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One hundred years of suffering?“Humanitarian crisis photography” andself-representation in the DemocraticRepublic of the CongoAubrey Grahama

a Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USAPublished online: 02 May 2014.

To cite this article: Aubrey Graham (2014) One hundred years of suffering? “Humanitarian crisisphotography” and self-representation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Social Dynamics: Ajournal of African studies, 40:1, 140-163, DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2014.895545

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One hundred years of suffering? “Humanitarian crisisphotography” and self-representation in the Democratic Republicof the Congo

Aubrey Graham*

Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Humanitarian images streaming from the ongoing conflict in the easternDemocratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are not “new”. In fact, contemporaryaid and journalistic images strikingly mimic photographs created a century ear-lier during the Congo Reform Association’s humanitarian attack on Leopold II’sactions in the Congo Free State. This article explores the consistency of thesephotographic forms and their surrounding text, showing how the images of suf-fering are not simple reproductions of observed reality but carry personal, localand political meaning. By analysing image content as well as the subject andphotographer’s experiences of image creation, this article expands beyond realistobjectivity to encompass the subjects’ visual embodiment of subjective desiresand expectations. Specifically, I examine how the photographic space composedof the photographer, camera and subject, becomes an intersection replete withcompeting expectations, hopes and tensions. To situate these images and theirsubjective, political and humanitarian weight within the DRC itself, I concludewith analysis of how the Congolese choose to present themselves to a differentaudience: themselves.

Keywords: photography; Congo Reform Association; humanitarianism;Democratic Republic of the Congo; sexual violence; conflict

In 1905, Mark Twain published King Leopold’s Soliloquy, a spiteful indictment ofKing Leopold II’s abuses of the people of the Congo Free State. Twain’s text wassold with the purpose of “furthering the effort for relief of the people of the CongoState” (Twain [1905] 1970). Specifically, it lent support to the Congo Reform Asso-ciation (CRA), an early humanitarian organisation, which pursued the goal of stop-ping the region’s “crimes against humanity”. While his words are scathing, Twain’sinclusion of brutal but well-crafted images help to show both the brutality of the sit-uation and the suffering of the Congolese population. One of the Soliloquy’s power-ful visuals is a collage of nine frames, each of which displays a portrait of aCongolese individual wrapped in a white sheet. Despite the variety of faces, gendersand ages, the most notable part of these images is not the subject’s likeness, person-ality or individuality, but rather the severed limb that they display. Missing handsare shown in high contrast against the cloth that wraps their body, conceals theirnudity and provides a background to highlight their absent appendage (Sliwinski2006; Peffer 2008). Such images of atrocity captured by missionaries, researchersand traders added a seemingly unquestionable edge of visual reality to the quest to

*Email: aubrey.graham@emory.edu

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

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expose and topple Leopold II’s regime. Writing sardonically from Leopold II’s pointof view, Twain contextualised the role of the camera saying,

The Kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has con-fronted us, indeed […] [with] the incorruptible Kodak – all the harmony went to hell!The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe. EveryYankee missionary and every interrupted trader sent home and got one; and now – ohwell, the pictures get sneaked around everywhere in spite of all we can do to ferretthem out and suppress them. (1905, 40)

The camera, while no longer as novel as it was a hundred years earlier in its abilityto mimic reality and show the effects of humanitarian suffering, nonetheless contin-ues to be a central tool of aid agency advocacy. Over the past century, internationalhumanitarian aid and advocacy have increased markedly. The number of interna-tional agencies has grown from just over 400 to more than 25,000 today (Kelly2009). However, certain forms of visual representations employed by aid organisa-tions have remained surprisingly static despite the exponential change in the numberof agencies, the shifts in the dynamics of conflicts and changes in the types of atroc-ities humanitarians endeavour to salve. What I refer to here as “humanitarian crisisimages” indicates photographs created and published by aid agencies and journalistsfor the purpose of drawing attention to ongoing emergencies. Importantly, this cate-gory does not reflect all humanitarian images, which span representations intendedto show need, salvation, aid-helped survivors and the broader situational context(Graham 2013). Rather, humanitarian crisis images focus on photographs that reflectthe human outcomes of violence, conflict and war.1 In contemporary aid agency dis-course, such images fall within the labels of both “urgence” and “plaidoyer”2 – indi-cating that the photographs pursue the goal of visually representing the given“need” in order to obtain immediate humanitarian relief, as opposed to longer termdevelopment.

Such humanitarian crisis images perpetuate century-old visual trends in theirdepictions of violation, victims and perpetrators. By comparing the so-called “atroc-ity images” (Sliwinski 2006; Peffer 2008; Twomey 2012) from the Congo FreeState, made popular by the CRA, and current humanitarian images of the conflict inthe eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this article shows howdespite subtle shifts in visual form, the ideas and intentions underpinning humanitar-ian crisis photographs remain largely consistent through certain formal types andgenre-based subject depictions. Specifically, I examine the repeated use of closelycropped (body-focused) portraits, wider angled textually dependent narrative scenesand the means of visually casting perpetrators vs. victims. For over a hundred years,such images have motivated western financial donations while also contributing to asystematic means of understanding the regions they depict and determining whatbecomes visually imaginable and what is rendered invisible. Employing the Congo(DRC) as an example, this paper will point out that photographers, be theyjournalists or humanitarians, employ well-established notions of victims andperpetrators to illustrate and further the humanitarian cause. However, the agency ofthe individuals featured within the photographs and the politics the images carry,play important and often unquestioned roles in the creation and continuation of suchvisual tropes. Through the interplay of a subject’s agency and the photographer’sgoals, the complex and ongoing social life of the Congolese is systematicallyremoved from the photographic frame, rending the depictions of suffering and

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arms-wielding violence prominent in representations of what Congo is, and for overa hundred years, has been.

Humanitarian crisis images have been studied in the past for their simplificationof the individual featured, their decontextualisation or their skewed representation ofthe situation and the imposition of the photographer’s power on the subject (Sontag1977; Benthall 1993; Moro 1998; Moeller 1999; Campbell 2007; Linfield 2010).However, few have questioned the subject’s agency and active collaboration in theimage’s creation. This article adds a comparative approach grounded in analysis ofthe images as material representations, as well as spaces of creative interactionbetween the subject and photographer. By examining the potential role of the sub-jects – and not just the photographers – in the creation of humanitarian crisisimages, this article pushes beyond the idea of photographs as objective, icono-graphic representations of reality. Rather I raise questions about the way in whichthe subjects themselves actively collaborate in the construction and perpetuation ofthese century-old visual tropes.3 Drawing from my current dissertation project,which tackles the dynamics of aid and local photography in the eastern DRC, thisarticle furthers the examination of photographic constancies in light of how individ-uals in modern-day North Kivu Province subjectively navigate the various forms ofphotography from inside and outside of aid agencies. Further, this work strives toshift the emphasis from a reification of the passive victims or malicious aggressorsfeatured, to an inquiry into the subjective processes that “make” such victims andperpetrators visible while hiding other conceptualisations of the Congolese fromview.

