ABSTRACT
In 1905, Mark Twain published King Leopold’s Soliloquy, a spiteful indictment of King Leopold II’s abuses of the people of the Congo Free State. Twain’s text was sold with the purpose of “furthering the effort for relief of the people of the Congo State” (Twain [1905] 1970). Specifically, it lent support to the Congo Reform Association (CRA), an early humanitarian organisation, which pursued the goal of stopping the region’s “crimes against humanity”. While his words are scathing, Twain’s inclusion of brutal but well-crafted images help to show both the brutality of the situation and the suffering of the Congolese population. One of the Soliloquy’s powerful visuals is a collage of nine frames, each of which displays a portrait of a Congolese individual wrapped in a white sheet. Despite the variety of faces, genders and ages, the most notable part of these images is not the subject’s likeness, personality or individuality, but rather the severed limb that they display. Missing hands are shown in high contrast against the cloth that wraps their body, conceals their nudity and provides a background to highlight their absent appendage (Sliwinski 2006; Peffer 2008). Such images of atrocity captured by missionaries, researchers and traders added a seemingly unquestionable edge of visual reality to the quest to
expose and topple Leopold II’s regime. Writing sardonically from Leopold II’s point of view, Twain contextualised the role of the camera saying,
The camera, while no longer as novel as it was a hundred years earlier in its ability to mimic reality and show the effects of humanitarian suffering, nonetheless continues to be a central tool of aid agency advocacy. Over the past century, international humanitarian aid and advocacy have increased markedly. The number of international agencies has grown from just over 400 to more than 25,000 today (Kelly 2009). However, certain forms of visual representations employed by aid organisations have remained surprisingly static despite the exponential change in the number of agencies, the shifts in the dynamics of conflicts and changes in the types of atrocities humanitarians endeavour to salve. What I refer to here as “humanitarian crisis images” indicates photographs created and published by aid agencies and journalists for the purpose of drawing attention to ongoing emergencies. Importantly, this category does not reflect all humanitarian images, which span representations intended to show need, salvation, aid-helped survivors and the broader situational context (Graham 2013). Rather, humanitarian crisis images focus on photographs that reflect the human outcomes of violence, conflict and war.1 In contemporary aid agency discourse, such images fall within the labels of both “urgence” and “plaidoyer”2 – indicating that the photographs pursue the goal of visually representing the given “need” in order to obtain immediate humanitarian relief, as opposed to longer term development.
