Early March 2020—just a few weeks before Europe went into lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic. I was struggling to finish the contents of a course where I invited medical students to think about contemporary humanitarian crises by triggering flashbacks to previous emergencies, such as the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Republican exile that followed the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as the Ethiopian famine (1983–1985). To make students feel an emotional experience, I decided to select a wide range of images exhibiting the spectacle of suffering which had fuelled the humanitarian movement since its beginnings. In the end, my PowerPoint presentation appeared to resemble an obscene repository of visual materials compiling corpses, as well as wounded, diseased and starving bodies. It looked like—what Susan Sontag (2003, 86) referred to as—an archive of horror. While, at first, I felt quite satisfied with the outline of my course, a further conversation with Rony Brauman—President of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, hereafter MSF) from 1982 to 1994—strongly discouraged me from using the expression ‘humanitarian crises’ in order to name emergencies of such different nature. Then, he told me something that I was not expecting to hear:

Crisis? What Crisis? I have publicly advocated for removing this term from the humanitarian vocabulary on several occasions, because it has been used to refer to such disparate situations such as wars, massacres, genocides, forced displacement, famines, epidemics, earthquakes, floods…. What you call humanitarian crises are rhetorical constructions mostly produced by media dramatisation in order to exploit the emotions of audiences.

Late March 2020—a state of emergency had been declared in most Western countries. Then, in the end, when the COVID-19 epidemic became a real global crisis, my course was cancelled. Although I could not test the emotional reactions of students to my visual history of human-made and natural disasters, I learnt an important lesson myself from Brauman’s words. Humanitarian crises have no ontological status. They are historically contingent constructions produced by governments, international organisations and journalists which have dissimulated the political dimensions of suffering and violence under a generic denomination, as in the case of the Rwanda genocide (Brauman 2001, 2009). Most importantly, wars, famines, pandemics, earthquakes and so on only become crises through the alchemical transmutations that have operated between images portraying distant suffering and the audiences who have performed their emotional effects. Put in other words, ‘disasters do not exist—save for the victims—unless publicized’ (Benthall 1993, 27; Calhoun 2008, 82–89; Käpylä and Kennedy 2014, 270).

As indicated in its Greek etymology, a crisis is always a matter of choice, decision and judgement. Therefore, a crisis necessarily involves some criticism from the point of view of the spectator to evaluate and comprehend why, how and when others’ suffering deserves to be represented in order to mobilise their emotions (Suski 2012, 135; Martín-Moruno 2020a, 449). One can only wonder why the pain of certain populations has been widely covered by the media to convey the urgent need for delivering international aid—as in the case of the 2010 Haiti earthquake—whereas other human calamities have remained largely ignored by Global North audiences. The cover of Supertramp’s album Crisis? What Crisis? (1975) perfectly shows to what extent the Western gaze establishes hierarchies of pain in our world, by ironically caricaturising a white, middle-class and middle-aged man relaxing in a beach chair while failing to see the apocalypse all around him (Bourke 2011, 71–92; Boddice 2017a; Martín-Moruno 2016, 142).Footnote 1

Besides Brauman’s reflection about the rampant banalisation of humanitarian crises and Supertramp’s hit, this book is the result of the work that I have had the pleasure of carrying out with my colleagues Brenda Lynn Edgar and Valérie Gorin during the last three years. Our desire to carve out a place for the history of emotions within humanitarian visual culture led us to organise the international conference ‘Regarding the Pain of Others: What Emotions Have to Do with Humanitarian Images’ in July 2019. Taking the title of Susan Sontag’s seminal work as a departure point, our aim was to reopen an old debate about the potentialities of exhibiting human suffering for raising awareness amongst civil society, promoting a culture of peace, advocating for human rights, denouncing warfare or alleviating its consequences. By addressing this topic with historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, scholars working on cultural and media studies, as well as NGO workers, activists and museum curators, we particularly sought to discuss the ways through which humanitarian images have connected the affective responses of audiences, thus, leading, to the establishment of transnational networks of solidarity (Martín-Moruno and Pichel 2019, 195).

Rather than answers, the intellectual exchanges we maintained during this meeting stimulated the questions which are at the origins of this book. Is there a well-defined visual corpus which can be properly labelled as ‘humanitarian’? What kind of emotions are supposed to be felt by a spectator who looks at these representations of distant suffering? Has disaster imagery involved radically different experiences and expressions of emotions across time and space? In which particular contexts have humanitarian images revealed a historical agency contributing to the formation of communities of feeling, bringing together NGOs, governmental bodies, audiences, aid workers, civil society activists and the beneficiaries of aid? And last, but not least, can we consider these visual representations as material objects which have affected audiences beyond vision, by engaging other senses, such as touch, hearing, smell and taste? This introductory chapter will provide us with some clues in order to better contextualise these interrogations, which constitute the main themes discussed by authors in the chapters of this book.