Century-old abuses and current conflicts

The Congo Free State (1885–1908) was formed as King Leopold II of Belgium’sprivately held colony. Riding on the anti-slavery movements of the early 1800s, casthis colonial ambitions under the auspices of humanitarian needs of the local Africanpopulation. Drawing the Arab slave traders as convenient demons, he argued thathis colony would secure the region, free the helpless Africans from the tyranny ofslave trading, open the interior of the Congo for free trade with Europe and makespace for the missionary salvation of the local people (Hochschild 1998; Grant2001; Pavlakis 2010). Once approved by his European neighbours, Leopold II begana distinctly non-humanitarian colonial project grounded upon military rule, resourceexploitation and giant transportation projects to facilitate the ivory and wild rubberextraction from the interior of the Congo to Belgium. Despite the rose-coloured lightin which Leopold II cast his Congo endeavours in Europe, the early years of thetwentieth century began to show a distinctly contradictory means of colonisation.With investigations from Europe underway, including Roger Casement’s Report tothe British Consulate (1904) and Morel’s publications in the West African Mail(1903), a document and photographic trail emerged, detailing the abuses of the Con-golese people through forced portage and labour, unjust imprisonment, flogging,4

bodily mutilation, torture, rape, murder and the severing of individual’s hands(Hochschild 1998; Hunt 2008; Twomey 2012). Cumulatively, the abuses committedby King Leopold II’s leaders, rubber sentries5 and the Force Publique army led tothe deaths of an estimated, nearly 10 million individuals and the depopulation ofentire regions within the Congo (Hochschild 1998; Hunt 2008).

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In reaction to the reports from this violent political milieu, the CRA was born.Central to their European campaign and their intense popularity in Great Britainwere their “atrocity meetings” composed of “lantern lectures” that employed photo-graphic slides, hymns and oration to move audiences (often numbering in the thou-sands) to the outrage and compassion that drove monetary donation. Photographicimages shown within these lantern lectures, and later published in Twain’s KingLeopold’s Soliloquy ([1905] 1970) and E. D. Morel’s King Leopold’s Rule in Africa(1904), were central to the politicisation of the campaign. Such images and theirassociated text worked to connect King Leopold II himself and his rule to the abusesof Congolese civilians (Grant 2001; Thompson 2002; Hunt 2008).

Ultimately the camera was critical to their efforts. The photographs that werepublished in Europe and America provided a visual “reality” – a form of unques-tionable witnessing – to the atrocities (Peffer 2008; Twomey 2012). These resultingphotographs can be categorised within seemingly distinct styles including close-framed portraits of victims and wider angled scenes of grief and suffering. In thepresent, despite a change in the circumstances and politics of the region’s conflict,such formal types and styles have not lost their worth as a means of both displayingand simplifying the Congo’s violation to western audiences – particularly in NorthAmerica and Western Europe. In the current conflict in the now DRC, the victimisa-tion of the Congolese people remains both a dominant visual and discursive meansof framing humanitarian engagement and the conflict itself.

Nearly a hundred years after Leopold II’s exploitation, the DRC continues toexperience the instability of war and the continued deterioration of its state infra-structure. From 1965 to 1997, President Mobutu’s kleptocratic regime oversaw thedemise of Congo’s social services and the dismantling of the state. Set in this con-text, the Congo has recently borne the brunt of two international wars and remainsthe site of ongoing conflict. In 1996, volatile instability in the eastern provincesrelating to the refugee influx from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide combined with in-country and regional efforts to oust President Mobutu and sparked the “First CongoWar”. By 1997, Mobutu’s regime was overthrown, but the peace was short-lived.On the heels of the First Congo War, the Second Congo War began in 1998 andlasted until 2002. Despite an official end to the war with the South African peaceaccords, conflict between armed groups, especially in the country’s eastern provincesremains ongoing. Throughout the current period of war and conflict, the Congolesecivilians have struggled with disease, death, displacement, genocidal massacres anda continuation of countrywide infrastructural and social service deterioration(Reyntjens 2009; Stearns 2011).

Since 1996, the violence has produced the deadliest conflict since the SecondWorld War, leading to the deaths of at least 5.8 million individuals (InternationalRescue Committee 2008) and driving the establishment of one of the world’s largestongoing humanitarian efforts (Kelly 2009; Autesserre 2010). The conflict itselfrevolves around regional and nationalised politics and economics, access to land,resources and the role of the crumbling Congolese state, yet it is the civilian trage-dies, stemming both directly and indirectly from the violence, that aid agencies mostcommonly endeavour to treat (Jackson 2002; Raeymaekers and Vlassenroot 2004;Reyntjens 2009; Steiner et al. 2009). Combatant groups share the commonality oftargeting civilians in relation to their location, presumed support of oppositiongroups and social identities, including: gender, region, politicised ethnic differences

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(particularly “Hutu” vs. “Tutsi”) and categories of belonging (“étranger” vs.“autochthon”) (Vlassenroot 2002; Geschiere and Jackson 2006; Jackson 2006).

As a result of the civilian victims and media attention, the aid response in theeast of the DRC has been one of the densest in the world. In the eastern provinces,aid agency headquarters populate major eastern towns and work to quell the symp-tomatic humanitarian conditions of the conflict. Currently the United Nation’sOCHA estimates 13 UN organisations, 100 international organisations and at least300 local organisations based in the province of North Kivu alone – with most ofthem based in the provincial capital of Goma (personal communication with GomaOffice, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2013). Many of thesehumanitarian programmes funnel their funds and efforts not towards politics as inthe Leopoldian era, but rather towards treating individuals whose bodies and liveshave borne the brunt of the conflict. Humanitarian symptoms of the conflict includethe perpetration of innumerable and violent rapes, severe levels of malnutrition, theproliferation of preventable diseases, the rise in developmental disability from lackof access to maternal care, the destruction of critical infrastructure and over the dura-tion the displacement of multiple millions of people (Holmes 2010; InternationalOrganization for Migration 2013; Médecins Sans Frontières 2013). Despite the atro-cious variety of potential suffering the conflict produces, aid agencies tend to castthose touched by the conflict under the broad policy labels of “victims”/“survivors”,“les maladies” (the ill – indicating those who had experienced sexual violence) ormore simply, “les femmes” (the women) or les enfants (the children), depending onthe agency’s discursive framing. Despite the commonality of such categories of vic-tims, such labels6 are not alone in producing an exportable representation of thehumanitarian outcomes of current violence. The often-overlooked humanitarian cri-sis photograph plays an equally important role.

