Research
Regarding Aid: The Photographic Situation of Humanitarianism
In this dissertation I take a cultural history approach that enables an exploration of the way in which photography, mobilized by a range of humanitarian actors, introduced new forms of humanitarianism, expanded the terms of who could be subjects of humanitarian action, and how those distinctions differed or conformed with dominant concepts of humanity at various points in time. An historical approach involves thinking about the ways the present is linked to the past, revealing obligations and responsibilities articulated to it. More specifically, I follow Ariella Azoulay in defining photography as “an event” rather than a technology for producing pictures it is a medium that is “subject to a unique form of temporality—it is made up of an infinite series of encounters” (26). Like Azoulay, I look beyond the content of the pictures to locate the greater force of the medium in the arena of actions and actors that extend beyond the picture’s frame or the little black box of the camera.
Over the course of the dissertation, I explore events and relations associated with:
Henry Dunant’s graphic language in A Memory of Solferino;
Lewis Hine’s European photographs in and immediately after the First World War; and,
a photograph of the French army in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide.
My key questions include:
How has humanitarian photography figured in shaping imagination of humanity and in formulating responses to human suffering? How does thinking historically about humanitarian photography change the way moral obligations and social responsibilities towards suffering others in the present are regarded? How can consideration of the photographic encounter impact humanitarian relations and reconfigure conceptions of the victim, perpetrator and benevolent actor?
With these cases, I seek less to find answers to my questions than to consider the insights and opportunities they provide for reconsidering current events from different points of view.
