Robin Hammond in the Guardian
Written by duckrabbitThese pictures make me feel sick and I guess that’s the idea. But they don’t really give me a reason to care, even though I’ve lived in this part of the world.
If I give it will be from guilt, not understanding and not from a sense that my money will solve anything.
Take this boy. What’s his name? Where does he come from? What does he want to be if he gets the chance to grow up?
As things stand he’s alien to me, his world is alien, his family are alien, his needs are alien, his future is alien, his past is alien, his dreams are alien.
We live on the same planet but come from different worlds.
Author — duckrabbit
duckrabbit is a production company formed by radio producer/journalist Benjamin Chesterton and photographer David White. We specialize in digital storytelling.
Discussion (8 Comments)
But have you not read any news pieces on it? The stories are unimaginable. The photography serves as only evidence that the drought is happening and that people are dying. Do you donate based on your persuasion in imagery? or this is comment purely highlighting that once again, there seems to be an element of exploitation by not including the subject’s name and personal story therefore making them a item to be potentially observed and criticized.
The photographers or photo editors lack of ability shouldn’t stand in the way of you acting humanistically and maybe giving aid to these people, if thats what you want to do. Having said that, I understand and support that we must judge and criticize media (which we as a nation are in full pursuit of right now) but in this instance, your opinions on the representation of this drought should not stand in the way of your ability to feel as a human and help where possible -especially if you know that the situation is different in situ given your background in this country.
Hi Saira,
Thanks for your comment, sharp as ever.
Yep, its a story I’m pretty familiar with. Infact same story, same pictures that we see every two years.
I don’t know about exploitation. I know the child has a name, but it’s not in the caption. The photographer won’t speak the language so I understand how that happens. Done the same myself.
I don’t often donate to large charities but in this case it would be on the basis of guilt, cause my intellect and experience tells me my money can be put to more good elsewhere.
These pictures dont make me sick. They make me angry. Very effing angry. The ‘government’ of Somalia, like many of its neighbouring countries, has a record of corruption and misdirection of food aid that places it pretty much at the bottom of the league table.
What really makes me sick? The picture in my head of the so-called ‘leaders’ of these countries eating their tomatoes and quaffing chilled beer whilst the people they are responsible for suffer unimaginably.
Maybe we need some balance here. Every pictures of some hapless malnourished child should be accompanied by an equally compelling image of the glorious leaders, their children and their equally thickly-waisted acolytes.
Rains dont cause famines, greed, corruption and carelessness do. We should reach for our wallets, but remember that fact.
Sorry – should be “lack of rains dont cause famines”.
Why black and white? Are we looking at tidy images in an messy situation again? These were my first thoughts when seeing these images.
‘Tidy images in a messy situtation.’
I think thats a very powerful way of putting it Al. With ‘tidy’ solutions that keep people alive to have more children who will need keeping alive.
Got to be a better way.
When I first saw Hammond’s pics, I found them powerful. But you are right, the people in the photos are treated like aliens. That’s also been the case in a lot of the BBC’s coverage of this drought. It has been done in a way that often removes the dignity of those caught up in this. I want to hear their stories, not the view of a reporter.
I think this image is telling of the endemic issues around imaging in the NGO sector as a whole. We are starting to see a public hardened to these images, which has been caused by their gratuitous over use by fundraisers.
We can easily see that the use of these images do illicit donations as they are intended to, and help fund the disaster relief. However, after they have donated, how many of those people continue to be engaged in the work that is going on, rather than have the donation take on a transactional character? The result of the overuse of this kind of communications is, as Kennedy points out in his paper “Selling the Distant Other” the ‘veritable commodification of suffering’ and this is what is undermining long-term development efforts.
What we need to see is shift away from this form of advertising and a sector wide shift towards positive frames in communications, to build deep public engagement with global poverty, and while this may initially cause a drop in short term income, it will build of long term support for those organisations that actively use positive imagery.
Yes, there are cases when these sort of images do portray the reality and truth and should be used, but they must become the exception rather than the standard recourse for fundraising. We’ve been blogging about this issue for a long time on our blog at the Global Poverty Project under the Perspectives of Poverty column at http://www.globalpovertyproject.com/blogs/index/column/17