Development Porn: NGO Imagery
by Catherine LaineMay 25th, 2007
Want to keep up with development, appropriate technology, and environment news? Subscribe to the AIDG Blog today.
Development Porn: NGO Imagery
This recent post from the THD Blog [Fair Trade Photography Battles ‘Development Pornography’] really stuck in my gut. I do most of the design/marketing work for AIDG and the issue of how to present the organization and people we work with through photography is something I struggle with all the time.
We try hard to stay away from pics that feel like development porn. First what’s a good definition of dev po (I’m just going to abbreviate it this way. I don’t want Google to get the wrong idea. ;). For me, I suppose it’s pictures that are shocking, pull on your heartstrings shamelessly and often, as Reuters puts it, “still perpetuate a colonial idea of incapable Africans [or other folks from developing nations] waiting passively for help from their white saviours”.
The one picture that we use that make us feel somewhat sketchy/exploitative in this way is the shot on our front page of the little boy. I took in 2005 and I do love it; the colors, his expression.
His name is Brandon. His auntie, Beatriz works at the Casa Guatemala, an orphanage for abused and abandoned children located on the Rio Dulce in Guatemala. I don’t remember all the details (my Spanish was shakier then). I’m not sure if he lived on site or was just there for the school day. He came by out of curiosity when we visited the site in summer 2005 to check on the biodigester AIDG had installed their in April. Pete and Benny were discussing the biodigester with Javier, one of the workers who would be using the fuel that the biodigester would generate. Brandon let me take a few shots of him. Here he is with his aunt.
What is it about the pic makes me feel a bit … you know… manipulative? It’s the fact that he is a this super-cute anime-eyed earnest-looking kid. It also makes me feel a bit naughty because but just as “Sex sells” in advertising, I know kiddies sell in development. Why did we keep it then? A big reason is that when I think of “sustainable future”, all I can think of is children either reaping the benefits or suffering the consequences of our decisions today. Yeah, it’s not a particularly innovative association. It could be called lazy even, though I think we’re using the image honestly.
It does beg the question as to whether a lot of what is now considered dev po is related to general laziness. Photo-editors and marketers are just falling back of easy associations to get their point across, wringing every last dollar out of imagery of the long-suffering developing country person until donors stop responding. They are failing to realize or underestimating the negative impact that the repetition of this type of imagery can have. For instance, when someone says Ethiopia, the first image in my head usually isn’t Haile Gebrselassie, the amazing 5,000 distance champ and world record holder [I saw him run in the UK. So so rad]. It’s famine. And I’ve got to say that despite their tireless work, many NGOs have done their target populations a serious disservice by leaving their donors with a similar knee-jerk association.
Let me know what you think? If you think we’re skirting that line too much, I’d really like to know.
Another interesting thing that this brings up is the relationship of the photo’s subject to the photographer. In the post, they mention the following fact: “Upwards of 90% of the images of the majority world that are seen in the western media are produced by white photographers from the USA or Europe.”
When I was in Cap-Haitien, Haiti last summer, I took various pictures of people who were involved in the charcoal training workshop, as well as folks who were on site. I took a few shots of these 2 sisters. Here is the pic they posed for me [a Haitian-American female.]
Here is how the posed for Dan, an engineer who was also on the trip [a white American male] a few minutes later.
Of interest:
Imaging Famine
THE ETHICS OF IMAGERY: HAVE WE LEARNT FROM OUR MISTAKES? [MS doc]
Kijiji Vision
Different tenor.
June 11th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
You seemed to consider the differences between the two photos as obvious.
Please help me understand what differences you see between the two?
June 11th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
I’m sorry, but your photos aren’t as good as Dan’s - your background is way too busy, and the composition of the subjects isn’t that good, but if you cropped Dan’s photo from just above the tallest girl’s head to just below the girl in the foreground’s hand, you have a dynamic group arrangement with interesting use of foreground and background subjects. Also, you’ve underexposed Brandon’s face - you should have used spot metering when there is back lighting like that.
June 12th, 2007 at 4:53 am
@Shooter. Oh goodness, I’m not holding up these three shots as examples of my photography skills! They’re just pictures I took in our overall library that illustrate interactions that my colleagues and I have had with people we meet/work with in the field. I’m not a photographer or even a dedicated hobbyist for that matter. We just need to document our work so we all do our part. I should pay more attention to composition, but more often then not, I take the picture and do the cropping and color correction in Photoshop. The pics in this post are the raw images. Point taken though. I could make more of an effort to learn the trade.