Feeling Humanitarian Images

The images studied in this volume are as multifarious as humanitarianism has been itself throughout history, as shown—for instance—by its intricate affiliations with the human rights movement (Barnett 2020, 1–6). Certain images included in this book were created by humanitarian workers as evidence of traumatising events and the violence they experienced in the course of their work. Others were captured by bystanders and independent actors not directly involved in humanitarian assistance, such as photographers, filmmakers, journalists and political commentators as eyewitness and advocacy discourses. Contributors to this volume also analyse more anonymous images, which were collectively produced and disseminated by humanitarian organisations in order to encourage donations. Contextualised in a wide range of historical settings, such as the Uruguayan Civil War (1839–1851), the First World War (1914–1918), the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War (1939–1945), the Soviet-Afghan War (1978–1992) and the ongoing civil war in Syria (2011–), the chapters gathered in this volume reveal that illustrated pamphlets, cinema talks, posters, photo albums, documentary films, graphic novels and virtual reality environments have been frequently produced through the combination of various media technologies. Thus, humanitarian images can be understood as a kind of montage, in which each visual composition echoes the emotional effects of other textual and artistic materials through their appropriation by specific cultural, social and political audiences (Zucconi 2019, 17). As the case studies included in this book demonstrate, humanitarian images should not be exclusively considered as the cultural property of aid agencies, but rather as a broader visual corpus which has focused on the representation of human suffering in order to appeal for a collective response to palliate its consequences (Rosón and Douglas 2020, 461).

As proxies for violence, injustice and suffering, humanitarian images are specifically meant to act on people’s feelings, especially when used in fundraising campaigns or to rally foreign political support. Several works have already shown the impact of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives on the emergence of a humanitarian sensibility and its further evolution in the Western world (Laqueur 1989; Wilson and Brown 2008; Festa 2010). However, little is known about the complex interactions established between disaster imagery, the changing emotional responses of the spectators and the making of humanitarian crises. While humanitarian actors and organisations have ‘tended to reify the concept of compassion as (…) a constant devoid of history’, this book will demonstrate how humanitarian images have in fact shaped shifting emotional responses from the nineteenth century onwards, giving rise to complex dilemmas that are still far from being resolved in the present (Taithe 2006, 38; Kennedy 2009; Calain 2013). We argue that a history of emotions perspective is a much-needed approach, in order to avoid presentist conceptions of pain, compassion, pity, sympathy and empathy, as well as to question whether these emotions have been the natural reaction of spectators regarding the pain of others. As Sontag (2003, 7 and 101) pointed out, no ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain, because ‘compassion is an unstable emotion’ which frequently comes into conflict with feelings of revolt, indignation, shame, rage, revenge and resentment, as well as even being able to provoke a numbing effect.

Some scholars have referred to this collateral damage—which humanitarian images are said to provoke—as ‘compassion fatigue’: the apathy and the indifference felt by the public when it is repeatedly exposed to images of atrocities (Moeller 1999, 2018). Although the inability to empathise with distant sufferers seems to have become a characteristic mode of feeling in our media-saturated world, authors—such as David Campbell (2014, 102)—have demonstrated that compassion fatigue is more an ‘empty signifier’ than an experience actually felt by present-day audiences who continue to economically support humanitarian organisations. For Campbell, the so-called compassion fatigue phenomenon hides an accusation addressed to the global visual economy marketed by mass media: the promotion of a disaster porn culture, which elicits an aesthetic pleasure in the spectator—also known as the ‘pornography of pain’—when images of suffering are sadistically consumed (Halttunen 1995). Campbell (2014, 119) further insists that it is not just compassion fatigue that functions as a myth in current debates about humanitarian visual culture, but the very notion of compassion itself. According to Campbell, compassion is a fragile and vicarious experience and as such, cannot be understood as the catalyst for collective action. Thus, compassion seems to represent the official image held by humanitarian organisations more than the complex lived experiences of people who have been confronted with others’ pain (Martín-Moruno 2020b, 153).

Echoing this criticism, scholars working at the crossroads of visual culture, media and humanitarian studies have recently explored emerging counter-strategies that appeal more to sentiments of irony and self-reflection than to compassion, in order to promote solidarity in the spectator (Chouliaraki 2010; Sharma 2017). In contrast to the compassionate model symbolised by the parable of the Good Samaritan, the twenty-first-century global citizen has the responsibility for denouncing the ‘symbolic inequalities and representational hierarchies in the mediation of disasters’ (Paulmann 2019, 5). These inequalities, which are the result of a ‘politics of pity’, have been at the roots of the portrayal of those persons who suffer as an undifferentiated mass of powerless victims (Boltanski 1999, 3; Martín-Moruno 2013, 4). Unlike compassion, pity has historically evolved as a sentiment of condescension towards others’ misfortunes, which has come to mean ‘to be sorry without being touched in the flesh’ (Arendt 2016, 84). Thus, pity has allowed the fortunate to contemplate the misery of the unfortunate in a detached way, reinforcing a hierarchical relation between these two groups of people (Hutchison 2014, 8 and 2019, 229).

