ABSTRACT
The modern figure of the refugee emerged as a problem within a Cold War framework of geopolitical displacement, which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was tasked with overseeing and ameliorating. Although responses to refugees have shifted markedly over the past half century, the UNHCR has consistently embraced photography as an instrument of documentation. While its projects once drew on a tradition of concerned documentary photography that often portrayed refugees as anonymous victims, the UNHCR has recently adopted the methods of visual ethnography as a means for subjects to tell their own stories. With this shift, the commission seeks to make refugees visible. The work of Syrian refugee Hany Al Moulia, a legally blind photographer, puts pressure on the UNHCR’s earnest avowals, however. His photographs, in presenting a “blind” way of seeing, respond to the indifference that has largely marked public reactions to refugees. Reading the work of Al Moulia in relation to UNHCR photographic projects, this chapter sketches a cultural and political history of the representation of refugees.
