Global humanitarian healthcare aid’s history is intertwining with photography’s. As images of human conditions around the world circulated in the late nineteenth century, concern for welfare and imperatives to reduce human suffering swelled. Good intentions, however, were often influenced by or even embedded within the colonial enterprise that had usurped ‘the science of photography’ in the manufacture of human hierarchies. Indeed, the iconography of global humanitarian healthcare aid is often still contains traces of ‘racial type’ image and ‘exotic other’ tropes that harken back to photography’s earlier days.
Over the past 150+ years, the reliance and repurposing of stereotypes and visual shorthand has resulted in the innocent child victim becoming a metaphor for entire people or even continents being dependent on the privileged west/north.
Here are some examples of tropes used to visual represent global humanitarian healthcare’s main protagonists.
Images such as the ones below are common global humanitarian healthcare tropes: the international aid worker, normally very different in appearance than the recipient population—appearing centrally or in a position of supremacy—providing assistance to often darker-skinned recipients. White saviourism comes in the form of global actor such as these, who are in positions of privilege and almost limitless mobility. The organizations’ logos stand in for the ‘hero’ when the humanitarian actor is not present or not obviously white.
