Empathy, Charity, Emotional Narratives, and Cash
The Good, the Bad, and the somewhere-in-the-middle
Julia de Luc’s images of Oscar Martinez and his daughter, Valeria, struck a global chord.
They show a deceased Oscar Martinez lying face down in the waters of the Rio Grande with his daughter beside him. He lies in the reeds, his daughter held close under his navy-blue t-shirt, her right arm almost about to embrace her father, even in death.
They are in the reeds, like Moses was in the reeds, like Lee Miller’s dead German soldier was in the reeds. Reeds speak of comfort and safety and peacefulness and rural idylls. You make baskets out of reeds, that you put babies like Moses in. You don’t die in the reeds.
But they are in the reeds because Valeria was swept away by the current of the Rio Grande, her father went to save her and they both died. Tens of thousands of people have died trying to cross the Mexican border, but it’s Oscar and Valeria who are now remembered.
The picture was shown on the front pages of newspapers around the world. It was shown online and went viral, stimulating discussion and debate starting with the essential sorrow of the image and moving on to questions of ethics, acknowledgement and change. The immediacy of the responses beg comparison with other images from photojournalism and charity photography, both of which use images where high emotion, storytelling, ethics and question of change are to the fore.
The question of change is apparent in the headline accompanying the image in this UK newspaper. The weight of responsibility is suddenly shifted onto both the image and the photographer. The image has been made, but the attention is directed to the aftermath of the image.
These ‘iconic’ images are not single images, but multiple variations on a theme. The images that have been shared on social media go beyond those terrible initial images of death, and include images of the family’s life in El Salvador, cartoons, tributes and other responses to the initial photographs. It’s almost as though the authorship is irrelevant here, it’s the monumental symbolism that matters—a symbolism that taps into emotional needs, people we can identify with, and grand narratives including the recurring question of change.
The images that Le Duc’s photograph has been most compared to are those of Alan Kurdi lying dead on a beach in Turkey. These images also crystallised the human cost of closed borders, of migration and the loss of life and were also accompanied by the rhetoric of change.
Nilüfer Demir’s photographs of Alan Kurdi did change some things. For a few weeks, they changed the editorial tone of some UK newspapers.
The problem was that those publications which showed a sympathetic tone to migration quickly reverted to type. And as they reverted to type, so political promises and social attitudes reverted to type.
The change was temporary, but temporary though it might have been, some of the after-effects of the pictures’ publication were positive and meaningful. The death of Alan Kurdi led (again temporarily) to a massive increase in internet searches for issues connected to the war in Syria, so there was an increased engagement with wider political issues beyond the infant’s death.
Raising awareness is not enough, though. Susan Sontag wrote that, ‘the camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed’.
That’s a sweeping statement, and if you change camera to laptop and change photographer to writer, it’s a statement that becomes even more true. We are all commentators now—all of us. It’s a very strange thing to read millions of words written by academics, journalists and commentators telling us that the photographer is responsible for changing the world.
The responsibility for how we go beyond the temporary sympathy expressed through petitions and hashtags lies with all of us; in how we shop, in who we vote for, in how we talk to people, in how we consider images, in how we retain them in our attention.
We, the viewers, are now the people who determine the afterlife of the image. But there is also a life before the image is made.
In his essay, Painful Photographs (published in Beautiful Suffering), Mark Reinhardt said that ‘…commentators on contemporary visual culture sometimes seem so preoccupied with the specific styles or instances — or even the very act, as such — of picturing pain, that they are in danger of forgetting that the most important problem is the suffering of those pictured.’
The onus here is on what happens before the image is made. The image is not what matters, rather it is the political processes that are crystallised in the images that matter. The image can help us understand that process depending on how they are made, shown and then understood by the viewer.
The images of Alan Kurdi did, albeit temporarily, lead to some viewers expanding their understanding of the world. They also led to a 100 fold increase in fundraising for migrant charities, which most people (but not all) would see as a good thing. Because of those photographs of Alan Kurdi, funding was provided that did provide care for refugees and almost certainly saved lives.
But why Alan Kurdi, why Oscar and Valeria Martinez? What about the other 60,000 people who have died while migrating over the last 20 years?
One of the reasons is the cynical and hard-nosed idea that the pictures symbolised the archetypal story, one filled with emotion, hope, tragedy and loss. The story is a quest and a tragedy combined. It’s the kind of story that once sold newspapers, the kind of emotion-filled tragedy that forms the heart of journalism-centred films like Peepli Live, or Ace in the Hole.
According to Paul Slovic, who conducted research into the impact of the Alan Kurdi photograph, we remember these pictures because emotional reactions create empathy. If we can identify with the people in the picture, through concepts such as the Identifiable victim affect, then we can be moved to action. And nothing moves us so much as an emotional story.
Arvid Erlandsson, a contributor to the Slovic report concluded that…
“The main take-home message of this paper is that emotional reactions … can influence actual donation behavior strongly,”
Erlandsson went on to suggest that charities and governments could try harder to channel “emotional reactions” into their fundraising efforts.
