Making the Unrepresentable Representable. Photojournalistic Storytelling of Humanitarian Crises from Ukraine

Visuality has played a major role in communicating humanitarian crises; photojournalism seems to be the most efficient means of communication in depicting humanitarian disasters, receiving the task of representing the unrepresentable. Photographic images are considered cultural objects useful in the construction of collective consciousness, but they also embody a culturally symbolic icon, available for the generations working on rebuilding their collective memory, processing and healing from their historic and violent trauma [Hariman & Lucaites 2007; Alexander 2018]. However, photojournalism has been accused of sensationalism, which incites the people’s morbid curiosity, and criticized of becoming pain pornography, being condemned as a voyeuristic practice [Boltanski 2000; Linfield 2013]. In this case of study, the focus will be the ongoing war in Ukraine: >60 photos have been selected as sample, all depicting the consequences of the conflict on civilians. The 7 mentioned reporters, 2 women and 5 men, some independent and some associated, were active on the field since the start of the war, so the approximate time frame considered would be February 2022-July 2024. The photos have been published by traditional newspapers and news agencies, but also posted on social media and used for humanitarian and awareness-raising purposes. A sociological analysis will allow to find common patterns in the representation of Ukrainian people’s suffering, eventually determining whether different photographic testimonies can confirm or overturn the Euro-American iconographic repertoire of humanitarian images. In fact, the ideal-typical visual conventions of said representation, which play a huge role in the construction of public discourse, tend to look upon the humanitarian crises from a paternalistic and colonial point of view [Kurasawa 2015; Massari 2021]. As a result, this research could explain how the western system of information communicates humanitarian crises through photojournalism and how those representations can change the course of social identity and cultural meaning.