Abstract
Photography has the ability to provoke ethical reflection and to provide an emotional connection to the reality of individual suffering (Hariman & Lucaites, 2016). Therefore, given the remarkable importance of visual communication in covering humanitarian crises, this short paper aims to problematize humanitarian photography practice and reflect on alternative ways of framing representations of refugee women’s life experiences outside mainstream media. Thus, I propose here an initial conversation regarding my doctoral research that focuses on self-representation of refugee women. I aim to investigate how self-representation can challenge the way to document refugee women’s life experiences by constructing through visual narration their identities and exiled memories. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to deromanticize the humanitarian discourse by reflecting on the photographer’s role in the field and by exploring alternative photography practices that frame nations affected by crises. The word crisis governs my work not only because refugee women are victims of a global refugee crisis resulting from armed conflict, natural disasters, and diseases, but also because of the daily subjective crises that these women face in lands that they now call home. Through self-representation, they can construct their stories beyond the problematic of conflicts. Thus, by reflecting on the activist potential of self-representation in framing of refugee memories it is possible to think of new opportunities to make their struggles visible in times of crisis.
Highlights
Photography has the ability to provoke ethical reflection and to provide an emotional connection to the reality of individual suffering (Hariman & Lucaites, 2016)
Afghan women made up 80% of the 250,000 Afghans forced to flee their country since May 2021 (UNHUCR, 2021). These women, in addition to dealing with the narrow interpretation of Islamic law that restricts their rights, suffer the consequences of visual representations shaped by a problematic humanitarian discourse that do not provide justice to the refugee’s cause. Given this global context of crises and the pervasiveness of visual coverage of these events, this paper offers a brief critical reflection on the state of humanitarian photography by defining this practice and questioning the photographer’s role in the field
Scholars assume that photographs that deploy the shock effect of violent imagery can provoke in the viewer either a perverse pleasure or compassion fatigue, both of which inhibit political action that would reduce the suffering of others (Moeller, 1999; Sontag, 2001; 2003)
Summary
Photographs are essential to reflect on the past, as well as to create visual memory and global awareness by offering an intimate relationship with reality (Hariman & Lucaites, 2016). These problematics regarding the representation of the other in vulnerable situations that moves between emotionaloriented narratives to post-emotional brings us closer to the concerns surrounding humanitarian photography practices itself In this context of witnessing “distant suffering” (Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2015; Moeller, 1999)—which I define as the suffering of people outside one’s sphere of influence— humanitarian photography confirm, document, and represent a crisis and seek to generate a connection between viewers and photographed subjects. As mentioned above, this practice is oriented to make audiences feel for and respond to those in need based on moral universalism or particularities of the cause (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015). In the coverage of a humanitarian crisis, the act of framing the Other in a vulnerable situation raises complex issues regarding the right of the photographer to denounce inhumane situations and barbarity, but at the same time, the need to respect the Other's space of pain and their agency
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