anxious faces against the background of a scene of devastation. Such images can be successful in communicating a sense of need, but they also convey desperation and helplessness. Victims in the Global South, in particular, are framed as pitiable objects who are entirely dependent on outside help for survival.
It is in this way that contemporary depictions of humanitarian crises – whether precipitated by conflict, earthquake or climate change – habitually present victims as powerless and submissive, reliant upon the distribution of foreign aid.
The dichotomies enacted in these visualisations – passive victim vs active helper – function to convey both the urgent situation and seeming dependence of survivors. These visual tropes also prompt the viewer to identify with aid workers. Gendered and racialized as these images are, they evoke a type of dependency on outside aid that affirms a deeply entrenched and hierarchical power relations between the Global North and the Global South.
Just like over two hundred years ago, today’s humanitarian photography still tends to engage viewers through an emotional lens much like during times of slavery and colonialism. Whether in news media or in campaigns to generate humanitarian donations, victims are often depicted in a way that frames and defines suffering – and the responsibility to alleviate it – from a Western perspective.
The underlying logic of humanitarian photography is to depict individual victims so that we can ‘put a face’ to a larger catastrophic event, be it war or another form of crisis. This enables viewers to identify with and feel for the distant suffering being depicted.
US Navy Lieutenant Commander Loring Issaac Perry takes a moment to comfort an Indonesian women and her child that lost everything they had during the Tsunami in the city of Meulaboh on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. 10 January 2005. The Image in the public domain and reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.
Visualising Peace
Drawing on the meanwhile extensive body of literature on peace photography we can see two ways forward.
First: a historically aware and critically minded humanitarian photography needs to do more than simply visualise peaceful solutions: it has to engage the sources of conflict, including unequal power relationships that are manifest in the history of humanitarian imagery and in humanitarian politics itself. An active visual engagement is needed to problematise the links between photography and violence. Appropriately visualised and critically framed, depictions of suffering can provide viewers with the chance to become aware of the problematic legacies that underpin current humanitarian practices.
Second: critical humanitarian photography has to visualise viable alternatives to existing problematic practices. Such photography is particularly powerful when it captures conflict and crises in ways that do not entrench structural inequalities but, instead, depict vulnerable communities such that its members are seen as possessing resilience and the agency necessary to work towards sustainable forms of peace. There are numerous photographic practices that do so, including solutions journalism, photovoice as well as participatory- and strength-based photography. Related engagements are diverse and complex but include attempts to visualise constructive engagements with existing conflicts to transform them by visually depicting solutions that lead to social and political transformation.
In sumary: if humanitarian photography is to contribute to social transformation it needs to depict pain and suffering in a politically reflective way and through a dialogue and engagement with those being visualised. Genuine political transformation and sustainable peacebuilding can only emerge out of such critical and self-reflective processes. They would also need to entail developing photographic practices that consciously break with the colonial past, emerge from or at least incorporate local worldviews, and in turn visualise conflict and suffering in ways that avoid stereotypes and genuinely empower post-conflict communities to work towards an inclusive and enduring form of peace.
Selected Bibliography and Further Readings
Allan, Stuart (2012), ‘Documenting war, visualizing peace: towards peace photography’. In Ibrahim Seaga Shaw, Jake Lynch, and Robert A. Hackett (eds), Expanding Peace Journalism: Comparative and Critical Approaches. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Barnett, Michael (2011), Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Baer, Ulrich (2001). Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Chouliaraki, Lilie (2006), The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage.
Cutter, Martha J. (2017), The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1852. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.
Edmonds, Penelope and Johnston, Anna (2016), ‘Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17(1).
Fehrenbach, Heide and Rodogno, Davide (2015), Humanitarian Photography: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Hutchison, Emma (2019), ‘Humanitarian Emotions Through History: Imaging Suffering and Performing Aid’. In Dolorès Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (eds), Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotions. University of Illinois Press, pp. 219-241.
I’Anson, Chioke and Pfeifer, Geoffrey (2013), ‘A Critique of Humanitarian Reason: Agency, Power, and Privilege’, Journal of Global Ethics 9(1), 49-63.
Fairey, T., Cubillos, E., & Muñoz, M. (2023). ‘Photography and everyday peacebuilding. Examining the impact of photographing everyday peace in Colombia.’ Peacebuilding, 12(1), 24–44.
Kennedy, David (2004), The Dark Side of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lasser, Carol (2008), ‘Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric’, Journal of the Early Republic 28(1), 83-111.
Lester, Alan and Dussart, Fae (2014), Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth Century British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lydon, Jane (2016), Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire. London: Bloomsbury.
Möller, Frank (2019), Peace Photography. Houndmills: Palgrave.
Rai, Amit S. (2002), Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750-1850. New York: Palgrave.
Sliwinski, Sharon (2018), ‘Human Rights’. In Roland Bleiker (ed), Visual Global Politics. London: Routeldge.
Wood, Marcus (2000), Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in English and America 1780-1865. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Emma Hutchison (1980-2024) was Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland.
Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland.