Medicalised bodies and generalisable individuals

Humanitarian crisis photographs have for the past century drawn from existing pho-tographic formal types and reproduced specific gazes. Constructed in part within thefamiliar portrait genre at the turn of the twentieth century, humanitarian crisis photos“proved” the mass of inhumane actions of Leopold II’s regime by medicalising thebody (Peffer 2008) – by foregrounding injury and containing as much excess in theimage as possible, it is visually transformed from the sentient individual who satbefore the camera into a narrow representation that shows them as a product of theirdamaged physical self – and constructing a repetition of an expected form. Usingthe confines of a highly regulated scene, the images’ tidy and consistent natureenabled CRA activists to keep physical injustice visible without overwhelmingviewers with gore. Rather, portrait-type photographs, like those shown in the CRA’satrocity collage, show the physical wounds committed by Leopold II’s regime in acontrolled and context-neutral fashion. While shock may accompany these images,it is their groomed stillness that enables the viewer is able to keep looking. These“atrocity” images were intended to “speak for themselves” (Twomey 2012, 40).

Similar to the common portrait of the time which relied upon the constructionof a neutral background and a closely cropped framing to draw out the unique iden-tity of the sitter (Tagg 1988; Pinney 2011), these humanitarian crisis images system-atically removed the local, social context, leaving only a portion of the individual tofocus upon. Repetition too was crucial. However, unlike the standard portrait, be it

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the three-quarter-turned image of the elite or the face-forward identity portrait ofthose under the state’s control (Sekula 1986; Tagg 1988; Werner 2010), atrocityimages narrowed the frame to gaze upon only the individual subject and their bodilyabuses. These images, as exemplified in the collage of nine truncations (Figure 1),

Figure 1. “Photos of mainly children whose hands or arms have been cut off as part of thepunishment used to enforce the production of rubber in the Belgian Congo.” Alice Harris andW.D. Armstrong (before 1905). Provided by Anti-Slavery International.

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follow the style of the “ID” photograph. The individuals are set against a mostlyneutral or non-specific background, facing the camera and situated within a framethat encourages the viewer to focus on the subjects’ bodies – predominantly theirtorso and head (Werner 2010). The photographer’s intention for the subject’s place-ment in each of these images is clearly established through the consistent amount ofspace left between the subject and the edges of the image, the cropping just belowthe hip, and the way in which the affected arm is placed, both in relation to thewhite wrapping cloth and to the other hand, which becomes superfluous to theimage. The tightly cropped, early humanitarian crisis images close down the frameto control any photographic excess and show just the barest of necessities – enoughof the individual and their face for a viewer to connect with their humanity.7 Theatrocity of the image becomes inescapable through its formulaic staging. The view-ers eyes go to the points of bodily rupture, fracture and literal disconnect – to a repe-tition of severed limbs.

Additionally, this ID-portrait-like framing and subject position was familiar tothe viewers of the turn of the twentieth century through popular-culture “type” pho-tographs. “Type” photos showcased the images of exotic peoples, focusing on themnot as individuals, but as generic representatives of a place or culture (Pinney 1990;Edwards 1992; Peffer 2008; Pinney 2011). In both cases, the “type” and the portraitphotograph work to make populations and individuals, respectively, legible to an“other”, be it the general western population or the State. However, a tension existsbetween these two formal types. The portrait, through its framing is aimed at show-ing the particularities and the identity of the individual (Tagg 1988, 137; Yannik1990; Kratz 2002), while the type photograph was intended to stand for an exampleof an entire population. The tension between the generalisable and the individualwithin humanitarian crisis images worked to make such photographs effective forenabling viewers to relate to the individual subject’s pain, while driving moral out-rage, compassion and action for the broader Congolese population. The imagesexpose enough of an individual to spark compassion, while through repetition of thisform, generalise, constructing a depersonalised unit that exemplifies the scale of theatrocity committed upon the generic Congolese body.

Despite a century-wide time gap and significant shifts in the causes of violence,the portrait-based visual representation of bodily abuses holds fast within the currenthumanitarian crisis images of the Congo. Where a white sheet was once used as abackground in images portraying bodily mutilation, now the contrast is reversed –white medical gauze or bandages often signify the injury that lies beneath. The por-trait form is retained through the tight frame and the reduced context surroundingthe subject, which frequently portrays the head and upper torso of individuals.8

Their injuries and general identity remain entwined, often aided by text, whichexplains the specificity of the abuse, while leaving the subject labelled not as anindividual, but often broadly as only a Congolese woman, girl, boy or man. Throughthis close crop, use of contrast, foregrounding of the injury and the still isolation ofthe subject, humanitarian crisis portraits repeat in form and function across agenciesand journalistic depictions, and create tensions between the specificity of individualsand their application as generic representations of the abuses in the Congo. A 2009Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) photograph exemplifies this trend. Within this clo-sely cropped photograph, a man is featured turned in profile to the camera, withwhite gauze swaddling much of his head. Despite the shift in the position of the sub-ject from facing the camera to a side view, violation from the conflict in the Congo

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is highlighted by drawing out the contrast between darkness of his skin and thewhite medical wrapping that like the white sheets in the century-earlier photographs,medicalises the body and brings victimisation to the fore. Equally, this trend existsin photographs created by Congolese photographers working for local and interna-tional aid agencies. Such a trend persists in Congolese-run aid agencies, and isequally used by Congolese photographers.

For instance, after the M23 rebel violence of July 2013 victims of the bombingswere brought to Heal Africa Hospital in Goma, North Kivu, DRC. There, the aidagency’s media team took photographs to “plaidoyer” for additional funding tocover the increased hospital need for the growing influx of victims. The photographshows the young boy seated, facing the camera with a white cast on his arm drawingattention to the wounds beneath the plaster. The gray, computer-edited rectangleplaced over the child’s eyes has hidden his identity, yet in framing and the composi-tion of the subject this image strongly echoes the visual past. As with the atrocityimages, these photographs employ the techniques of visual contrast to highlightabuse without too much gore. Whether showing a gauze-wrapped head, leg, chest orarm, the image maintains the notion of emergency and abuse by foregrounding thebody, and removing context and photographic ambiguity. As such, the photographscontinue to effectively draw the viewer’s eye to the wounds the contradictory “gen-eric Congolese individual” has suffered.

