Photographs of Suffering: Women and Children between Stereotypes, the Obscene and the Traumatic

The essay is an explorative reflection that focuses on a very specific part of a broader investigation on the testimonial vocation of photography, and the very concept of document and documentary. To document means to give evidence, to prove, but also to teach, to inform. That of documentary is an interpretative structure, an attribute which can be used also to refer to something animated by an exhortative impulse, by a humanistic wish to ameliorate. But to what is then the category of documentary opposed, or opposable, to? Expressive, Aesthetics? Abstract, Poetic? Is it still the case that that which constitute a proof should not be aesthetically pleasant? Here, I argue the complex opposition between witnessing and reporting “reality” (as photography, needless to say, has long been supposed to do), and producing a “testimonial effect” (and not a reality effect); between the objectifying nature of a document such a photograph and the subjectifying and, ultimately, idiosyncratic stance of the photographic enunciation. Specifically, I concentrate on the very ambiguous character of shocking images, which is always already inscribed not only in a cognitive process of communication, but also in text dominated by a pragmatic intent, and by a will to make people feel, to render the audience sensitive, to change their attitude. This last point indicates two further issues framing the essay: the problem of compassion fatigue, that is the hypothesis that continual coverage of distant suffering causes audience and even journalists themselves to lose interest, even if the suffering continue; and the vast debate started already long time ago by Susan Sontag and has been re-inforced by her last book on “Regarding the pain of others”. And the question of the broader texts and cultural practices in which these kinds of photograph circulate

The essay focuses on photographs which document, and represent, pain and suffering caused by traumas and catastrophes, both natural and man-made. It is an explorative reflection on specific aspects of a broader investigation on the testimonialand documentary vocation of photography. I attempt to discuss this vocation whitin a particular sub-genre of photography, in its turn defined and transformed by the medium and the cotext in which it is consumed, thta is, photo-reportage once it is produced by, and also produced for, international humanitarian NGO's websites.