Susan Sontag said in 2003 that watching disasters from a distance is part of the quintessence of modern life. And the truth is, none of us can argue with it. It is enough to watch a news broadcast, or the long string of posts on Facebook, to realize with surprise how much and how deeply ingrained in our everyday life the “image of the less fortunate” regardless of the force which plunged him into suffering.
Grown old men begging for a piece of bread, barefoot and hungry children smiling naively in front of a pile of rubble they call “home”, uprooted families, wounded people, lost souls hope, crushed by the fury of nature or life. Emotional, controversial or just plain painful topics. Some leave us as careless as the beggar on the street corner that we’ve seen so often that we almost don’t notice him anymore. Others make our heart clench and our eyelids often struggle over barely contained tears. And often the difference lies only in the art with which it is put before our eyes, the story.
Although pain and suffering have existed since the beginning of time, humanitarian photography was truly born in the second half of the 19th century, once attitudes towards disease and poverty took a major turn from accepting placid, to the will to change something. Because it cannot be called humanitarian photography, except that image created as a testimony of the determination to act and to cause others to act.
Photo source: Kelly Short
After two decades, humanitarian photography today has its own history and its own professionals. People like Stephanie Sinclair, Jessica Dimmock, Luca Catalano Gonzaga, Andrew McConnell, Jeffrey Chapman, Mia Baker, Karl Grobl and many more. Some use the title of humanitarian photographers (“humanitarian photographers”), others have remained under the name of photojournalists. Most agree, however, that humanitarian photography is not taught at university and is not a job you pick off a list. It is an art that chooses you and a career where the soul means more than the talent to find an interesting setting.
In a world full of ideal images and garish colors, humanitarian photography strives to bring the value of reality back to light. Through stories where life often hangs on a thread of hope and a hand outstretched to help, images that should always make us think, have a real effect only when the frames manage to attract attention. By composition, by colors or lack thereof, by people and situations. Captured in a deserted field, in fresh ruins or in a slum corner, often in difficult conditions and in questionable safety, humanitarian photographs fight everyday side by side with fashion pictures and advertising posters for a place in the eyes of the beholder. .
And if you think that long separations from loved ones and endless journeys to inhospitable areas are the greatest challenges of the photographer meant to appeal to humanity, you will be surprised. Because the cornerstone in this field is the fine balance between the emotions that the photographer allows himself to feel and the distance, he needs so that his hand does not tremble in front of the story that moves us to tears, hundreds of kilometers away distance.
Written by: Ioana Spiridon