While strong continuities remain between these two eras of humanitarian crisisphotographs, they are not without differences. Slight shifts in the composition of theimages reflect changes in both recent trends in portraiture as well as the type of con-flict injuries that have come to dominate humanitarian concern. Formally posedstyles of photography have lost headway to current visual trends that emphasise can-did, documentary-looking images. The tightly cropped frame remains a feature ofhumanitarian crisis photographs, yet the unquestionable staging and centring of thesubject in the photograph, as in the Leopoldian-era portraits, has lessened – thoughas is clear in the example from Heal Africa described above – has not disappearedentirely. Currently photographed to protect anonymity and dignity of the subject,portraits no longer have to follow either the standardised rules of early twentieth-century portraiture. As such, contemporary images, like the MSF portrait describedabove, reflect off-centre subjects whose wounds are not uniformly denoted by con-sistent subject placement or the use of props – the chair and sheet – to standardisethe form. Despite the small shifts from formal towards more “found” or “documen-tary” portraiture, the body-focused, often medicalised gaze remains prominent inhumanitarian crisis portraits. The de-contextualised frame and the focus on the bodyof the subject continues to goad compassion and moral outrage by signifying theinhumanity of the injuries suffered and by employing the hint of an individual’sidentity as a means to humanise of the results of conflict and crisis.

A shift has also taken place in what wounds are featured through the humanitar-ian gaze and its associated portraits. Where once amputations were the focus of suchchanges, now more superficial though no-less scarring injuries are represented – infact, wounds that provide no visible scars have become prominent within the con-temporary genre. In the DRC, the notion of rape as a weapon of war has becomecentral to the humanitarian cause. The exact figures of military vs. civilian rape andthe best means of addressing the causes and symptoms of sexual violence are con-tested. However, humanitarian aid agencies that deal with sexual violence havebecome one of the fastest-growing aid entities in the city of Goma (Kelly 2009).

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Maintaining the visual trends set with the humanitarian crisis images of the lastcentury, images of sexual violation predominantly feature women and retain the tightportrait crop and the bodily foregrounding, highlighting medically superficialwounds while connoting a different type of suffering: psychological hardship. Whileat the time of the CRA, victimisation was shown by the lack of hands and predomi-nantly direct gazes into the camera, now it is often a woman’s downcast eyes andplacement of her hands, set near her face, which index the wounds that the viewercannot see: loss, desperation, depression and violation that psychologically accom-panies sexual violence.9

For instance, in a 2006 MSF colour image of a woman who had experiencedsexual violence, the viewer is given a narrow view of one-third of a woman ofuncertain young age, whose hands cover her face. It is a close-up portrait that fea-tures her partial form, from her upper torso to the crown of her head, leaving the restof her to be cropped away from view. The light in the photograph directs the view-er’s eye to the subject’s shoulder and her blue-patterned cloth dress. Visible in theimage is her bright, patterned shift, her bare arms, hands, nails and the small braidsacross the crown of her head. Seated and unmoving with her head bowed and facehidden, this image’s cropped composition drives forward the woman’s assumedemotion that visually is connoted but not directly represented. The caption that con-textualises her image, “April 2006, Kabyabiynga. A woman covers her face as shedescribes her rape to a health worker” (Platt 2006). Despite the fact that viewersknow through the caption that she’s talking to someone, that person is not visible.She’s alone with her story and fragmentarily framed to heighten her perceived vul-nerability. With no identifying features exposed, this woman could be nearly anywoman in the DRC, her body and her caption make her a generic representation ofan epidemic of gender-based violence. Platt’s photograph both is, and is not, unique.The images by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), V-Day, Merlin, theUnited Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and MSF (amongothers) echo the form of the medicalised portrait. In these photographs, the frameexcludes the broader context of the body and the surrounding world, hands indicatesuffering and downcast eyes confirm emotional trauma. In cases like this, where ahumanitarian “type” photograph has been constructed, meaning is created “not in,but between images” (Wexler 1997, 167). Representing this particular woman asrepresentative of others is important not only for anonymity but also for therepetition of this form of image, which like the repetition of CRA atrocityphotographs, provides “evidence” that this atrocity is indeed occurring, and worse,occurring en masse. Between the images, an idea of the DRC is formed,highlighting its populations’ victimisation by focusing on their bodies and excludingthe complexity of ongoing life from the view.

The narrative scene: controlling meaning through text

While de-contextualised portraits control meaning and guide viewers’ responsesusing tight framing to exclude excess, another set of humanitarian crisis photographsinstead relies upon text to bind meaning and emotion into a significantly more inclu-sive frame. At the turn of the twentieth century, such wider angled, narrative sceneswere structured so that the composition of the image resonated along an emotionalwavelength. Alice Harris’s missionary photographs are the best example of this workin the CRA era. Like her medicalised portraits, her narrative images were clearly

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and consciously constructed, including the emotional and contemplative aspects of ascene, which helped to spark the needed moral outrage and compassionate responsesin the west (Peffer 2008). Perhaps the most renowned of these images is the icono-graphic image of Nsala (Figure 2), man whose photograph shows him sitting at anangle to the camera gazing down at a small hand and a foot while three figures lookon in the background. Excess enters this image through the expressions of theonlookers, the potted plant, and the contrast between the tidy veranda and the yardbeyond. However, the narrative told at lantern lectures worked to control the excessand ambiguity that this scene provided, while giving the image meaning beyond itsiconicity. According to Harris, Nsala came to the mission to report an attack on hisvillage by rubber sentries. The attack led to the death of his wife and the cannibali-sation of his young daughter, whose hand and foot are featured. This image, andthose which follow its form, relied both on the implied photographic reality and thecontemplation it provoked.

In other words, the image linked atrocity to the individual in the photograph notdirectly through the visuality of the subject alone, but rather through the careful andintentional framing of the image within a textual narrative. In such cases, the cameraangle is often far wider than that of the portrait; it allows more excess into theframe, and thereby requires a caption to guide the reader to the atrocity it depicts.While text also helps to connect portraits to broader trends of victimisation, the textsurrounding narrative images not only needs to create connections, but also needs tooverride the included visual excesses. Taken together, the portrait and narrativescenes, and their encompassing stories, supported a successful political campaign,

Figure 2. “Congo atrocities – Nsala of Wala with severed hand and foot of his five-year-olddaughter murdered by ABIR militia (Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company) – BelgianCongo.” Alice Harris (1905). Provided by Anti-Slavery International.

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which in 1908 led to the transformation of the personally managed Congo Free Stateto a Belgian colony (Hochschild 1998; Twomey 2012).

