Images of the child and environmental risk: Australian news photography of children and natural disasters, 2010–2011

Abstract

Images of children appeared frequently in Australian metropolitan news reporting on the series of extreme weather events and natural disasters that occurred in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region between September 2010 and April 2011. This article examines these photographs and pictures as a case study through which to comment on relationships between public image worlds of children and globalised visual cultures of risk in late modernity. The author discusses the Australian news coverage of these events alongside the public uncertainty generated by discourses on global climate change. She draws attention to the frequent emphasis on children in this news reporting to narrate the stories of families and communities, and considers the historical relationship between images of the child and natural disasters in news journalism. Drawing on theories of risk, the author then examines the global networks of images of risk within which these pictures of children circulate. This is contextualised alongside Western post-industrial sentiment towards the child, and the ways in which frequent images of children today saturate the market in unprecedented forms. Two case studies from the Australian context are analysed to illustrate how such representations have become emblematic of deeply held public anxieties towards Australia's uncertain environmental future. In conclusion, the author argues that these images bring forth the intimate relationship in the global public sphere between visual cultures of children and risk in the 21st century.