The images speak for themselves? Reading refugee coffee‐table books

Abstract

The practice of collecting photographs of refugees in ‘coffee‐table books’ is a practice of framing and thus inflecting the meanings of those images. The ‘refugee coffee‐table books’ discussed here each approach their topic with a particular style and emphasis. Nonetheless, while some individual images offer productive readings which challenge stereotypes of refugees, the format of the collections and the accompanying written text work to produce spectacle rather than empathy in that they implicitly propagate a world view divided along imperialist lines, in which the audience is expected to occupy the position of privileged viewing agent while refugees are positioned as viewed objects.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writing of this paper was supported by a Monash University Postgraduate Publications Award. Thanks are due to Denise Cuthbert and Ashley Woodward for their help in revising earlier versions, to the UNHCR for permission to reproduce Figures 1 and 2, and to the Australian Picture Library for permission to reproduce Figures 3 to 6. The Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research and the Faculty of Arts, Monash University, gave much‐appreciated assistance with copyright fees.

Notes

1. ‘What is this humanity?’ asks Susan Sontag. ‘It is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs’ (1979: 111). The inauguration of this tradition of photography might be considered Edward Steichen's ‘Family of Man’ exhibition of 1955. The founders of the genre of socially concerned photography are often named as Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, whose work photographing America's poor was explicitly linked to an agenda of social reform (Rosler 1989; Solomon‐Godeau 1991). As I imply here, a third precursor for the practice of refugee photography might be named as ‘colonial photography’ – the practice of photographing those defined in developmental, racial and geographic terms as ‘other’.

2. Indeed, I will admit to being ambivalent about these books. They raise many emotional responses. Many of the images fascinate me, and some seem paradoxically to portray the very unimaginability of atrocity and horror. Some leave me feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed with what I am asked to look at, as though I have unintentionally intruded on someone's privacy. At other times am less involved. I see what I expected so see, or, too often, I find myself simply wanting to buy a Leica and be able to produce such beautiful images myself. Finally, I sometimes find myself disappointed, as if the photographs promised a sense of encounter that they have failed to produce, leaving me aware that I still know nothing about these people: who they are, what they would say to me if we were to meet. This last feeling, I think, is productive in that it makes me aware of my own will to knowledge. Why would I expect a visual image to provide me with such knowledge, and why, indeed, should I think that I am entitled to know and see the personal lives of these strangers, simply because they are refugees? This article springs from all these feelings, but it is especially this last feeling that I do not find echoed in the commentaries and reviews that accompany the images. While the effects of voyeurism and spectatorship are sometimes debated, I find no questioning of the transparency or informativeness of the images, or of the right of the implicitly Western viewer to knowledge and visual access. In other words I find these books silent on the issue of the culture of imperialism, and its contemporary manifestation in a worldview in which the right of the ‘developed’ to assess and intervene in the destinies of the less privileged is taken for granted.

3. Valerie Holman (2002) argues that news photography during the Second World War was influential in constructing the familiar features of the refugee. Liisa Malkki concurs, writing:

The visual representation of refugees appears to have become a singularly translatable and mobile mode of knowledge about them. Indeed, it is not far‐fetched to say that a vigorous, transnational, largely philanthropic traffic in images and visual signs of refugeeness has gradually emerged in the last half‐century. Pictures of refugees are now a key vehicle in the elaboration of a transnational social imagination of refugees. (Malkki 1997, 234)

Terence Wright (2000) notes that much of the resultant imagery draws on religious tropes, an insight which seems particularly applicable to the work of Salgado discussed below.

4. Of course, refugees are not present in the photographic text as corporeal or subjective entities. Hence such a text is not exactly the same as an exposition which tells the reader about an object, such as a work of art, which is physically present in a museum. It is more like an ethnographic or archaeological museum exhibit which, by showing objects made or used by a certain ‘kind of people’, apparently tells the reader about those people. Books that tell about refugees by showing pictures of refugees use expository evidence one or more steps removed from the people the books purport to show. As will become clear in this article, this distinction is an important one. For now it is necessary to note that the effectiveness of these books as exposition – as display in which we seem to be able to see what is being argued – already relies on the assumption that a photograph is a mimetic representation of external ‘reality’ – the ‘truth effect’ of the photograph.

