Witnessing famine: the testimonial work of famine photographs and anti-colonial spectatorship

Abstract

The scholarly discussions of photo-documentation as a human rights practice have typically regarded images as a means of making suffering public and provoking affective responses as well as remedial actions. Overwhelmingly, however, liberal humanitarian images have affirmed the cultural imaginary of the isolated subject–victim and the sympathetic, yet privileged, spectator. This article attempts to complicate our understanding of the trajectory of humanitarian photodocumentation by considering the famine photographs of WW Hooper and Sunil Janah taken during the 1870s Madras famine and the 1940s Bengal famine, respectively. The author argues that, in contrast to Hooper’s photographs, which function as the genealogical predecessor to liberal humanitarian photojournalism, Janah’s photographs allow the possibility of witnessing as activism and model anti-colonial ways of seeing.