Conversely, the exploitation of an imagery of victimhood by aid agencies has fuelled resentment amongst aid beneficiaries, who do not recognise themselves in visual representations that have reproduced gender, class, racial and, even, colonial tropes, such as those that tell us about ‘white men saving brown women’ (Spivack 1988, 297). To rectify the unequal donor-recipient relationships, some researchers have recommended developing an ethics of care in media culture, which could increase our emotional ability to embrace distant strangers as nearer and dearer people (Silk 2004; Lawrence and Tavernor 2019, 3). However, benevolent attitudes still remain suspicious for other authors, who remind us of the virtues of cultivating indignation and anger rather than compassion in order to denounce the political causes that are at the roots of human suffering (Käpylä and Kennedy 2014, 284).

All these vivid discussions reveal to what extent scholars have not yet managed to solve the dilemmas, paradoxes and tensions resulting from the portrayal of human suffering and the emotions that the spectator is expected to feel when faced with these symbolic representations. This book seeks to contribute to these ongoing debates by challenging presupposed affective responses about how humans should react in the face of others’ pain, which are largely based on a behaviourist interpretation. As explained in the next section, the history of emotions is the most effective antidote against all these theories whose ultimate political goal is to nudge our feelings, because it shows us the colourful palette of affective experiences that have nurtured the humanitarian movement since its early origins.Footnote 2

The History of Humanitarian Emotions

As authors in this book argue, a long-term historical perspective of humanitarianism can help us to better understand the plasticity of what it means to look like and to feel like a human, as our notion of a shared humanity has evolved in close relation with different conceptions of pain and allied emotions, such as compassion, sympathy and empathy (Bourke 2011; Boddice 2017b). These emotions have been labelled as humanitarian because they have crystallised the driving force that lies behind altruistic action (Taithe 2016; Martín-Moruno 2018, 2020a). In particular, compassion has been considered as the humanitarian feeling par excellence, as this emotion involves not only empathising with others’ pain, but also a gesture aimed at relieving their suffering (Fassin 2010; Martín-Moruno 2022). Therefore, historians of humanitarianism have situated the beginnings of this movement—‘the humanitarian big-bang’—in the late eighteenth century, when the notion of compassion expanded to the public realm ‘and the alleviation of human suffering became a defining element of modern society’ (Barnett 2011, 49; Salvatici 2019, 22). At that time, abolitionists started to condemn the cruelty of slavery by cultivating a growing sentiment of sympathy for those colonial subjects who suffered this inhuman treatment within the confines of Western empires (Abruzzo 2011).

As Adam Smith put it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1761, 71), sympathy denoted ‘our fellow-feeling with the sufferings, not that with the enjoyments of another’ and established mutual cooperation as the basis of eighteenth-century Western societies in order to propel their economic welfare. A great visual example showing the relevance of sympathy in the anti-slavery movement are William Blake’s engravings for John Steadman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). In this work, Blake illustrated the brutality of Dutch colonial troops against enslaved people of African descent in order to proclaim his abhorrence of these acts of violence.Footnote 3 Despite the noble aspirations of the initial humanitarian impulse, we should not forget its Imperialist roots. Fellow-feelings—such as sympathy and compassion—have actually legitimised the presence of Western powers in their colonies for civilising indigenous populations (Krauel 2013, 86; Lydon 2020, 2–3). When abolitionists claimed the virtues of these emotions did not contest the racial inferiority of slaves, only their unchristian treatment. This showed to what extent altruistic actions are not necessarily disinterested. Indeed, the rise of a humanitarian sensibility was not free of economic interest, as anti-slavery campaigners understood that it functioned as a kind of moral economy, which went hand in hand with the development of the capitalist market (Haskell 1985). The production of both humanitarian narratives and images has not been in vain, as they have historically played a decisive role in the expansion of this charity business by selling the distant other to Western audiences (Roddy et al. 2020).

From a history of emotions perspective, the emergence of this culture of compassion also showed a major shift in the history of pain which was no longer considered as a necessary punishment from God or a natural reaction within the healing process, but rather as an uncomfortable experience that should be progressively eliminated by professionals such as doctors, in the name of humanity (Moscoso 2012; Boddice 2021). This change of attitude explains the gradual adoption of anaesthetic techniques for performing surgical operations, as well as the use of opiates, such as morphine, for dealing with the chronic pain of patients throughout the nineteenth century (Rey 1993; Bourke 2014). Besides the medical context, the wounds inflicted by warfare were not easily tolerated either and an increasing number of voices were raised to denounce the heroic image of armed conflicts. Amongst these humanitarian representatives, Henry Dunant (1828–1910) recast the meaning of compassion in his novel A Memory of Solferino (1862) by identifying this emotion with the relief mission of nascent charitable societies, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (hereafter ICRC) (Rieff 2013, 68; Taithe 2016, 80). Originally created to assist sick and wounded soldiers in the battlefield, the Red Cross movement—which gradually included the ICRC, the national Red Cross societies and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies—would reshape the recipients of its compassion throughout the twentieth century by providing aid to war prisoners, civilians and refugees, as well as those victims affected by epidemics and natural disasters. As a historically contingent emotion, compassion should be, therefore, carefully contextualised within gender, class, ethnic and religious power relations in order to examine who has remained inside and outside of its scope (Pernau 2017; Barnes and Falconer 2020; Martín-Moruno et al. 2020; Möller et al. 2020). In this book, authors—such as Brenda Lynn Edgar and Moisés Prieto—explore the exclusive nature of compassion by looking for less evident affiliations with emotions, such as anger, hate and indignation, which have been central to shaping the identity of these communities that have been considered as the perpetrators of atrocities.