I agree with you that Dan’s pic is a good one. The girls are really beautiful. Mine is familiar, sort of like a throwaway vacation snap you might take of friends.
@tami. The difference is all in their body language. In Dan’s, there is something slightly coquettish about their posture and regard. Basically, that look on their faces is one that a young pretty teenager might give a young attractive man.
June 13th, 2007 at 2:31 am
I am surprised but glad that there is already terminology for the discomfort I, a black male born and raised in the UK and Canada, feel when I see the “dev po” that shows up on tv and in print. It is an embarrasment to me. I change the channel or look away when I see these appeals to give aid that show primitive poor brown-skinned peoples. I have nothing else to add. The true depth of the issue is overwhelming, I am aware that there have been some calls from some African leaders to reject foreign aid but my knowledge is sketchy. What I do know is that pictures of poor black kids in Africa in need of handouts from the west embarrass me, and are probably only marginally representative of life in the region.
June 19th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
@mars You know, I think most people of color have that same reaction. Seeing people who look like you portrayed “in that way” and pretty much only “in that way”, gets to you after a while.
I wonder if marketers realize that if they want affluent socially conscious POC’s to start being more involved in their campaigns either financially or otherwise, they need to use different imagery.
Similarly, every time I hear people describe Haiti as the poorest nation in this hemisphere or land of voodoo, it makes me sad. Is there no other way to describe the nation but these hackneyed old standbys?
June 19th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Oh and on the aid question, this piece is worth a read: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/business/yourmoney/17stream.html
June 19th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
you as a Haitian American woman took a pic of two Haitian teenage girls.
your friend a white american MAN took a pic and they played up to the camera.
I deplore the idea of Dev Porn and exploitation but your point about these two pics only proves that teenage girls are more likely to play up to the camera when being snpped by a foriegn man than a local woman.
Nothing more.
It’s the way teenage girls are the world over.
June 19th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
@ Polx: True. Teenage girls ham it up for boys. Nothing earth-shattering there.
I’m just pointing out that in addition to the style/biases of the photographer and photo editor, the human interaction between the photographer and subject are an important part of the final picture that gets served up.
Yeah it’s sort of obvious when you are sitting in your art class looking at photos that Alfred Stieglitz took of his lover, Georgia O’keefe, but I don’t think people think about any of those things too much when they are on the receiving end of marketing materials.
I was at a Human Rights and Media workshop where Kathy Ryan, photo editor at The New York Times Magazine, was a panelist. She was telling us that when the Magazine does a piece, they will often hire a certain photographer because they know they will get a certain type of picture and they want to evoke a certain kind of response.
The photo you ultimately get is one of an infinite variety of the possible shots/treatments. Not only will a certain photog tend to take a particular type of pic, but he/she may be able to bring out particular emotion from their subjects. Given that you, the viewer, generally only get one look, that is important even if the reaction the photog is getting is fairly predictable. (This of course is not all conveyed in the above post.)
For me, it was the first time that I had experienced this, given that I’m not a pro photog and my friends and I generally are on more even footing with people we do photograph regularly (i.e. each other and our families).
Totally obvious and predictable, but it wigged us all out nonetheless when you added on top of it the race, gender and class stuff.
December 15th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
You might want to look into / read up on some of the concepts discussed by Sarah Pink with regards to visual ethnography and anthropology.
March 1st, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Ms Laine. I like how you have advance the idea of “dev. po”. Those in development must strive to accurately depict projects and peoples in the places we work. In my work a few years ago in the Artibonite valley, we often were discouraged by farmers from taking thier pics..they were not dressed in thier finest, and they had an idea that the photos woould be used to raise money… and they wanted no part of it.
Oh and yes, teenage girls ‘posed ‘ and hammed all the time, no different than teenagers in Canada.
cheers
July 8th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Hey Cat,
I think its really interesting that you chose to talk about the photo of Brandon because when I first saw it on the cover of AIDG I got a bit weirded out too. I think it was because, those eyes, as a visitor to the site, having those eyes surrounded by all this “you can help” “donate now” media, it felt a bit like a guilt trip. I think that weirded me out because that’s not how I think of AIDG and we certainly didn’t relate to locals that way when I was actually working there in Guatemala.