In contrast, it is common that within current humanitarian endeavours, aid agen-cies no longer justify their existence by their broader political cause. Rather, theirwork is frequently premised on the supposedly apolitical work of helping victims ofunnecessary distress and violence (Bornstein and Redfield 2011; Fassin 2011).Instead of linking discourse and images to the politics of the ongoing conflict andlack of state intervention, local and international agencies use text to connect photo-graphic subjects to broader trends of humanitarian suffering. Local aid agencies(such as ODH [Organization pour les Droits Humaines] and Heal Africa), as wellas large international agencies (such as the Norwegian Refugee Council, the UnitedNations High Commission for Refugees and the IRC), situate and silence the ambi-guity and excess in their photographs by embedding them within or next to a guid-ing caption, title, article, report or heading. Situations, such as sexual violence orsurvivor’s grief, which push beyond visible bodily harm, require information beyondthe image itself to attain the connection between the individual featured, the associ-ated emotions (such heartbreak, depression or loss), and the broader humanitarianissue. Visually, like in the photograph of Nsala, a wider angled representation of anindividual is able to provide flexible visual material to be cast in a direction that isuseful for the agency’s programmatic causes.

For instance, Bleasdale’s image of the “Christmas Killings” in Oriental province,DRC 2009 (Figure 3), shows a man sitting on the floor with his knees drawn uptowards his chest, staring blankly out an open door. The photograph, used by MSF,is open for interpretation until the caption hems it in. It states, “MSF gathered

Figure 3. “MSF gathered testimonies from survivors who told disturbing stories of whathave been termed ‘the Christmas killings.’ This man witnessed the massacre of 60–70 peoplein a Batande village church on December 24. He later discovered that his own son and preg-nant wife were among the dead. Provided by VII with permission from Marcus Bleasdale.”Bleasdale, Marcus/VII (2009).

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testimonies from survivors who told disturbing stories of what have been termed‘the Christmas killings’. This man witnessed the massacre of 60–70 people in aBatande village church on December 24. He later discovered that his own son andpregnant wife were among the dead” (Bleasdale/VII 2009). In an eerie similarity toNsala’s 1904 image, the echoes of the visual past speed into the present in thisimage. Narrative links the man to a grief, which cannot be medicalised and createsan emotional entanglement by connecting the violent situation and humanitarianneed to the otherwise ambiguous nature of the photograph. While not all images ofindirect suffering bear such a close resemblance to Nsala’s photo from 1904, takenmore broadly, the trend of creating wider angled, pensive images and situating themwithin story-based text indeed remains prominent.

For instance, in situations of sexual violence, when not photographed within theclosely framed portrait, women are anonymously represented using a wider angle.The larger visual frame frequently contextualises them with their spaces of healingor treatment – often lying on an iron-rung bed with the mosquito net hanging in anet from the ceiling, or sitting hunched, away from the camera. In these cases, suchas in the photos for Oxfam, the IRC and United Nations Populations Fund to nameonly a few, the immediately associated text clarifies that the scene featured is relatedto sexual violence and its prevalence in the Congo. Yet again, individual bodies andcontexts become generalisable. For instance, Oxfam’s April 15, 2010, report showsthe silhouetted back of a woman lying on her side in a bed. The wider angle showsmost of her body and the two other beds on either side of hers. The title in place ofthe caption reads: “New report shows shocking pattern of rape in eastern Congo”(2010). The potential ambiguity of the image is held in check by the narrative thetext that is so quickly layered on top of the visual. Within such situations the imageprovides a semblance of visual evidence of a hard-to-communicate emotion. How-ever, by surrounding the photographs with text, the image, its excess and its ownresonance, is quieted if not silenced by the word-based context. Such photographshelp promote the agencies’ goals of raising awareness, gaining donations, workingtowards easing suffering for victims and creating a brighter future for survivors.However, unlike the political campaign of the CRA, the current images help agen-cies adhere to a humanitarian’s central tenet of “neutrality”. Such depictions rarelypoint fingers (or viewers) at the deeper, political, root causes of conflict, violenceand civilian victimisation, but rather provide a way forward by encouraging dona-tions to the organisation’s projects to treat the symptoms.

Constructing the subject: victims, perpetrators and their photographic agency

To effectively treat even the symptoms of a humanitarian crisis, agencies and theirdonors must appear to be effective at separating victims from perpetrators. Theremust be no ambiguity as to who is being aided and who is contributing to the crisis.Photographers and editors are conscious of how their subject is represented; theyknow what tropes, themes and visual configurations “sell” (Benthall 1993; Moeller1999). Additionally however, I argue here that subjects also perpetuate their ownrepresentations as passive victims or equally as arms-wielding perpetrators. The sub-ject – both in the case of the victim and the perpetrator – is often conscious andactive in their own visual construction. This of course is not possible if being photo-graphed inconspicuously from a distance. However, all of the images and thebroader genres discussed in this article, require interaction between the photographer

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and the subject. Such an interaction is often a negotiation, which produces the visualway in which an individual is identified to the outside world. To apprehend theimplications of the polyvalent articulations of images and the subject’s identity, it iscritical to step beyond the western gaze which focuses on the photographer’s power(Sontag 1977, 2003; Moeller 1999; Manzo 2008), and to explore the local and per-sonal tensions surrounding the subject and their visual self-representation.

Importantly, the photographic encounter is not simply a site where the photogra-pher wields the unyielding power of representation. The camera holder neither cap-tures untainted objective reality, nor do they simply control the scene and inscribetheir conception upon a passive subject. Such a view would correspond with thesomewhat outmoded view of media critics which argues narrow-mindedly that thecamera is a weapon that is aimed and fired, objectifying the subject in front of itsincisive, single-eyed lens (Sontag 1977; Tagg 1988). This form of theoretical orien-tation only sees the “photographer’s attempts to steal the sitter [subject] from him orherself” (Lury quoted in Orjasaeter 2012, 235). Despite the presumed unidirectionalpower vector from photographer to subject, identity is implicated within the image,as something that is both “inscribed” upon the individual and “described by thephotographer” (Tagg 1988, 37). Identity is indeed brought to the fore within theportrait. However, rather than conceptualising identity as objectively inscribed bythe photographer, I argue that the zone of interaction created by the camera becomesa site of intersubjectivity and self-making (MacDougall and Taylor 1998; Grimshaw2001; Behrend and Aird 2003), even in the images of victimisation.

In this intersubjective space, an individual’s self-representation is imbedded incomplex politics and notions of agency, subjectivity and an active engagement withthe space created by the camera. In front of the lens a performative space ariseswhere the enactment and the making of subjective identities comes to light. The vic-tims and perpetrators’ self-portrayal is a complex means of negotiating their self andsociety in relation to their surroundings, the photographer and their anticipations ofthe use of the photos. Critically there exists a tension between the creation and theinterpretation of the humanitarian crisis image. For, while the camera initiates roomfor the subject to self-present and engage with both the camera and the photogra-pher, the final material object of the image instead shows a supposedly objectiveform centred upon the subject’s assumed passivity.