Contributors to this volume do not only explore the historical vicissitudes of compassion in relation to the construction of humanitarian crises, but also explore those of neighbouring emotions such as empathy. Coined in 1858 by the Idealist philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lötze (1817–1881) in order to translate the German notion of Einfühlung (literally ‘into feeling’ in English), empathy appeared as a neologism in the late 1870s. Used at the time amongst German intellectuals, such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887), Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) and later Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), empathy referred to the ability of the spectator to project their own emotions into a work of art. This aesthetical process involved a conscious entanglement of the senses that went beyond the strictly visual to encompass subjective experience. Appropriated by American psychologists in the first decades of the twentieth century, the term empathy had multiple meanings from the start, none of which correspond to today’s understanding of empathy as an identification with the thoughts of another (Lanzoni 2012, 2018). Although, today, our empathic abilities are associated with the biological equipment which provides us with mirror neurons, humans should be able to interpret ‘what is painful’ within ‘an intricate web of cultural signs and symbols’ in order to make them function (Boddice 2017a, 61).

As the chapters of this book illustrate, images from the mid-nineteenth century were made in a completely different context of empathy than recent visual productions. By taking a critical look, authors—such as Ariela Freedman, Valérie Gorin and Jo Labanyi—question in their chapters the ubiquitous role of empathy, by showing how this emotion works as a kind of ersatz in contemporary debates about humanitarian visual culture, as viewers actually felt more complex affective and cognitive processes when they were looking at images representing human suffering. As explained in the following section, fluctuating affective responses to humanitarian images are due to the fact that visual representations only acquire a meaning when they are able to touch historically situated audiences. In this sense, humanitarian images are performative: they are able to do things, such as mobilise international public opinion when they are appropriated by specific groups of people (Labanyi 2010, 223–224). This performative approach to both humanitarian emotions and images will allow us to link visual representations with their production-related and dissemination practices in order to shed light on the material conditions which have historically shaped the changing affective responses of audiences.

Performing Humanitarian Images

By acknowledging the affective powers of visual culture, the present volume is very much in debt to contributions which have already stressed the pivotal role of ‘images and emotions in the globalization of humanitarian agendas.’ As Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (2015, 1) have remarked, the expansion of the humanitarian enterprise only became possible through the adoption of new advocacy strategies in the mid-nineteenth century, such as photography. Introduced as a scientific technique, the camera promised to capture reality in a mechanical and objective way producing, thus, visual evidence of remote disasters. However—as these authors highlight—humanitarian photography has in no case been neutral in representing others’ sufferings. It has functioned as a kind of ‘moral rhetoric’, which has revealed its connections with the expansion of liberal ideology, the histories of Imperialism and colonisation, as well as with the civilising missions led by Christian movements. Fehrenbach and Rodogno (2015, 6) conclude by pointing out that the effectiveness of this humanitarian visual strategy has been mainly due to the apparent ‘simplicity’ and ‘directness’ through which it has conveyed an emotional message to Global North audiences.

Making Humanitarian Crises broadens the scope of the research conducted by our colleagues, by examining the emotional agency of images produced as a variety of visual mediums, such as drawings, printed or projected photographs, posters and moving images. Going beyond focusing on what is represented, contributors explore how humanitarian images have built ephemeral ‘emotional communities’ from the nineteenth century to the present (Rosenwein 2006). Regardless of the form they take, the emotions attending humanitarian images have also been contingent upon their conditions of production, how they have circulated and how and where they have been displayed and viewed. By considering images as ‘emotional objects’ whose production and dissemination have been crucial to the construction of humanitarian crises, this book highlights the entanglement of emotions with their material conditions of possibility (Downes et al. 2018, 11). As physical objects, images also ‘reveal something about the material world of the people who interacted with them’ (Boddice 2018, 38). Therefore, the technology of a given era is a crucial element in the embodiment of these emotions by audiences (Fernández and Matt 2019). This means that the way in which images were made dramatically changed audiences’ perceptions of humanitarian crises.

