Children and Other Civilians: Photography and Humanitarian Image-Making

For well over a century, humanitarian appeals have used child-centered imagery and the latest visual and media technologies to raise public awareness of, and funds to alleviate, human suffering.  As sociologist Laura Suski recently suggested, humanitarianism might well “require a concept of childhood innocence to legitimate it.”  This talk is drawn from my current book-length project, which explores how, since the late 19^th century, humanitarians and image-makers have deployed photographic media to stir emotion, shape social values, and stimulate response to distant suffering.  It is conceived as an interpretative history of the rise and spread of humanitarian imagery and ethics, articulated via the symbolic figure of the child.

My talk will probe one significant strand of this longer history: the role of pictorial magazines and photojournalists in crafting and disseminating humanitarian imagery and iconography in the extended era and aftermath of World War (1918-1960).   Drawing on archival and published material from a variety of sources, including Save the Children Fund, Soviet Russia Pictorial magazine, and the work of photojournalists of American and European origin (Thérèse Bonney, Werner Bischof, and David Seymour), it examines the emergence of a shared cultural strategy – across political and ideological camps – of constructing compelling visual narratives, focused on the figure of the innocent and endangered child, regarding the destructive consequences of war and famine, as well as more hopeful visions of postwar relief, rehabilitation, and recovery. One striking result of this imagery, I argue, was the popularization of the notion of “the civilian” as imagined through the figure of the child.