Nonetheless, the creative intersubjective space of the photograph is rarely codedas such. Photographs, like all forms of communication, are constructed with specificintent. These intentions are later “read” under distinctly different personal and con-textual situations, take on new meaning, or are “re-coded” (Peterson and Pinney2003). As such, when viewers interpret these images, they often ascribe new mean-ings, setting the negotiated, subjective image within the expected “documentary”genre. Such documentary photography implies a relationship to objective, candid,representative photographs that appear to mirror observable reality, obscuring thepresence of discourse and negotiation (Caldarola 1988). The intersubjectivity of thephotographer and subject are often left invisible. Instead, the ascription of them asobjective “captured real” carries high exchange value (Poole 1997), allowing thehumanitarian crisis image to stand as evidence of abuses, and as tools with which toevoke compassion, drive moral outrage and even politicise a situation, as in the caseof the Leopoldian-era photographs.

The circulated photographs connote victims and victimisation by focusing on asubject’s passivity and their deficiency, as discussed above. In the Congo Free State

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atrocity images, subjects are marked as victims by their bodily lack – the void ofwhere a hand or foot should be. In the contemporary humanitarian images, the pas-sivity of the victims is shown through the focus on their body as a space where vio-lence is done, in opposition to being a space where one actively engages with theworld. The subjects’ hands, which gesture to the suffering of body and the mind,rarely hold material that enables one to participate actively with the environmentaround them. Absent are the hoes, the pencils, the cash, the books, the matches andthe omnipresent mobile phones. These items, and the ongoing social life of those sofrequently cast as visual victims remain photographically invisible. Even in thewider, narrative-dependent images, the common stillness of the body gestures totheir victimisation. The repetition of the visual constructions of a still victim makethings such as daily life, social networks, means of continuing on, loving one’s fam-ily, visiting with friends, working the land or learning new skills distinctly difficultto imagine.10

In direct contrast to the emptiness of victim’s hands and passiveness of theirbodies, perpetrators are made identifiable precisely by what their hands hold and bytheir actions. Where perpetrators are present in images from Alice Harris’s lanternslides for the CRA and in images appearing in Human Rights Watch (2009), MSFand the United Nations publications, it is what young men carry hold, or activelyengage with that marks them as different from the victims. Harris’s flogging imagefrom the CRA era is an early and extreme example that shows both the victim andperpetrator dynamics. In it, a nude individual lays prone on the ground and a uni-formed individual stands tall, with a chicotte raised in the air in the air showing hisintention to strike.11 Such perpetrator images are important catalysts, aiding in theconstruction of a victim through the connection between the images; the perpetratorphotographs create a time-aligned narrative of violence and victimisation, whichcontextualises the victim images as “outcomes” of the actions of the often danger-ous-looking young men. It is equally important to note that in nearly all of theimages the perpetrators are young men, while women, children and the elderly aresubjects in the vast majority of victim photographs.

Currently, aid agencies themselves are no longer prominent producers of photo-graphs depicting perpetrators – journalistic outlets now dominate in this respect.12

Nonetheless, the images that show who commits the violence retain similar tropes tothe photographs created a hundred years earlier. Equally, the current perpetratorimages continue to contextualise the humanitarian victim images by providing asense of both who victimises the subjects and with what weapons. Perpetratorimages are often wide angled enough to show the scale of the potential violencewithout being so wide as to allow visual distraction by a broader context. By depict-ing often multiple well-armed men or trucks loaded with men whose hands grasptheir weapons, photographers link the movement and action of the men, the truckand the conflict. Alternately, when closely cropped photographs are created, theimages often ignore the faces of the perpetrators altogether, focusing specifically onthe masculine hand gripping the barrel or the magazine of their semi-automaticweapon. The visual inclusion of their possession of a weapon marks their status as aperpetrator, connoting a person of power who is capable of violence. Additionally,there are often a multitude of subjects within a single frame, which serves to indicatethe prevalence or potential scale of the violence.

While photographers commonly frame victim and perpetrator images withinrespective passive or active tropes, my research in North Kivu, DRC between 2009

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and 2013 has shown that the subjects featured in the images play an active role.When a camera is raised for the purpose of capturing a humanitarian scene for anAmerican or European audience, subjects actively enact, negotiate or resist the ideaof how to visibly embody either a powerful perpetrator or passive victim. Forinstance, in relation to the idea of the victim, when interviewing women who hadexperienced sexual violence in the eastern DRC in 2009, seven out of the 10 notedthat for an American or European audience they wanted to be photographed in waysthat showed them as sad, suffering or upset. The women interviewed came from var-ious parts of the eastern part of the country and had stayed at the aid agency’s sexualviolence treatment and counselling centre for varying lengths of time – spanningfrom three days to nearly a year. Despite their region of origin and amount of timereceiving aid from a Goma-based aid agency, these women possessed a clearlydefined sense of what a humanitarian crisis image should look like. Sarah exempli-fies the trend. Before I raised my camera, she explained, “For the West, I want to beshown to suffer”. She placed her hand on her head and cast her eyes away from mylens. When asked how she wanted to be represented in an image she could keep,she tidied her clothing, brought her children close and looked straight at the camera.In another example, Neeta struck a similar pose for the west, but asked me to followher to two locations in one, she pulled a flower to her face, and said, “I want you toshow me as beautiful” in the other, she showed me her new cloth and emphasisedhow happy she felt (Figure 4). Whether drawing from previous experiences havingbeen photographed at the agency or from images they have seen published in bro-chures for distribution, aid agency reports or pulling from a locally trafficked senseof what a victim looks like, it was clear that the women linked a sense of visual suf-fering with the west to the potential of further aid or benefit. Occasionally, theconnection between enacting a position of victimisation and humanitarian aid was

Figure 4. Neeta holds up her newly acquired cloth, engaging with the camera to show partsof her life that step beyond passive victimisation. Aubrey Graham (2009). Personal photo-graph from the author’s fieldwork in conjunction with Heal Africa, Goma.

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directly explained: “If you show me as suffering the West will give more money”,one woman stated.

