Taking a Feminist perspective as a starting point, this introductory piece seeks not only to integrate women as the main agents within the history of humanitarian relief, but also to understand their assistance to victims, from the Franco-Prussian War to WWII, as a type of situated knowledge which was broadly associated with the notion of care through the implementation of practices such as dressing wounds, vaccinating, feeding and clothing vulnerable populations. This political and epistemological position allows us to analyse the agency of women humanitarians as a caring power involving strong gender, class, religious and colonial power relations within the history of Western Empires. Furthermore, our Feminist approach enables us to deconstruct the essentialist vision through which women humanitarians have frequently been depicted as compassionate mothers or loving angels, as well as to contextualize their contrasting experiences of complicity with Western Empires and resistance to male delegates and political and medical representatives. Far from heroic representations, women humanitarians had to navigate through complex global hierarchies although this did not necessarily come into conflict with their dreams about female emancipation.

This afterword revisits the wide range of visual media explored in this edited volume, reflecting on the advantages and limits of the methodologies used as well as on potential perspectives for future research.

In 1997, independent Swiss filmmaker and anthropologist Jaqeuline Veuve (1930–2013) released her documentary Journal de Rivesaltes, 1941–1942 based on the journal kept by Friedel Bohny-Reiter (1912–2001) while working as a nurse for the Swiss Red Cross/Aid to Children at the Rivesaltes internment camp in southwest France. This chapter will show how Veuve’s film brought public attention to hitherto unknown women humanitarians and contributed to shaping a new understanding of Switzerland’s role in the Second World War. It will also examine the film as a performance of both the trauma of others in the past and that of the public facing this history in the late 1990s, thus constituting an important source for the history of emotions.

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A la fin du XXe siècle, la photographie grand-format fait une apparition sensationnelle sur la façade dans l’œuvre de figures proues de l’architecture européenne comme Jean Nouvel et Herzog & de Meuron. Ouvertement décorative, la façade photographique est souvent composée d’œuvres d’artistes, qu’il s’agisse de commandes faites à des photographes contemporains ou du réemploi d’œuvres du passé. Ce phénomène représente la dernière mutation en date de la photographie décorative en architecture, pratiquée depuis le XIXe siècle. Malgré l’existence de techniques permettant l’application en façade depuis les années 1850, la photographie décorative était largement reléguée aux intérieurs avant la fin du XXe siècle. Sa migration vers la façade dépasse donc la question de l’invention technique et se comprend plutôt à la lumière des changements fondamentaux à l’œuvre dans la photographie et dans l’architecture à la fin du XXIe siècle, au croisement de la révision moderne des deux domaines.