Picturing Need: Images of Overseas Aid and Interpretations of Cultural Difference

Abstract

The use of images by overseas aid agencies for the purpose of raising funds is common in the media in western societies. This paper reports a qualitative study of the ways that people in Britain view such photographs, how they interpret Jthem and how they respond tohthiem. The accounts given by respondents reveal that this involves individuals in making sense not just of visual material, but of a social world in which need is defined and met. That is, picturing need and articulating one's response to it is part of an imaginary (constructive) relationship through which the social world and the speaker are together made sensible. This is consistent with a theoretical position which holds that looking at photographs is both discursively and non-discursively ordered. Seeing is therefore understood as a cultural activity, through which social differences and moral imperatives are jointly and severally made to reappear.

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