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.
1 Comment
A couple of weeks ago, I had the immense honour of being part of a panel entitled: Small Humanitarian Acts that Make All the Difference in End of Life Care? We, the members of the panel, made up a very lively and eclectic mix: Emmanuel Musoni, a psychiatrist from Rwanda Ibraheem Abu-Siam, RN, CNS, is a Public Health Officer at UNHCR (Jordan). Olive Wahoush, professor in the School of Nursing, McMaster University. and myself. Dr. Paul Bouvier was the keynote speaker, and it was his essay, "Small things in dehumanizing places" that inspired a particular analytic lens. HHERG and CERAH co-sponsored the event. It was held at Maison de la paix, Geneva on 26 September. Have a look at this article recently published by myself and my colleague Stefano Tijerina.
Tijerina, S. and de Laat, S.(2018).Constructing Modernity and Progress: The Imperializing Lens of an American Engineer in the Early Twentieth Century. Ipersotria, No. XI, Spring/Summer, 24-39. http://www.iperstoria.it/joomla/images/PDF/Numero_11/monografica_11/Tijerina%20and%20de%20Laat.pdf Please follow this link to a FREE ISSUE of the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies' special issue on recent media attention on migration and refugees.
Thank you to co-guest editors, Vittoria Sacco and Valérie Gorin for their great work on pulling together such a fine collection of articles. I am honoured to be among the group. de Laat, Sonya. (2018). Pictures of migration: The invisible shock of misery photographs. Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, 7(1): 15-36. DOI: 10.1386/ajms.7.1.15_1 Read, comment, share. Thanks! Here are references for recent book reviews:
Humanitarian Photography: A History, Edited by Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2015. 345 pages, with 60 black & white illustrations. Hardcover £67.00, ISBN 978-1-107-06470-6.. History of Photography, Issue 3. http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cyVtpi7Pd8akXRMaEAF6/full de Laat, S. (2017). Photography, humanitarianism, empire. Jane Lydon, 2015. Book Review. Visual Studies. Published online: 4 July 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2017.1345473 I can't stop looking at this picture. Maybe if I did, I'd get my dissertation completed...
I am attracted to the handwritten sign (what gorgeous script), the slight blur of some of the people, the kids sitting backwards in the chairs...I can almost see and hear the action taking place. Its interesting that there are almost as many 'officials' as there are 'voyageurs', and I love that they are called 'voyageurs' rather than refugees, though that is what they are. These are Belgian refugees who entered France after the 'German Drive' forcibly displaced them, or drove them out. The language of 'voyageurs' is less a reflection of an attempt at being sympathetic than evidence of the fact that the term 'refugee' was not widely used at the time -- the picture is from 1918, at the tail end of the First World War. This picture bears witness to the 'making of the modern refugee'; read Peter Gatrell's book of the same name to learn more about how WWI manufactured refugeedom, a phenomenon that emerged from this moment and has continues to exist (and amplify) in the century since. That's just some of what I see in this picture. There's much more to be said about how this picture compares to other photography of refugees since Lewis Hine made this exposure, and why what appears to be aesthetic patterning on the part of photographers is really a comment on a pattern of making ever more refugees that has spread globally. Another time. I have to get back to the dissertation. NOTES on the collection from which this picture comes: Lewis W. Hine made this picture while working overseas -- his only project outside of the United States -- for the American Red Cross (ARC). While the war was on, he was tasked with photographing ARC relief activities in and around Paris. From June to November 1918, Hine made about 500 mainly glass plate exposures of public health activities, American soldiers convalescing, ARC warehousing, orphans, and refugees, from which the photograph above is a part. When the war ended, Hine stayed on as the photographer for the ARC's Special Survey Mission that was to make a scientific study of reconstruction and repatriation needs. I'll write about those photographs another time. For more detailed information about the history of this little known collation of Lewis Hine work, see Daile Kaplan's 1988 text: Lewis Hine in Europe: The Lost Photographs. Reference-- Caption: 'Early morning in the courtyard of St. Sulpice. Red Cross captain explaining matters to group of refugees "Sans destination." One woman has 6 children' Creator(s): Hine, Lewis Wickes, 1874-1940, photographer Date Created/Published: 8 June 1918. Medium: 1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-anrc-16403 Library of Congress Please check out a new review book published in Visual Studies:
de Laat, S. “Images performing history: Photography and representation of the past in European art after 1989” Visual Studies. Published online: 12 Jan 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2016.1274191 Link to the full review: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/z9tpcyyZEQINKJIRxbdd/full
2. Wrapping up a project hosted by the UK's Humanitarian Policy Group from the Overseas Development Institute on the global history of humanitarian aid, here is a link to the paper I co-authored with Valérie Gorin, from CERAH in Geneva. The chapter is entitled: Iconographies of humanitarian aid in Africa and can be accessed here:
Learning from the past to shape the future: lessons from the history of humanitarian action in Africa As part of the Global Humanitarian Research Academy that I was fortunate enough to be a part of last summer (2015), here is my contribution to the Online Atlas on the History of Humanitarianism and Human Rights:
In the summer edition of Reflections, the newsletter of the Humanitarian Health Ethics Network (HumEthNet), is my brief reflection: Tonight, I'm here to talk about the cover photograph on the new edition of the Time & Place chapbook. Thank you to Ed Shaw and Nancy Benoy for continuing to put this publication together. I am honoured to be on the cover of this, the tenth issue, and further touched because it is the last time the edition-launch night will be held here at Homegrown cafe before their move to a new location. I've always been drawn to photographs. I like the detail they carry. Photographs can say--or, more accurately, provide access to--so much information about a time and a place. For instance, this photograph I made for the cover is evidence that at this time, in this place, Homegrown existed in this location on King William Street. But that's thinking of photographs as objects. I would like, instead, to think of this picture as an event. In the future, the near future, this place will move. At that time, this photograph will have a future that will become a part of the picture's story. In fact, that future was already a part of the photograph when it was made; actually, even before the picture was completed. How so? Nancy approached me about a month ago to see if I had time to make a photo for the cover. Maybe she planned this, or maybe it came to her as she talked about the ideal location that Homegrown has been for their launch-night events. She asked that the photograph for the cover be of this place. And, of course, she wanted the picture as soon as possible…time was of the essence. |
Blogroll...Good sites....Categories
All
Archives
November 2023
|