Humanitarian Photography: A History (Human Rights in History)

For well over a century, humanitarians and their organizations have used photographic imagery and the latest media technologies to raise public awareness and funds to alleviate human suffering. This volume examines the historical evolution of what we today call “humanitarian photography” – the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries – and asks how we can account for the shift from the fitful and debated use of photography for humanitarian purposes in the late nineteenth century to our current situation in which photographers market themselves as “humanitarian photographers.” This book is the first to investigate how humanitarian photography emerged and how it operated in diverse political, institutional, and social contexts, bringing together more than a dozen scholars working on the history of humanitarianism, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations, and visual culture in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Based on original archival research and informed by current historical and theoretical approaches, the chapters explore the history of the mobilization of images and emotions in the globalization of humanitarian agendas up to the present.

Heide Fehrenbach is Board of Trustees Professor and Distinguished Research Professor in the history department at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of three books: Cinema in Democratizing Germany, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America and After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (with Rita Chin, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann). She is also co-editor, with Uta Poiger, of Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (2000).

Davide Rodogno is Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Developmental Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. His books include Fascism's European Empire, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914, and, as co-editor, Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Transnational Networks of Experts in the Long Nineteenth Century.