Emotional death: the charity advert and photographs of childhood trauma

Abstract

This essay will use current and historical advertisements by the British charity Barnardo’s to analyse the representation of abused children. In particular, it will focus on the 1999–2003 campaigns to explore the connection between the experience of trauma, death and the photographic image in the context of a first world, Western preoccupation with the spectre of the missing, lost or abused child. It will consider the complex attempt to photographically capture the missing image, to invoke a subjective loss and to conjure up the accompanying wound of trauma. The Barnardo’s adverts, like many charity adverts of abuse, attempt to show a traumatic past, that by its very nature as trauma, defeats easy representation. Trauma as an experience produces a crisis of representation. The traumatic event, with its radical disruption of psychic defences, results in an absence or gap in memory, knowledge and recall. The devastating event so overwhelms the senses that it produces a perpetual sense of “belated uncertainty” about “a truth to which there is no simple access” (Caruth 1995, p. 6). These photographs attempt to capture the dislocation of time and distortion of identity for the traumatised child. Whilst structurally they can be read for invoking a sense of aura or credibility as testimony, they do so in a digital age when the status of the “truth” of the photograph as evidence is called into doubt (Robins 1996). This dislocation of image from referent can be read for its parallels with the dislocating structures of trauma. As such they raise questions of the ethics of “spectral evidence” in a commercialised charity sector.