For those who don't know me, I've been passionate about documentary photography for years, and even more so about the kind that uses images to tell the story of realities and places that we Europeans find so intriguing, places that for years were seen as exotic and outside the contemporary world.
I don't want to write to you as an industry insider, that would be a dream, but let's be honest: the photojournalism we saw in the second half of the 20th century no longer exists, market logic has swallowed it whole, the field has been complicit in neo-colonial visions for years, and even now we're still asking ourselves what the right way to represent the Other might be.
For years now, because of global and migration crises and wars, we've seen suffering peoples represented more and more, if that's even a fair generalization, though I don't feel it's the right term.
To understand how we got here, it's worth taking a step back. Photography entered newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century and changed forever the way we see the world: for the first time, the ordinary person could learn about events far from their own street, their own village, through what was described as a true "window on the world." But this window was never neutral: from its earliest decades, the world of images was shaped according to the interests of those who owned the means to distribute them, industry, finance, governments, becoming at once a tool of knowledge and of propaganda.
The very idea that a photograph is "objective" is, in the end, an illusion. In 1967, during the Katanga war, the same photograph of two bodies hanging from a tree was published by two European weeklies with two opposite captions: in one, the victims were presented as Congolese soldiers executed by mercenaries; in the other, as prisoners saved by those same mercenaries from death by starvation. The image doesn't change. Only the words placed next to it change, and it's those words that decide, for the viewer, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.
This power of the caption over the image becomes even more delicate when the photographed subject belongs to a world that the viewer perceives as distant, different, "other." The great African famine crises of the 1980s showed clearly how much our visual grammar still owed to an imagery inherited from the colonial era: isolated individuals or indistinct crowds, empty gazes directed at a distant, compassionate audience, mothers and children as icons of a place rendered passive, feminized, in need of a rescue that always comes from outside. These are true images, but ones that tell only one version of the story, that of the victim stripped of her own will, ultimately confirming, rather than questioning, the power relationship between the one who looks and the one who is looked at.
Some of the photojournalists who helped build that imagery came to realize it, often too late. A well-known BBC correspondent recounted, years later, his remorse at having filmed a thirteen-year-old Sudanese girl reduced to starvation, convinced that showing a specific face would help the public identify with the crisis; he later wondered whether he had achieved the opposite effect, erasing her individuality and reducing her to just another anonymous image of African suffering. It's the same mechanism Susan Sontag identifies in the problem of missing captions: a portrait that doesn't name its subject transforms them, even unintentionally, into a representative example, of an ethnicity, of an occupation, of a condition of hardship, rather than into a person with their own story.
There's also a second, equally debated issue: is it acceptable to make an image of suffering aesthetically beautiful? On one hand, there are those who argue that aestheticizing suffering amounts to domesticating it, turning it into an object that invites admiration rather than action. On the other hand, it must be said that no photograph, however "raw" or deliberately anti-aesthetic, can ever be called pure documentation: every framing choice, every choice of light and of moment, is already a form of cultural coding, and therefore already a political choice. The opposite risk, if anything, is that the anti-aesthetic becomes itself a form of anesthesia: an elegant way of looking away, instead of holding one's gaze, precisely in the face of what is painful to look at.
The sociologist Luc Boltanski tried to bring order to this issue, distinguishing between different possible responses to social suffering. The politics of pity draws a sharp line between those who suffer and those who observe: it requires that suffering be made visible and almost spectacular, while at the same time reducing the sufferer to a mere representative of a category. The politics of justice, instead, classifies people along a scale of merit, "privileged" and "less fortunate," without ever asking whether that condition is truly just. The philosopher Avishai Margalit showed how even pity, however noble a sentiment it may appear, conceals an asymmetry: the one who feels it implicitly places themselves in a position of safety, as if what happened to the other could never happen to them.
The alternative these authors point to is not pity, but compassion, which does not consider the sufferer guilty of their own condition, and beyond that, solidarity: a feeling that moves the other from the realm of "them" into the realm of "us." It is not a principle of superiority but of identification: recognizing that the other's suffering and dignity belong to the same humanity we share, and that what happened to them could, under different circumstances, have happened to any one of us.
There is a photographer who turned this shift into something of a personal manifesto, and he is the very one from whom my interest in all of this began: Sebastião Salgado stated on several occasions that if the only reaction his photographs provoked was compassion, his work would have failed. Not because compassion is the wrong feeling, but because on its own it risks remaining a one-way gesture, help that flows from above to below, without truly bringing the viewer closer to the viewed. For Salgado, the real next step is solidarity in action: the recognition that the other's suffering and dignity are part of the same human condition we all share, and that something in that photograph concerns us too.
It is in this spirit that, for two years now, we have been trying to tell the story of our project and the community around it, the boys and girls of Nechishala, and we hope, in this way, to show that another path is possible here too: in the representation of a people who, for centuries, have been portrayed as passive actors, but who, from what we are witnessing ourselves, are anything but passive.
Bibliography
Boltanski L., La souffrance à distance, Métailié, Paris, 2007.
Campbell D., Salgado and the Sahel Documentary Photography and the Imaging of Famine, in F. Debrix, C. Weber (eds.), Rituals of Mediation: International Politics and Social Meaning, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Freund G., Fotografia e società, Einaudi, Turin, 2007.
Keane F., Another Picture of Starving Africa. It Could Have Been Taken in 1984 or 1998. How Can We Change the Imagery of Despair?, in "Guardian" (Media Supplement), 8 June 1998.
Levi Strauss D., Politica della fotografia, postmedia, Milan, 2007.
Machado K. R., A política da estética da fotografia de Sebastião Salgado, in "Proa: Revista de Antropologia e Arte", vol. 1, no. 4, 2012.
Margalit A., La société décente, Flammarion, Paris, 2007.
Salgado S., in Sebastião Salgado on Photography, The Foreign Correspondents' Club, Hong Kong, 12 December 2014.
Sischy I., Good Intentions, in "The New Yorker", 9 September 1991.
Sontag S., Davanti al dolore degli altri, Nottetempo, Milan, 2021.