The thing is charities have been using emotional impact to raise money since the 19th century, in ways which are still very much in use today.
The portraits of Florence and Eliza Holder that were produced for Dr. Barnado’s Orphanage in 1876 are an example of images that were made using Dr. Barnado’s “artistic fiction” to garner sympathy and raise funds for his home.
In the picture of the girls taken when they were put into Barnado’s care by their mother, Florence is shown with her sister Eliza (above, left). Her arm is protectively placed over Eliza’s shoulder and her expression is one of a caring fortitude. Her hair is combed, her dress, though dirty, is straight and she is wearing a pair of boots.
It’s a picture made for the archives. This is how these children appeared when they came into the orphanage. It’s not a picture for which to raise funds. For that a more dramatic picture is needed, one that fits the basic Barnado salvation plot.
The picture “artistically” used to illustrate Florence “before” she came into Barnado’s care portrays her with unkempt hair, a rumpled dress and without boots (above, right). There’s a blanket on the floor suggesting she’s sleeping on the streets, and the rumpled dress suggests sexual abuse. She’s holding a newspaper, suggesting she has been selling them on the street, and her sister is nowhere in sight. Nor is her mother who, by implication, abandoned to a life of degradation amidst the gin joints and brothels of post-Dickensian London.
No wonder poor Florence looks miserable. She’s made up to look like an unloved, abused, homeless child, the kind of child one feels pity for, the kind of child that a donor’s money could save from a life on the streets. She’s a waif and a stray, a “savage” that required salvation from her neglectful mother.
So staging of images and representing fiction as photography is nothing new. Nor is the objection to these kinds of images; Barnado’s “artistic images” took center ground in a court case against the doctor in 1877, which saw him reprimanded for the “fictitious representations of destitution” he made for “the purposes of obtaining money”.
The children he photographed were presented melodramatically. Barnado showed them as innocent children that needed to be saved. The social causes of child poverty were ignored, and parents were presented as sexually promiscuous, alcohol-dependent, work-shy, neglectful savages. It wasn’t society that was to blame, it was the feckless working-class parents.
They were manipulative pictures that blocked understanding, that used pity as a lucrative, but ultimately destructive, force. Their saving grace might be that the gaze of Florence reaches out to us across time and reclaims her citizenship through photography, a citizenship denied by Barnado.
Barnado’s pictures were manipulative, but the images are also an example of the way our decisions are shaped by emotion rather than information.
Emotional reactions and the essential plots are what power many of the iconic images of photography. It’s also what powers the way photography is used in NGO fundraising by organisations such as Save the Children, Oxfam or Action Aid.
Jess Crombie is a Senior Lecturer at UAL, London, and consultant on imagery and fundraising who formerly worked for Save the Children, where she produced the People in the Pictures, a report that emphasised the need for consent, collaboration, and communication across all stages of the image-making process.
Crombie believes that there is an over-emphasis on how images are received, and that while the portrayal of poverty and its long-term effects are important, it is also where the vast majority of the debate lies, whereas the process needs an equal amount of attention. “The process leading up to the making of that image is what matters because how you undertake that process and the experience of that process for the person being photographed or their wider family is also where the ethics lie.”
“You get different stories you didn’t expect to get. For example, I was doing work with young people who had lived in care all their lives. One of them was talking at the UN General Assembly and somebody asked them what their favourite food to eat was.
The young person answered, ‘I don’t know what food I would like to eat because all I’ve eaten every day of my life is rice. Why would you even ask me that question? I’d love to taste different food but I haven’t yet so I can’t answer that question.’
That’s a story in itself that is very emotionally impactful. It’s a different kind of story that also looks at the process of what is being asked and the assumptions that we have about people and the lives they lead.
Changing the process can lead to challenging those assumptions and you also get a different kind of imagery. You have to get the process right about how you gather those stories. That means moving away from language like empowering people or giving them a voice. That’s an incredibly patronising way of looking at things, the idea that you can give people a voice. They already have a voice. What you can do is provide a platform for that voice to be heard. It’s a mindset shift as much as anything.”
The problem for NGOs is how to shift a mindset that is very much engaged in fundraising and institutionally set in using a particular kind of imagery. Things haven’t moved on too much from the basic techniques Barnado used, and there’s a degree of resistance to challenging those techniques.
“There’s the assumption that large chunks of the public aren’t capable of understanding complex stories and complex situations, but what we’ve found when we’ve tested more complex stories is you get slightly lower levels of engagement, but the engagement you do get lasts longer and has a much greater retention.”
Just as with the images of Oscar, Valeria and Alan, the question for NGOs is: how do you keep people’s interest?
“In the NGO sector, retention is the golden ticket. It’s easy to get £5 because somebody has seen a crying child, but to get someone to do something after that is much more difficult. You want the cycle of interest and action to continue and longer, more complex 360-degree stories can help do that. That gives deeper engagement, people care more.”
Crombie is also eager to go beyond the basic dichotomies of good and bad, innocent and guilty, deserving and undeserving. These polar opposites have their roots in the Victorian (and Colonialist) philanthropy exemplified by Barnado and others. but they are still apparent today.
