The scholarly discussions of photo-documentation as a human rights practice have typically regarded images as a means of making suffering public and provoking affective responses as well as remedial actions. Overwhelmingly, however, liberal humanitarian images have affirmed the cultural imaginary of the isolated subject–victim and the sympathetic, yet privileged, spectator. This article attempts to complicate our understanding of the trajectory of humanitarian photodocumentation by considering the famine photographs of WW Hooper and Sunil Janah taken during the 1870s Madras famine and the 1940s Bengal famine, respectively. The author argues that, in contrast to Hooper’s photographs, which function as the genealogical predecessor to liberal humanitarian photojournalism, Janah’s photographs allow the possibility of witnessing as activism and model anti-colonial ways of seeing.
In 1872, Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré began publishing their lavish travelogue, London, a Pilgrimage. Much renowned for his illustrations of Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Idylls of the King, and other significant literary texts, Doré's considerable reputation as an artist fetched him a staggering sum of ten thousand pounds as payment for his work in London, a Pilgrimage. Jerrold, responsible for conceptualizing the project, was an established liberal playwright and journalist, often contributing pieces to the Daily News, Illustrated London News, and Athenaeum. Looking for interesting material, Jerrold and Doré traveled all over London; Doré often made notes on the spot and finished the illustrations later. Seeking to situate their work within the field of social exploration, Jerrold and Doré referenced Henry Mayhew's reformist journalistic series, London Labour and the London Poor. Jerrold claimed that their social investigation would reproduce for contemporary readers Mayhew's categories of “those who work, those who cannot, [and] those who won't work” (“Frontmatter”). Volumes of London, a Pilgrimage, however, were reviewed as gift-books in various periodicals; the Examiner, for example, reviewed it in the “Christmas-Books” section, indicating that these volumes, which contained pictures of lower-class shanties and miserable, under-fed people, were being gifted and enjoyed (“Christmas-Books”).
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