5. Those interested in the point of view of one person who identifies as a refugee can visit the website of Osam Altaee, an Iraqi refugee living in Lebanon, at http://www.unhcr.info/human‐buttons.htm. ‘Sam’ objects passionately to the use of photographs of refugee women and children on buttons asking for donations on the UNCHR's website. He finds the pictures humiliating and offensive to the dignity of the people depicted, and to Islamic values, and believes that ‘the UNHCR have worked hard to establish a deep‐rooted connection between poverty and refugees’ – a connection which he notes makes people surprised that he himself has access to the Internet.

6. Liisa Malkki (1992, 1995, 1997) has described in detail the way in which the concept of ‘refugee’ as an identifiable kind of person has been constructed through the discourses of international law, aid agencies, development studies, anthropology, refugee studies and the media. Her 1997 essay ‘Speechless Emissaries’ offers an incisive critique of the way aid workers expect refugees to be helpless victims, and the importance of visual images propagated by the media in producing such expectations. Holman (2002) also identifies passivity and poverty as significant tropes in Second World War depictions of refugees in France.

7. Hage defines the term ‘Third World‐looking people’ as that which ‘sums up best the way the dominant Whites classify those ‘ethnics’ with very low national capital and who are invariably constructed as a ‘problem’ of some sort within all White‐dominated societies’ (1998, 59).

8. Rosler's critique of documentary photography was originally published in 1981, and Solomon‐Godeau's in 1987. According to Derrick Price, such critiques have resulted in many photographers abandoning both documentary photography as a socially concerned project and the belief that it can portray ‘truth’ (2000, 111). The field of refugee photography seems to be an exception to this movement. The criticisms seem only to have had the effect of occasionally making refugee photographers or their supporters defensive, as discussed below in relation to Exodus. It is interesting to note also that Price associates colour with the new forms of documentary, linking the use of black and white with a discourse of authenticity. The texts examined here remain resolutely monochrome.

9. Anne Maxwell (1999) discusses ways in which photography was used within the colonial project to construct and reinforce certain images of the colonised ‘other’ in opposition to the ‘European’. Anne McClintock (1995) points out that photography is also implicated in the development of imperialist epistemologies based on a voyeuristic desire to visually ‘penetrate’ the mystery of the colonised world.

10. For further analysis of the operation of imperialist tropes in contemporary refugee discourse, see Szörényi 2004.

11. In an extended contribution to this debate, Jonathan Friday (2000) has argued that the display of beautiful images of disaster, injustice or suffering can be morally justified if it also ‘manages to transform the human evils it depicts into valuable meaning’ (2000, 358) – for example, ‘to make a point about the human condition’ (2000, 360). This seems to beg the question as to what a ‘valuable meaning’ is and who decides. I argue here that especially when the project also claims to ‘speak for’ those on display, such a focus on meaning can amount to an appropriation and a disavowal of the experience of the visible subjects in the name of the edification of the audience.

12. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons images from Migrations could not be reproduced here. Readers are encouraged to view the book itself, which will in any case offer a better sense of the rhetorical effects of this vast collection of photographs.

13. Terence Wright (2004) describes the repeated use of very similar imagery in his analysis of media coverage of Afghan refugees after the bombing of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001.

14. This division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is based on the assumption that refugees cannot also be audiences of texts about refugees. Given the percentage of people in the English‐speaking world who are in a position to self‐identify as ‘refugees’ or descendents of refugees, this assumption is by no means self‐evident. Rather, it is produced by the kind of discursive distancing that I am describing here, in which refugees are constructed as ‘other’ and ‘over there’ by definition.

15. It should not be necessary to point out that there are very valid reasons, not limited to the ethics of the encounter between photographer and subject, why an asylum seeker may not wish their photograph to be distributed. Such publicity, if it falls into the hands of the wrong authorities, can be very dangerous for the asylum seeker themselves or for their family.

16. Refugees and asylum seekers sometimes make this decision to sacrifice their own sensitivities in order to alert the world to their predicament – which does not render it less of a sacrifice. My point is that such acts of sacrifice are not even alluded to in the texts described here, and the visual availability of people defined as refugees is thus effectively naturalised.

17. A more detailed discussion of Forced Out is outside the scope of this essay. It differs significantly from those discussed here in that it includes a large component of written commentary, including some by self‐identified refugees. I would argue that such inclusion of refugees as ‘authors’ significantly refigures the structure of the text. Nonetheless, as indicated by the subtitle, The Agony of the Refugee in Our Time, the overall aesthetic of Forced Out, and particularly its visual tone, is one of sensationalism.