Conversely, when working with young men in North Kivu on a photographicproject showing their “identity”, David announced that he would like to be photo-graphed so to show himself enacting his future job as a soldier. He led me to a walland stood against it “at attention” – hands resolutely by his side, his chin up, andback straight. His friends, witnessing this, interrupted the photographing, and handedhim a stick to represent a gun. He took it and held it against his side, at attention.With more cajoling they encouraged him to point the “gun” at the camera to lookmore like a soldier. He followed their lead, glaring down the barrel of his make-believe gun at my camera (Figure 5), embodying the idea of power and violence, afar cry from the prestige and discipline his initial pose had evoked. This process ofembodying aggression for the camera parallels images I had previously co-createdwith a group of Mayi Mayi soldiers in Muhanga, North Kivu. Knowing what wasexpected for a western audience and a western photographer, they held their weap-ons high, pointed them towards the camera, or posed menacingly with them, staringfiercely at the lens, only to later resume what that day was a jovial mood, chattingcasually with their fellow combatants and townspeople, their weapons slung looselyat their sides (Figure 6). The performance for the camera was not an objective repre-sentation of daily reality, but rather a subjective means of crafting oneself in aknown form for an assumed audience.

A few things are striking about these examples. The first is that the interactionbetween the subjects and the photographer led to an active negotiation of how theindividual would be featured. At no point were the passive victim or aggressivearmed man photographs simple snapshots of reality; they were dually constructed bythe photographer and subject. This negotiation provides a means to understand how

Figure 5. In Goma, DRC David follows his friends’ encouragement, and enacts a well-recognised pose showing power through his (pretend) weapon. Aubrey Graham (2012).Personal photograph from the author’s fieldwork in conjunction with CAMME asbl.

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subjects actively inhabit the common photographic tropes, and gives the commonvictim/perpetrator forms an amount of staying power across time, as the tropes areanticipated by both the photographer and the subject. Secondly, the inclusion ofbeauty, family or self-composure for the victims, or jovial, casual soldiery for theperpetrators, hints at that which is excluded from humanitarian crisis images. In sodoing, it raises questions about other systems of visual culture and social life thatthese subjects inhabit. For instance: how do featured individuals wish to be repre-sented for different audiences or for themselves? While these anecdotes show theway in which humanitarian image tropes are known and actively chosen as photo-graphic representations, they do not lessen the potential violation of victims or thepower of perpetrators.

In fact, by embodying either respective roles, a paradox is constructed withinthese images and their processes. As spaces of agency and self-making, the activeembodiment of victim and perpetrator tropes also acts as a means of self-circum-scription within the known field of representation. As subjects intentionally imaginethemselves into the narrowly defined, externally crafted and lasting visual script,they are at once enacting a position of power – they define how they are featured –and giving power up to the assumed audience. What this means for the Congolesepopulation and those individuals, has yet to be seen. Nonetheless the tension ofanticipation of aid or finances and the active embodiment of an expected yet suppli-cating position raises questions that step beyond the documentary “reality” oftenevoked in order to goad both horror and compassion.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that there remains a striking continuity between earlyhumanitarian photographs and the contemporary humanitarian crisis depictions in the

Figure 6. Soldiers for Mayi Mayi and FDLR rebel groups greet each other and relax inMuhanga, DRC. Aubrey Graham (2012). Personal photograph from the author’s fieldwork.

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Congo. Whether within the body-centred portrait or the wider narrative-dependentscene, the repetition of such visual tropes have constructed a set of visual expecta-tions for Congolese populations who have experienced conflict and atrocity. Congo-lese hands or the lack thereof, have been central to the configuration of how tounderstand the photographs of victims and perpetrators. However, by regarding theirlimited photographic placement and use, it becomes clear that the everyday use ofone’s body, outside representations where hands connote perpetrators or victims, hasbeen left out of the frame.

By contrast, Congolese self-representations provide an initial means to contextu-alise humanitarian crisis images. The physical image produced and the associatedsubjects’ agency in the photographic process shed light on how individuals activelytraverse zones of visual culture. Building on a history of African vernacular photo-graphic inquiry (Sprague [1979] 2003; Kratz 2002; Behrend 2003; Vokes 2008), Iam currently undertaking anthropological research that works to understand whatzones of photographic meaning-making conflict-affected individuals navigate on adaily basis. This research is centred within the conflict-affected town of Goma,North Kivu, where humanitarians and local Congolese spaces both overlap andremain separate. In Goma, aid agencies’ offices and hostels populate the lakefront,their signposts lay claim to their charitable activities at each crossroads, their white(or now purple, yellow and rainbow-coloured) SUVs line the city’s roads, and“expat” workers identify themselves not by where they are from, but which agencythey are “with”. However, as humanitarian crisis photographs continue to be pro-duced en masse within this space, vernacular Goma photographers create day-to-dayportraits, as well as images of weddings, funerals, birthdays and nights out on thetown.

Goma boasts over 1000 licensed photographers and countless photo studios, withfour wet-labs where black-and-white film can be developed. Within this milieu, ID-type photos remain common, used for identity cards, driver’s licenses, passports,and nearly all applications or interactions with the Congolese state. Yet, outside ofthat standard 2 cm × 2 cm framing the local photographs vernacular photographerscreate are often used to reflect their subjects’ feelings, generally explained as “bien”or “mzuri” – both indicating a general sense of “good”. Such photographs producedof the Congolese for the Congolese challenge the objective notion of reality, andinstead like Buckley’s study of the Gambian photographic sense of elegance (2006),endeavour to show the sentiment of individuals as they mark themselves as fashion-forward, “sapeur” (MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000) and modernised.Instead of placing one’s hands against their heads to indicate suffering, earlyfindings from this research show that the average “Gomaen” or “Gomatricien”(Vlassenroot and Buscher 2009) is more apt to fill at least one of their hands with amobile phone, or shove them in their new jacket’s pockets and lean against a stran-ger’s 4 × 4 vehicle and ask for a photograph, or even “Photoshop” luxury into thebackground (Figure 7). Dressed well and wanting to capture that feeling, individualsoften borrow props – phones, sunglasses or cars from their friends and theirsurroundings and pose in distinctly modernised poses. “They want to show they areglobalised”, claimed a Congolese photographer from the Agfa pro studio after takinga picture of a young woman leaning flirtatiously against a parked car. Such a stancecorrelates well with the sense that despite humanitarianism’s dominant presence inGoma, the city is a bustling urban space of chameleon-like social identities and

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bootstrap entrepreneurialism (Vlassenroot and Buscher 2009), where individualsmust navigate the intersecting situations of conflict and daily life, aid and politics.

Despite this expansive local photographic front, the west rarely consumes thedaily images that Congolese non-humanitarian photographers produce. Thereby such“vernacular” representations of Congolese life, and imagined sense of how theywish to be visually shown, rarely travel the same paths or carry similar social biog-raphies (Edwards 2012), as the humanitarian crisis images. Instead, despite the prev-alence of non-humanitarian photographs within the DRC, common visualknowledge from outside the Congo remains centred upon its passive victims’ griefand violent perpetrators, leaving the sense of “bien”, of modernisation and of pride,literally out of view.

