ABSTRACT
Humanitarian organisations have always struggled to settle the question of how to visualise suffering and how to inspire our feelings and actions on it. One of their challenges is to safeguard the legitimacy of their activities in an increasingly competitive market (DeChaine 2005). It is this struggle over legitimacy that is reflected in the visual practices of humanitarian campaigning, for, as critics claim, no style of campaigning seems to do justice to the moral claim of solidarity. Early “negative” imagery of emaciated children was denounced for dehumanising the sufferer (Benthall 1993). “Positive” imagery campaigns of smiling faces were accused of glossing over the misery of suffering (Lidchi 1997; Smillie 1995). Most recently campaigns were accused of what has been called a “commodification of solidarity” (Nash 2008).