To explore the material dimensions of emotions, authors analyse how the perception of images has been conditioned by their scale, mode of transmission and circulation. In particular, contributors examine how practices such as hand-drawing, photographing, filming and computer-generated simulation have solicited a different ‘constellation of emotions’ in both individuals and social groups (Rosenwein 2006, 26; Plamper 2015, 69). Beyond the visual realm, authors explore how images have engaged the whole body and its senses in very different ways throughout the history of humanitarianism (Sullivan and Herzfeld-Schild 2018). In so doing, the following chapters seek to expand the horizons of the histories of emotions and the senses by including the study of visual sources in their agendas, as they appear as a promising way to open new directions within these fields of research (Burke 2005, 39).

By looking at images as objects, this volume also has the ambition to contribute to the material turn which has been recently claimed in humanitarian studies by both scholars and activists, who have analysed the commercialisation of commodities, such as textiles, to support humanitarian campaigns (Barber et al. 2022). Mainly concerned with the evolution of medical technologies, historians working in this area of research have neglected the epistemic value of other artistic practices, such as drawing, taking photographs or filming documentaries in the configuration of the humanitarian enterprise. This book fills this gap, by exploring both the experiential and the material aspects of humanitarian images in order to provide future researchers with a clear picture about how they have contributed to making crises visible in world history.

In order to rethink the active role of audiences, this book also takes inspiration from insightful International Relations and Feminist Theory works, which have highlighted the cultural, social and political dimensions of the emotions provoked by images depicting others’ suffering. In particular, Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison’s article ‘Fear No More: Emotions and World Politics’ (2008, 130) provides a fruitful theoretical ground for approaching visual representations as documents allowing the study of ‘the process by which individual emotions acquire a collective dimension and, in turn, shape social and political processes’. From this perspective, humanitarian images are not just passively received by audiences; they are also actively fabricated by them. In this sense, humanitarian images have defined—what Judith Butler calls—political frames through which spectators have distinguished those lives that are valuable and, therefore, mournable from those other lives that are ungrievable, because they have ‘never counted as life at all’ (Butler 2009, 38).

Through Butler’s eyes, Sontag’s reflections on photography take a new meaning for historians of emotions. While for Sontag feeling images seemed to be an obstacle for reasoning on the violence of warfare, for Butler the fact that people are affected by images does not mean that they are not able to critically think about geopolitical order. Indeed, it is the capacity of images for wounding and troubling us which reminds us that we share collective emotional norms in order to give face to those lives that are regarded as human and to efface the lives of those others who do not look like us. By understanding that humanitarian images are both ways of feeling and of knowing, this book interrogates these images which have revealed the power of communicating suffering by affecting viewers and providing them with an understanding of what they see (Butler 2009, 66). These are the images that have shown the extent to which their emotional agency has been essential to the construction of these humanitarian crises, which have changed the course of international history.

Making and (Un)making Humanitarian Crises

Chapters of this book are organised in chronological order to emphasise both the long-term history of humanitarian images and the significant shifts in their material characteristics and uses over time. Adopting a critical stance, the chapters presented here challenge universalist conceptions of emotions when looking at, touching, tasting, listening to and feeling the pain of others. To this end, contributors have paid particular attention to identifying unexpected affective reactions which have been frequently classified in present-day psychological theories as negative, by investigating their transformative power in the history of humanitarian images. As the American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai (2005, 1–3) has shown, ‘ugly feelings’, such as envy or disgust, have played a positive role when they have become the source of inspiration amongst artists and intellectuals for representing non-violent political activism under late capitalism. Following this argument, these chapters explore the creative potential of emotions, such as horror, abjection, shame and guilt in the construction—as well as in the deconstruction—of humanitarian crises contextualised in such disparate geographical sites as Latin America and North, Central and South Europe, as well as East Asia.

In Chaps. 2 and 6, Moisés Prieto and Ariela Freedman deal, respectively, with nineteenth-century drawings and twenty-first-century graphic journalism in order to address the specificity of hand-drawn illustrations, how they circulated and how they have been received by audiences across the globe. In contrast to other technologies, drawing openly exhibits the active participation of its author’s subjectivity and—to some extent—their liberty to express their emotions, because this medium does not ‘extirpate human intervention between the object and representation’ (Daston and Galison 1992, 98). By adhering to a partial vision, different generations of illustrators and cartoonists have thus been able to translate their experiences through this aesthetic form as a humanitarian commitment. Though one could imagine that drawings are an old-fashioned medium, they are currently used more than ever as advocacy strategies. Powerful examples of this artistic tendency are Jovcho Savov’s Aegean Guernica (2015) and Vasco Gargalo’s Alleponica (2016), which went viral on the internet as readaptations of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) denouncing, respectively, the Mediterranean refugee crisis and the Syrian civil war.Footnote 4