While raising many yet-unanswerable questions, this article has shown that bothcurrent and hundred-year-old standard humanitarian conflict images deserve anotherlook. What is visible and what remains hidden – the ongoing lives and agency ofthe “victims” and the potential normalcy or even kindness of “perpetrators” – needsto be placed in conversation with locally desired self-presentation in order to com-plicate the overly simplified visual histories of the Congolese, both past and present.For over a century the visual content and framing of the subjects within humanitar-ian crisis images has influenced how the wider world understands the Congoleseand their supposed violent, victimised heart of darkness. It is time to place thesewell-worn image ideas within the vibrant and complicated daily context occurringjust behind and to the sides of the photographs and make equally visible what,unphotographed or unpublished, has remained literally unimaginable.

Figure 7. Individual portrait poses like this one show off the notion of feeling “bien” andbring the imaginary into the photographic real by connecting the social world of the photo-graphic subject with their visual context. In this case David, a photographer, shows off theportrait he edited, linking himself, his style, and a pricey new Audi. Aubrey Graham (2012).Personal photograph from the author’s fieldwork.

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AcknowledgementsI would like to thank my committee composed of Peter Little, Corinne Kratz, AnnaGrimshaw and Bruce Knauft for their unflagging support. I’d also like to thank EmoryUniversity Anthropology for helping to fund my preliminary research discussed within thisarticle. Last, and certainly not least, I would like to thank the Lunanga Family and allinvolved at CAMME for their love, encouragement and ongoing logistical support while inthe DRC.

FundingThis research was made possible by support from the Social Science Research Council’sInternational Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds provided by the AndrewW. Mellon Foundation, as well as that from the National Science Foundation [grant number1260640] and the Chester, CT Rotary Club.

Notes1. One photographic topic that falls under urgence and plaidoyer, but is not touched upon

in this article is that of the “refugee”. Refugee images showing fleeing populations andthe misery of the resulting encampment are complex. While linked and overlapping withthe humanitarian crisis image category discussed here, they warrant a study in their ownright. Interestingly, the well-worn visual trope of individuals running from conflictshows “action” (or perhaps re-action) as opposed to the passivity of victims, and begsfor a nuanced analysis.

2. Plaidoyer is the francophone means of describing images whose primary goal is toplead for financial help, while urgence (in English the equivalent of “emergency”) is thecategory of the aid effort. I retain the French version here as it is the way in which theimages are described by contemporary aid agencies functioning in francophone Africa,including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

3. Stereotypes or perpetual visual forms have been widely studied, for instance in relationto the notions of the hunter-gatherer and the pastoralist (Gordon 1997; Kratz andGordon 2002). However, the humanitarian crisis, victim or perpetrator tropes have yetto receive substantial analysis.

4. Flogging individuals with the chicotte, a hippopotamus-hide whip was both commonand deadly. Like the body-focused portrait and narrative scene Peffer (2008) argues thatflogging images equally created a “type” photograph, widely created and reproduced inthe Congo.

5. During the Leopoldian era, rubber sentries were armed local militias charged with pro-tecting Congolese rubber concessions and ensuring the steady collection of wild rubberspecifically on Anglo-Belgian India Rubber (ABIR) Congo Company land. Such sen-tries were known for their brutality in forced labour, slavery, torture, murder and massa-cres.

6. Such labels and their impact within both humanitarian and development policy andpractice have been much discussed in the anthropology of development/humanitarianismliterature (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1994; Bornstein and Redfield 2011; Fassin 2011).

7. The portrait, while perhaps the most effective form to reduce images’ encompassmentof the random, the excess and the uncontrollable interpretations (Barthes 1982;Driessens and Aird 2003; Poole 2005; Morton and Edwards 2009), still can’t quite closeout variation. Working without the artificial backdrops of early anthropometric- orethnic-type images (Edwards 1992), variation nonetheless enters the frame through thetextures of the fauna and construction behind each individual.

8. While the close-crop portrait appears to be a predominant means of visually depictingindividual violation both a hundred years ago and at present, there also exist less com-mon full-body portraits. A primary example is that of Boali, a woman who both shotand had her foot amputated by Force Publique officers (see Hunt 2008). Her portraitshows her standing for the camera, half-nude with her missing limb highlighted by thetidy, light-coloured earth that acts as a background. These full-body portraits follow

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similar trends to the cropped portraits, using contrasting colours or shades (the colour ofthe dirt in the case of Boali) or bandaging, as in the case of tightly cropped full-bodyportraits of bedridden individuals swaddled in white cloth, to indicate their bodilyinjuries. The lack of broader context around the individual also remains constant.

9. Sexual violence images require a level of permission and anonymity that differs fromgeneral conflict images. An additional technique of photographing women who haveexperienced sexual violence is to capture their likeness as a silhouette. Nonetheless suchsilhouettes frequently retain the portrait attributes, with a minimal inclusion of context,and a focus on the individual person, and the victimisation that she represents.

10. There exists another set of images, which temporally follow victim images and take theform of the “flourishing aid-helped survivor images”, which posit that the continuationof life is possible because of the aid, skills and mentoring provided by the affiliatedagency. These share similarities with the salvation images of early mission work anddeserve their own comparative examination. There the visual passivity is removed toshow active skill use, such as sewing, baking or learning – but only through the chan-nels provided by the organisation. Hands then become active, showing individuals andtheir ability to carry on, to be the positive outcomes of humanitarian programmes, tem-porally mark individuals as “helped”, and, therefore, able.

11. This photograph has recently been captioned with “re-creation”, however, the imagewas part of the lantern shows portrayed as a reality, contextualising the victim’s suffer-ings and the power and ease and dominance of the perpetrator (Peffer 2008; Twomey2012). It also became an iconic image that has been re-created, re-appropriated andgiven new meaning as definitions of who are the victims and perpetrators continue toshift (Fabian 1996).

12. Journalists and humanitarian agencies (for example, World Vision, Oxfam, IRC, Savethe Children and MSF) frequently work together, in the end often sharing access to theimages that the photographers produce. Journalists provide the ability to publicise thesituation and mark the agency as one competently carrying out their work. The aidagencies provide journalists access to the given situation (especially important in spacesof conflict), transportation, translation, housing, security and frequently even a directionto the journalist’s stories.

Notes on contributorAubrey Graham is an Anthropology PhD candidate at Emory University and holds a mastersdegree in the Social Anthropology of Development from the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies. She is also a freelance photographer who has worked for World Picture News, SIPAPress, Belga Press and IRIN.

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Bornstein, E., and P. Redfield. 2011. Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism BetweenEthics and Politics. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.

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