ABSTRACT
Humanitarian organisations have always struggled to settle the question of how to visualise suffering and how to inspire our feelings and actions on it. One of their challenges is to safeguard the legitimacy of their activities in an increasingly competitive market. In this chapter, the author addresses the question–Why are visual appeals to the morality of solidarity set up for a perpetual failure of legitimacy?– that sheds light onto broader ethico-political tensions of humanitarianism as a practice of power suspended between empowering and subjecting, humanizing and othering those it cares for. She briefly comments on these, by way of exploring the two most prominent historical forms of humanitarian visuality: negative and positive humanitarian appeals. The moralisation strategies of "positive" appeals seek to produce a new form of agency that avoids the evils of "negative" appeals.