Looking back to nineteenth-century hand-made illustrations, in his chapter Prieto retraces the origins of humanitarian sensibility by exploring the historical relations of emotions such as empathy and compassion with horror, indignation, abjection and outrage, in order to comprehend how the Siege of Montevideo (1843–1851) turned into a humanitarian cause. Perpetrated by conservative Uruguayan supporters and the troops of the Argentine confederation led by the General Juan Manuel Rosas during the Uruguayan Civil War (1839–1851)—also known as la Guerra Grande (literally the Great War)—this historical episode inspired a great number of political cartoons depicting the atrocities committed against the people of Montevideo. Echoing famous contemporary novels, such as Alexandre Dumas’ Montevideo, or the New Troy (1850), these illustrations were disseminated through Latin American pamphlets and newspapers, such as El Grito Arjentino (The Argentine Cry). Published by anonymous authors, as well as by leading anti-rosist painters and intellectuals, such as Antonio Somellera (1812–1889), these drawings were accompanied by captions, in a similar fashion to Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1815).Footnote 5 As Prieto remarks, these visual compositions were structured according to a series of allegorical figures portraying helpless widowed and pregnant women, orphaned children, as well as civilians assassinated by Rosas’ troops as martyrs. Intended to arouse the empathy and compassion of French and British audiences, these representations were widely disseminated by Rosas’ detractors in order to force military interventions in the River Plate region. As Prieto concludes in his case study, the logic of compassion and empathy worked in intimate connection with that of horror and abjection, because the representation of Montevideo’s people as innocent victims involved—at the same time—the dehumanisation of General Rosas. Portrayed as a cruel Robespierre, Rosas could only provoke disgust in those civilised Europeans who dared to look at his atrocities.

On her part, Freedman examines the mobilisation of emotions in non-fictional graphic novels, such as The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders, first published in French from 2003 to 2006. This collective and hybrid work combines the black-and-white photographs taken by the MSF photo-reporter Didier Lefèvre with the drawings, captions and word balloons sketched by his friend, the cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert, and the coloured sepia scenarios conceived by the graphic designer Frédéric Lemercier. Starting in Pakistan in 1986, the three-volume book describes Lefèvre’s traumatic experiences when he joined MSF’s medical mission during the Soviet-Afghan War. Although graphic novels have been claimed as instruments for promoting empathy amongst civil society, Freedman alternatively identifies the affective force of The Photographer in its capacity for troubling and, even, disrupting the reader. Freedman argues that rather than creating an immersive experience, the use of overtly subjective cartoon establishes an ironic distance between Lefèvre’s photographs and the description of his own feelings expressed in the speech bubbles, thus encouraging readers to develop a meta-critical reflection about the humanitarian adventure. In Freedman’s eyes, feeling photographs through drawings appears to be a powerful way to desacralise the myth that the photographer is a neutral observer, whose work will effectively constitute a neutral testimony against warfare.

On the contrary, the disenchantment of the humanitarian world evoked in The Photographer enables the authors of this comic novel to fiercely criticise the structural inequalities which are at the roots of this movement. For instance, Guibert did not hesitate to caricaturise Lefèvre, the photographer, as a kind of Tintin in order to denounce the imperialists dimensions of French medical humanitarianism, as represented by MSF. As Freedman explains, the success of this graphic novel lay in the reflexive empathy solicited in readers through the interplay of drawings and photographs. Beyond French-speaking audiences, The Photographer reached global recognition before the publication of its English translation in 2009 and before Afghanistan became the global crisis centre for traumatised North American audiences after 9/11.

Chapters 3 and 4 move into the age of mechanically produced images, addressing the industrialisation of images, their polyvalence and ultimately their ability to solicit senses other than vision alone. Jonathan Bates’ and Jo Labanyi’s contributions demonstrate how techniques related to photography literarily reshaped the First World War and the Spanish Civil War as humanitarian crises by moving both national and international audiences. To this end, these chapters invite us to think about the relationships between feeling photography and the making of humanitarian crises. Although Roland Barthes (1981, 27) considered that photography involved an essential ‘affective intentionality’—which he identified as the ‘punctum’—it has not always been considered as a form of art capable of expressing photographer’s emotions and conveying them to the viewers. As Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (2014, 10) have pointed out, for a long time the camera was regarded as a scientific device that could not provoke intense feelings, contrary to the case of paintings. Beatriz Pichel (2021, 1–23) has recently shown how the emotional potential of photographs has been intimately related to the history of warfare since the Crimean War (1853–1856), when Roger Fenton poetically documented the fate of the British troops in his famous Valley of Shadow and Death (1855). In particular, photographing warfare became a central emotional practice for articulating the experiences of both combatants and civilians during the First World War following the commercialisation of cameras, such as the Kodak Brownie Box and the Kodak Vest Pocket.

