Heide Fehrenbach - Humanitarian Photography: A 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 coeditor, 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 Fascisms European Empire; Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire (18151914) ; and, as coeditor, Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Transnational Networks of Experts in the Long Nineteenth Century .

This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of human rights today. With an open-ended chronology and international perspective, the series seeks works attentive to the surprises and contingencies in the historical origins and legacies of human rights ideals and interventions. Books in the series will focus not only on the intellectual antecedents and foundations of human rights but also on the incorporation of the concept by movements, nation-states, international governance, and transnational law.

For a list of titles published in the series, please see .

Humanitarian Photography

A History

Edited by

Heide Fehrenbach

Northern Illinois University

and

Davide Rodogno

Graduate Institute of Geneva

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the Universitys mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107064706

Cambridge University Press 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2015

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

Humanitarian photography : a history / Heide Fehrenbach, Northern Illinois

University, Davide Rodogno, Graduate Institute of Geneva.

pages cm. (Human rights in history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-107-06470-6 (hardback)

1. Photography Social aspects History. 2. Documentary photography

History. 3. Humanitarian assistance History. I. Fehrenbach, Heide,

editor of compilation. II. Rodogno, Davide, 1972 editor of compilation.

III. Series:

Human rights in history.

TR183.H86 2014

779.936126dc23 2014032388

ISBN 978-1-107-06470-6 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.