The Image Formers section investigates how a photo determines our view of reality. This week: a new frame for MSF photos.
It’s easy to overlook her, she’s that doll. And then she almost blends into the environment; her brown hat seems to be part of her mother’s clothing. It is a girl who is administered a new kind of polio vaccine through her mouth in Lahore. I can’t see if she’s crying, but I can imagine. I see a closed eye and a slightly too pinkish face, but I mainly see her mother’s reaction.
That reaction moves me, because I think I recognize her: looking away awkwardly and laughing, precisely because you can’t stand your child having to undergo something, no matter how good it is for her. All subjective projection, of course. Second touching point: the woman who administers the vaccine to the girl. She is not a white Western doctor or nurse, not a so-called one white savior who comes to help the helpless poor people in – in this case – Pakistan. She’s from there. She speaks the language and looks just like the people she provides medical support to.
I thought of the photo above when Doctors Without Borders (AzG) released a brave video last week about the visual language that the international organization has used for years and which is deeply racist. It is the visual language I just described: that of black children without parents, who stare blankly into the camera lens and are rescued by perfectly healthy white doctors. The parents present are often cut out of the frame, the film shows, so that the mostly anonymous children seem extra lonely and powerless.
That kind of cliché imagery is now passé, you say? Oh, no. They still come up, oddly enough not infrequently on the websites of NGOs such as AzG. Why? Because those images still generate more financial support for the organizations in question. And because – barring exceptions – we are apparently so used to them that we take them for granted. ‘Proven’ effectiveness and habit – it’s a snake that bites its own tail to maintain the sad status quo.
AzG now wants to break with this dubious tradition. In the video, spoken to each other by two doctors (a black man and a white woman), the organization says it feels responsible for contributing to a much too one-sided story and the emergence of racist stereotypes. “We haven’t always told you the whole story, given you the whole picture.” We are going to do that differently from now on, is the message.
Immediately look at the various websites of Doctors without Borders, Doctors without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières of course. And look, they do what they promise. The photos already give a very different, much more diverse picture of both patients and medical staff.
Nice. But will the organization now also do something about the structural underpayment of black doctors and the structural undertreatment of black patients (as described in an article published last year on the news platform Insider), some wondered. That is certainly to be hoped. But in a world where image has become so all-important, this is a step in the right direction. Adjusting the image is the beginning.
With the financial support it will also be fine. A photo like this above doesn’t use cheap tricks. He shows no situation of unequal superiority or unhealthy dependency. And you can imagine: someone like me (exactly the target group of AzG) can still identify with it. So cheers for that hand in your bosom, Doctors Without Borders. In the end, everyone benefits from that.