Also contextualised during the Great War, Jonathan Bates’ chapter examines domestic philanthropic initiatives, such as those led by Arthur B. Malden, a travelogue lantern lecturer who organised a series of talks in British theatres and cinemas in benefit of disabled ex-service men. Illustrated lectures, combining the projection of coloured photographic slides with short films and music, had been performed since 1920 by members of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, such as Arthur B. Malden’s father who had been one of the pioneers of this new travelling cinematographic movement. The projection of lantern slides also had a longstanding tradition in the Anglican church, which used this technology to perform rituals, such as sermons, as a way of strengthening the sense of religious community. During the Great War, Malden transformed this type of animated photographic session into charity shows which aimed to gather funds for creating rehabilitation programs for disabled veterans; a sector of the population which became the target of humanitarian compassion amongst local British audiences. Malden’s lectures—which were symbolically entitled Recalled to Life—were displayed as the visual proof that disabled soldiers, namely those belonging to the working-class, were able to return to the labour market, after receiving health-care treatment and training in workshops where they acquired manual skills.

As Bate demonstrates, these performances were intended to create a culture of sympathy amongst the civilian community by making war disabilities visible, as healing these victims became a metaphor for the physical and moral recovery of the British nation. Resulting from a collaboration between the British cinema industry, charities and the state, Malden’s philanthropic initiative revealed to what extent boundaries between domestic politics and humanitarianism were blurred during the First World War. Within this political humanitarianism, photographic and early cinematographic practices became a patriotic instrument for shaping the emotional attitudes of audiences, who felt mixed sentiments towards disabled ex-service men that ranged from compassion to pity and guilt. For their part, veterans also expressed changing emotional reactions towards British authorities during the course of the war, which went from shame and frustration to anger, as they gradually realised that their fate had been put in the hands of charity. As Bate concludes, Malden’s cinema talks perfectly reveal the performative effects of humanitarian images, because they turned the social reintegration of disabled ex-service men into a legal and economic priority throughout the Great War and its aftermath.

In her chapter, Jo Labanyi takes us on a journey through the golden age of photojournalism, the Spanish Civil War, in order to show us how photographs depicting civilians’ corpses and the exodus of refugees entered into the history of humanitarian images. As Susan Sontag (2003, 18) has already pointed out, this ‘war was the first conflict to be covered by a corps of photographers’, such as Robert Capa (1913–1954), Gerda Taro (1910–1937), David Seymour (also known as Chim) (1911–1956), Kati Horna (1912–2000) and Augustí Centelles (1909–1985). Labanyi examines not only the visual production of these renowned photojournalists, but also other images disseminated by the Spanish Republican Government Ministry of Propaganda, which Sontag discussed in Regarding the Pain of Others, echoing the reflections on war written by Virginia Woolf during the fascist insurrection in Spain, also known as Three Guineas (1938). These shocking photographs show corpses of children killed in the aerial bombardments of Madrid perpetrated by General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces with the help of the Nazi Germany Condor Legion in late October 1936. As Labanyi details, these images were widely reproduced in the United States by the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy’s organisation, as well as by European newspapers, such as The Daily Worker, in order to criticise the non-intervention agreement which had been signed by the main Western powers to prevent foreign participation in the Spanish Civil War. Therefore, Labanyi considers that the circulation of photographs denouncing war atrocities in Spain became the main affective strategy for gathering humanitarian funds in favour of the Republican cause. Although these images were not politically neutral, for Labanyi they should be considered as indisputably humanitarian because they were intended to protect human rights against the global advance of fascism.

Deeply inspired by Ariella Azoulay’s civil contract of photography (2008, 2012), Labanyi shows the limits of empathy and compassion for developing a critical outlook of the visual corpus produced during the Spanish Civil War by both photojournalists and the Republican government. The materiality of these photographs, whose spectral presence still touches present-day audiences, leads this author to plead for the active role of our imagination as viewers with an ethical responsibility for reconstructing the experiences which have remained out of the frame of these images. Therefore, to comprehend these photographs it is necessary to advocate against empathy in order to reconstruct the emotions and the ideas embodied by these international audiences who witnessed the Spanish Civil War, taking into account that they were radically different to one’s own.

Moving the focus from photography to cinema, Chap. 5 explores the potentialities of films as sources that can enrich the history of emotions by examining how filmmakers have constructed—as well as deconstructed—humanitarian crises by negotiating collective affective experiences with audiences. As Tarja Laine (2011, 1) has pointed out, ‘cinematic emotions’ should not be considered as indicators of object properties, but the result of ‘processes that are intentional in a phenomenological sense, supporting the continuous, and dynamic exchange between the film’s world and the spectator’s world’. In contrast to photography, cinema promises audiences will not only see, but also hear and, even, touch the skin of the film (Marks 2000). To investigate this multisensorial experience, Edgar takes Jacqueline Veuve’s Journal de Rivesaltes (1997) as case study: a documentary film, which is a retrospective mise en image of the journal kept by the Swiss nurse Friedel Bohny-Reiter (1912–2001) during her humanitarian mission at the internment camp of Rivesaltes in the midst of the Second World War. As a female volunteer of the Schweizerisches Rotes Kreuz/Kinderhilfe (Swiss Red Cross/Aid to Children organisation), Bohny-Reiter worked assisting resettled Spanish Republican refugees who had fled their country at the end of civil war, as well as other persecuted ethnic populations, including Jews, Roma and Sinti.