Behind the façade of the innocent Holder girls, there is a guilty working class. Behind the deserving migrant who deserves our sympathy, there is the undeserving migrant who deserves everything that is coming to them.
There is huge resistance to stories that challenge these embedded narratives of the powerless, the innocent, the deserving. Yet these are narratives that actually fail to tell real stories of real people.
“Basically the reason we did the People in the Pictures was because we were on the Syrian border and all these kids were coming up to us showing us these ligature marks and cigarette burns where they had been tortured,” says Crombie.
“And then they started sharing this horrendous footage of mass killings and people being beaten to death and they were saying download it, download it, tell people what’s going on. So we did, but we couldn’t use it until we’d verified it. It turned out some of the data we’d been given had been filmed from YouTube and had happened in other places. There’s this colonial and academic idea of the downtrodden and poor being this tabula rasa of unknowing innocence, but it demonstrated that these kids knew how information worked, they knew what was happening, and they were trying to change opinion. These kids were suffering, they’d lost their families, they’d been tortured, but they are also agents and they have a powerful voice. And that doesn’t get talked about because it doesn’t fit into that positive and negative, that idea of being a good victim. And they’re not good victims—nobody is. They’re real people. And those kids were desperate, and those are the kind of stories that you should be able to tell. But it’s incredibly difficult.”
Crombie uses the idea of the 360-degree story and ties this to having people tell their own stories. “During the research for People in the Pictures, we heard again and again that ‘We just want to tell our own stories ourselves’ and we tried to unpack that in terms of what that meant.”
This feedback led to experimentation and the How we Survived project with Patrick Willocq. For this project, Willocq worked with children who had fled fighting in Burundi and were living in a camp in Tanzania and recreated in true collaborative form their memories, their hopes, their dreams.
One image shows a boy called Anicet who wants to be a doctor, but not just any doctor. He wants to be a malaria doctor. Willocq worked with the kids to visualise their stories and then sets were built.
“It was a true collaboration, where Patrick Willocq was going in the camp for six weeks and every single bit of the sets is made by a joiner, a seamstress, a set painter, and the kids are drawing their own pictures and directing the overall event. They’re saying things like ‘no, the cloud has to go there! Look when I drew the bomb, it looked like that. You’re doing it wrong.’ It was really fun and engaging, a really collaborative process.”
Pleasure is at the heart of this project; there’s pleasure in the making and pleasure in the viewing. But pleasure does not preclude a meaningful story. It’s a picture made in a refugee camp with 30,000 people (you can see it in the background of the photo above), but the image speaks of ambition, dreams, a past and a future and it shows the vibrant creativity of everybody who played a part in its making. And it looks amazing.
“At the other end of the scale you have DRTV, Direct Response Television, with one-and-a-half minute ads that are so polarising. That’s the crying babies and that’s what raises money,” says Crombie.
Crombie is engaged in a gradual process of inserting different voices and more engaged elements into these DRTV ads and changing the process of how images are both made and used, but it’s a difficult process in a conservative field that likes to stick with what it knows.
The problem for NGOs is they are stuck in a feedback loop on what images to use. Data collection and the decisions of focus groups help dictate what images will be used in a campaign.
“I remember a focus group where they showed a picture of children by a railway track and people were saying, ‘oh that child’s not skinny enough’ or ‘that child’s got a nice skirt on.’ And they’re obviously not okay, but people are listening to these views and the temptation is to use a picture of an even skinnier child because that’s what will get the ‘right’ reaction.
They don’t take into account the bias of a focus group, the expectations of a focus group to give controversial answers or who takes part in a focus group. There’s also a tendency to focus on the most extreme comments and act on those and take those as the most representative views of the many rather than the few. There’s a data collection problem in the sector which reinforces the tendency to use images that are stereotyped and lack nuance.”
The problems and solutions that Crombie is talking about can be applied to the images of Oscar and Valeria Martinez and beyond. The question is how can one broaden the range of photojournalism to examine the 360-degree story where political, economic and personal situations in El Salvador, Mexico and the United States are considered.
Partly that can be seen as a budgetary concern. The well-funded historical photo-essay of the Sunday Times or Life Magazine is a thing of the past.
But it’s also a question of rethinking both the process of making images and stripping away our preconceptions of what an image should look like and do. Just as Crombie is eager to move away from the polarised narratives which have a momentary impact, so photojournalism and documentary needs ways of telling stories better.
This means getting the process right, engaging with the people in the pictures and going beyond the quick emotional fix. The problem is: how do you do that when basic storytelling still matters and when there is the temptation to simplify things into polarities of good and evil, right and wrong?
This is the sixth in Colin Pantall’s year-long series of articles on truth, ethics and storytelling in photography. Click here to read the introduction or read the rest of the series by clicking below:
- Beautiful Deaths: On acknowledgement, narrative, and the representation of death in photography
- Hoda Afshar, the individual, and their story
- Remembering the Past, Remembering the Present
- A Guide to Landscape, Power and Climate Change
- Emotional Pictures: Sad Faces, Fake Smiles and Angry Photographers
