Other People’s Pain in Visual Communication

This presentation addresses the question of crisis through examples of visual communication of pain and suffering. First, my starting point is that images of bodies in pain in the news media are becoming increasingly more ‘real’, unprocessed and immediate, given especially the role of social media. Second, I review the literature in media studies and outline the dominant themes in the analysis of representations of pain: the truth and reality debate (focusing on the spectacular aspects of media reports on wars, Baudrillard 1991), the aesthetics debate (examining the pornification of horror and violence) and the ethics debate (how witnessing distant suffering impacts compassion, Boltanski, 1999, Moeller, 1999, Chouliaraki 2008). Third, I use examples of dead children in news media images to argue for the need to go beyond these debates in order to consider the visual language of how bodies are used as evidence of suffering. I discuss the question of whether the visibility of body, flesh and injury serves to humanize or de-humanize the exposed bodies. I argue that the differential exposure of the vulnerable human body is not simply representation of ‘reality’ but production of cultural difference. I pose the question of whether providing ‘evidence’ of other people’s crisis is a process that defeats the intention to humanize these ‘other people’.