I’m glad to see that you’re aware of the connotation of the images you put up, and I think you do a great job too. Just a bit of feedback, I really enjoyed getting to know more behind the picture, and having the other photo somehow put the first one into context, I could imagine your interactions outside of the photo, I could imagine Brandon as a real person.
Cheers!
Jesse
July 27th, 2008 at 8:25 am
I stumbled on this post a bit late and thought I would just add a quick perspective from a private sector professional with life and professional experiences in Central and West Africa, Haiti, and the US. (I am Haitian-American, by the way.)
First, I believe that some of the NGO “marketing” geared to individual donors is simply not targeted to people like me, i.e. professionals originally from developing countries with enough disposable income to give to worthy causes and with an interest in the development of their countries of origin. I certainly don’t recognize the Haiti or the Senegal or the Congo I know in the imagery used by such organizations and am instantly turned off by it. On the other hand, organizations more focused on building and teaching broadly-speaking seem to use images and discourses that are more reflective of the reality I know.
Second, I am extremely sensitive to the manipulation of children as a means to further a cause, no matter how noble. That goes for the World Vision-type infomercials on television as well shots such as Brandon’s photo which you discuss. My experience here in Senegal (which matches what I have encountered in many other countries) is that people want to have a say in how they are portrayed. As a result, as a (very) amateur photographer, I always ask for consent before taking a picture and share the picture, once taken, to make sure they are comfortable with the end result. With respect to children, I ask permission from an adult before taking any picture, even though children will usually start hamming it up the minute they see my camera.
Finally, the fact that the imagery of developing countries is being produced primarily by (white) Western photographers is certainly a factor in the perception of developing countries globally, with Africa (and Haiti) routinely viewed as charity basket cases. Part of the problem is that, the trends in Africa over the last 10 to 15 years of economic development, the slow but steady rise of a middle-class, and the gradual move towards democracy with all its imperfection and occasional problems (certainly in most of the countries I am familiar with) are just not interesting to many NGO’s. As globalization pushes these middle-classes to look and behave more or less like their Western counterparts, these middle classes have no “appeal” from a marketing standpoint to NGO’s who earn their living from addressing poverty-related issues. I would argue the contrary, that NGO’s should revisit their message to show that progress is being made (whether they contributed to it or not) but that it is not enough and that some people still need help. At least such a message would refresh the now-stale and counter-productive message we seem to get that Africa has not progressed at all in the past 30 to 40 years which explains the donor fatigue that we are experiencing. But then again, what do I know? I am only a private sector guy, who is viewed with much suspicion by many (white) NGO bosses in the countries where I have worked, including Haiti, the country of my parents.
To conclude, I tended to view NGO’s in a negative light, partly because of their “clumsy” marketing, partly because I connected to the communities I lived in directly by trying to be as “local” as I could be myself. However, I am cognizant of the fact that some NGO’s do have a real impact and are not simply obsessed with maintaining or maximizing their overhead. Those tend to be more effective in how they communicate their mission, both in their discourse and imagery, and have developed a track record which matches their rhetoric. These are the ones I support.
September 24th, 2008 at 10:09 am
“Development porn” - what a great expression. Like the traditiinal media’s approach in australia - SEX SELLS - so in the development sector it seems that ‘MISERY SELLS’.
A case in point … When I worked for an international children’s charity in East Timor, we had an abundance of good and positive news to report. However, I was horrified at the ‘tears, poverty and misery’ style of photographs one of my visiting New Zealand colleagues was directed to take by her Communications Manager - and their purpose, to raise more funds in their next appeal!
But it’s not all bad news. There are global photo competitions that try to capture the positive impact of development, such as the recently closed:
* Development Gateway Foundation Photo Contest
; and
* 2008 CGAP Microfinance Photo Contest
.
And Irish NGOs like Comhlámh are playing a leading role in trying raise standards for the development sector and combat the photo-exploitation that disquiets so many of us ‘in the field’.
Change starts from within and I believe it is up to development leaders and workers to lobby and exert greater influence on their marketing and communications people - and ultimately their Boards of Management - to reflect their work in a manner that is empowering, respectful, dignified and uplifting to the human spirit.
After all, isn’t that what development is all about?