Putting a Face to a Name: Visualising Human Rights

Vera Mackie

doi:10.5130/csr.v20i1.3065

Abstract

In this essay, I focus on a text which attempts to deal with human rights issues in an accessible media format, Kälin, Müller and Wyttenbach’s book, The Face of Human Rights. I am interested in this text as an attempt to translate between different modes of communicating about human rights, which we might call the academic mode, the bureaucratic mode, the activist mode and the popular media mode. There are significant gaps between the academic debates on human rights, the actual language and protocols of the bodies devoted to ensuring the achievement of basic human rights, the language of activists, and the ways in which these issues are discussed in the media. These issues are compounded in a transnational frame where people must find ways of communicating across differences of language and culture. These problems of communicating across difference are inherent to the contemporary machinery of the international human rights system, where global institutions of governance are implicated in the claims of individuals who are located in diverse national contexts. Several commentators have noted the importance of narrative in human rights advocacy, while others have explored the role of art. I am interested in analysing narrative and representational strategies, from a consciousness that texts work not only through vocabulary and propositional content, but also through discursive positioning. It is necessary to look at the structure of texts, the contents of texts, and the narrative strategies and discursive frameworks which inform them. Similar points can be made about photography, which must be analysed in terms of the specific representational possibilities of visual culture.

Highlights

What would it mean to ‘visualise’ human rights? Can an abstract concept like ‘human rights’ really be presented in pictorial form? What is at stake in such a project of visualisation for the producers and consumers of texts? The visual, it seems, is important in various modes of communicating about human rights, whether on the internet, in broadcast media, in documentary films, in drama, in pamphlets, posters, fliers, or even, as we shall see below, in coffee table books
Similar points can be made about photography, which must be analysed in terms of the specific representational possibilities of the visual medium.[6]
The experience of looking at a photograph will be different depending on whether it is seen on a gallery or museum wall, on an instructional wall panel, as a postcard or photographic print which can be held in the hand, in a frame, as a poster, in a slide show, in a power point presentation or in a book

Summary

Introduction

What would it mean to ‘visualise’ human rights? Can an abstract concept like ‘human rights’ really be presented in pictorial form? What is at stake in such a project of visualisation for the producers and consumers of texts? The visual, it seems, is important in various modes of communicating about human rights, whether on the internet, in broadcast media, in documentary films, in drama, in pamphlets, posters, fliers, or even, as we shall see below, in coffee table books. Both ‘The Family of Man’ and The Face of Human Rights display hundreds of photographs from around the globe, arranged in thematic clusters which often juxtapose similar scenes from different local contexts (such as wedding ceremonies, classrooms or children playing).

Results

Conclusion