ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the camera's power to represent people, and the choices that photojournalists must make in depicting situations where they encounter difference or 'otherness'. It uses examples from the history of British 'colonial photography' to illustrate some of the potential pitfalls involved in the representation of race in the present day. When the power of photographic representation and its presumed transparency intersect in the public space of the media, the stakes are often very high indeed. The chapter focuses on the question of race: how the colonial legacy has shaped the photographic representation of race in the nineteenth century and today. The coverage of African famine by Western photojournalists has proven in particular to be a minefield of stereotypes and entrenched visual cliche, because it is an area in which so many questions of power and representation collide.
