Images at war: photography, gender and humanitarian aid (NWO VENI project):
Press photography often reduces geopolitical conflicts from local or regional political disasters into isolated, simplified, and safely communicable spectacles of atrocity. In war coverage, images of non-Western women in particular regularly function as symbols of the degeneracy and hopelessness of the oppressed, obscuring social and political subjectivities. NGOs such as the Red Cross also often use still photographs of women, informing public understandings of war, peace, victims and perpetrators.
The main road of scholarship on photography capturing war and conflict has focused on the empathic responses of the Western audiences to the general category of ‘trauma photography’ (Baer, 2002; Moeller, 1999; Sontag, 2003), rather than on institutionally-distributed image-making that produces contemporary notions of identity, citizenship and sovereignty.
The goal of this project is to produce a set of representative case studies analysing gender as a key component in armed conflict press coverage, and to create a framework of visual analysis that can be applied both to the coverage of conflict zones and the use of this coverage in humanitarian relief campaigns. Located in photography studies and using theories of representation and gender, this study is the first to provide a systematic analysis of photographs of women from the wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq and their use in press and in fundraising appeals. Building upon archival research, visual analysis and discourse analysis, I discern recurrent tropes in the representation of women in these three conflicts (e.g. mourning women, veiled women, civilian women facing soldiers). Subsequently, I examine which tropes reoccur in aid campaigns by several NGOs and how they are transformed to fit the organizational codes and objectives of those NGOs. A better understanding of the images of women in war can contribute to an increased awareness of the mediated character of conflict coverage that sways opinions regarding armed conflicts.
