ABSTRACT
My focus in this chapter is the cultural practice of looking at humanitarian images.1 More specifically, I examine a social disposition of privilege, which I term ‘the predicament of spectatorship’. This predicament will be well known to most people living in the Global North, referring as it does to the ways in which we respond, or fail to respond, to distant suffering presented to us by the media. The questions central to the predicament of spectatorship are about how to live with and act on the awareness of the immense suffering of others, and of the global injustices and inequalities, testified to by this suffering. How can we look, and how can we not look? If we look away, we might feel that we are engaging in some kind of escapism, a disavowal of our own situation in the world. If we look, we are likely to experience a kind of impotence, an experience of ourselves as passive voyeurs. Being moved by humanitarian images, how do we come to act, and what might constitute an act in the face of a humanitarian crisis somewhere else? The predicament of being a spectator is closely related to the predicament of being privileged. Being a spectator is itself a function of some kind of privilege.
