On this day, 11 November, exactly a century ago, photographer Lewis Hine left Paris as part of the American Red Cross' Special Survey Mission to gather visual evidence of the social and material reconstructions needs across Europe. While the active fighting was officially over, the impact of the conflict on the material infrastructure and social systems was far from over, or even understood. Hine's photographs were crucial in gaining an understanding of the devastation that years of violence and destruction had on the lives of civilians and their surrounding environments. He also made recognizable a new humanitarian subject that had emerged unexpectedly as a result of the war: the modern refugee (Gatrell 2013). Unlike the religious refugees of old, these were people who found themselves fleeing by force or out of fear because they were no longer--often from one day to the next--welcome in the place they called home, often their place of birth or that of generations before them as a result of a growing sense of nationalism. Hine's photographs, though hardly used by the American Red Cross and then soon forgotten and buried in their archive as the organization turned its post-war attention to the (also great) needs of Americans back home, are an early example of visual representations of refugees and forced migrants that shamefully form part of a pattern of human behaviour that has been intensifying in the past one hundred years. In the name of nationalism and border protection, 'nativism' is proving to be another socially constructed, artificial power, that is as cruel and as prone to coercive force and extreme violence as the Empires that were toppled in the name of 'the people' during the Great War. In looking at Hine's pictures today, in really 'watching' them (in Azoulay's sense of 'watching' photographs), to imagine being in the place of those people in the pictures, it's possible to think about the decisions that individual people made and could potentially have made that contributed to mass population disruption and its accompanying suffering and despair. Through them, we can think about individual decisions we have control over in our day to day lives that can curb the pattern of displacement and diminish or even prevent the suffering cause by imaginary borders today and going forward.
Photo credits: 1. "Lieut. Col. Homer Folks and his staff who are about to start on a mission which will include visits to Italy, Servia, Greece, Palestine, Switzerland, Belgium, England, possibly Russia, Roumania and other Balkan states. The purpose of the expedition is to prepare a survey of actual needs existing in the various countries where the American Red Cross is engaged, or may be engaged in the near future. Left to right: Lieut. Hine, photographer, Capt. Pompelly, Secretary and Col. Folks, chief, Capt. Mills, writer, Lieut. Booth, stenographer. Nov. 1918. Picture taken in front of the American Red Cross Headquarters, Paris" by Lewis Hine, LC-DIG-anrc-17930 2. "American Red Cross Balkan Survey. Greek refugees who were formerly driven out of eastern Macedonia (Seres and Drama), into Serbia (around Nish), by the Bulgars; now returning to their homes, but living while here in abandoned building in a very bad state of repair and in a deplorable sanitary condition. December 1918" by Lewis Hine, LC-A6197- RC-146-Ax 3. "Gheluvelt, April 9. A British military hut, now used by returned Belgian refugee. The Ypres-Menin road at this point and at Hooge, a little further on, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the war. Note the effect on the trees in the background" by Lewis Hine. LC-DIG-anrc-14676 4. "American Red Cross Balkan Survey. Refugees on top of a box car, exposed to all kinds of weather, returning to their homes. Strumitza". Attributed to Lewis Hine. LC-A6194- X275 5. "Scraps of cloth that defy description save that they are unclean and insufficient form the only clothing of thousands of children refugees in Allied countries even now. These three little Serbs and their garb strikingly portray the utter destitution to which their people have been reduced. To clothe decently these helpless waifs of the war the ARC is conducting a nationwide collection of used clothing, shoes, and blankets" Attributed to Lewis Hine. LC-A6195- 4725 6. "'A wilderness of rags,' is the description travellers give of devastated Serbia and the garb of these small Serbians tells why. Thousands of men, women and children in this unhappy land and others that were laid waste by the Hun must wear clothing like this until civilized garments reach them from the nationwide collection of used clothing, shoes and blankets conducted by the A.R.C. for the refugees in Allied Countries." Attributed to Lewis Hine. LC-A6195- 4728-Ax References: Azoulay, A. (2013). Potential History: Thinking through Violence. Critical Inquiry, 39(3), 548–574. https://doi.org/10.1086/670045 Gatrell, P. (2013). The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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