More than fifty years later, a eighty-four-year-old Bohny-Reiter returned to this camp situated in the French Roussillon—which was by then in ruins—with the Swiss filmmaker Jacqueline Veuve (1930–2013) in order to relive her traumatic memories from when she had desperately tried to save refugees from famine and contagious diseases, as well as from the deportations organised by the French Vichy government to German Nazi camps.Footnote 6 Although Bohny-Reiter should have acted in strict compliance with neutrality—as officially imposed by the Swiss Red Cross—she actually defied this humanitarian principle by hiding numerous children from the French authorities and facilitating the escape of others from the camp. Strongly moved by Bohny-Reiter’s account, Veuve decided to save her story from oblivion as a part of a larger cinematographic project in which she reconstructed the history of other Swiss female humanitarians who consciously refused to collaborate in the deportations of Jews to Nazi Germany camps, including Anne-Marie Imhof-Piguet (1916–2010) and Rösli Näf (1911–1996). As a rare feminist representative of Swiss cinema—who had been trained in anthropological cinema in Paris with Jean Rouch (1917–2004)—Veuve regarded her documentaries as an emotional space where she should shape her own subjectivity in close dialogue with the main characters of her films.

As Edgar explains, the encounter between Bohny-Reiter and Veuve was not a coincidence, but the result of raising collective awareness about the involvement of France and Switzerland in the crimes against humanity that were committed during the Second World War. In this sense, Jacqueline Veuve’s Journal of Rivesaltes can be understood as a film which helped to deconstruct the idea that what happened in that internment camp was a humanitarian crisis, by revealing to international audiences the involvement of French and Swiss governments in the Holocaust fifty-four years before. Visually recreating passages of Bohny-Reiter’s journal, taking shots of her photo-album, paintings and drawings, as well as reproducing interviews with camp survivors, Veuve conveys to the spectator the emotions which were at the roots of the notion of trauma after the Second World War, such as frustration, guilt, rage and fear. Edgar interprets the complex affective repertoire evoked by Veuve’s documentary in the light of the theories that emerged in the 1980s on post-traumatic stress disorder. As she concludes, trauma is cinematically performed through those past images that continue to haunt us in our present memories ‘in the form of flashbacks, dreams, and other intrusive repetitions’ (Leys 2007, 93).

In Chap. 7, Valérie Gorin retakes up the sensory experience of trauma in the contemporary context of virtual reality movies, such as the one produced by MSF Switzerland to recreate the bombardment of one of its hospitals settled in the province of Kunduz in North Afghanistan on 3 October 2015. This film, at the origins of the MSF campaign #NotATarget, shows a major shift to digital media in humanitarian advocacy. By promising a total immersive experience, virtual reality is supposed to make the viewer feel as if they were a doctor in a hospital during a military attack, a civilian in war zone who should decide whether to stay or flee their country and, even, like a refugee resettled in a camp who hopes for a better future in the Global North. Directors, such as Chris Milk (2015), who produced the virtual reality movie Clouds over Sidra in collaboration with the United Nations (hereafter UN) and UNICEF, had not doubt about publicising this medium as the ‘ultimate empathic machine’. Featuring a twelve-year-old Syrian refugee in the Za’tari camp in Jordan, Milk’s production had the ambition to erase the affective distance between the viewer and the recipients of humanitarian aid and, therefore, to encourage a relation of empathy between them, rather than one bound in pity.

By analysing Milk’s film and other virtual reality movies, such as Forced from Home and The Right Choice—produced, respectively, by MSF and the ICRC in 2018—Gorin questions the fetishisation of empathy in humanitarian visual culture; namely, by examining the central notions around which the experience of virtual reality is legitimised: immersion, presence, engagement and emotional resonance. As Gorin explains, virtual reality theorists associate immersion with the sensorial experience of the spectator while they are diving into a virtual world, which includes 3D sight, sound, smell and, even, touch aspects when the spectator is equipped with headsets and gloves. As a technology which is said to replicate a true physical experience of being there—whether being there refers to a real or a fictional world—virtual reality is supposed to be performative, as it aims to create an affective outcome in the spectator. Nevertheless, Gorin reminds us that immersion is often reduced to a passive reception of digital images, which does not allow the viewer to interact with the virtual environment or the characters of the film and so they are, thus, unable to develop an agency.

Seen in this light, virtual reality films do not provide any revolutionary experience in relation to those offered by other mediums—which have been used in the history of humanitarianism—such as painting, photography or cinema. Although digital moving images are frequently presented as a hyperreal representation of disasters, their alleged technological superiority does not ensure that the viewer will actually feel a humanitarian experience, which will naturally bring them to express an ethical response in the face of others’ suffering. It may also occur that the spectator visits a virtual world as they were a kind of—what Susan Sontag (1973, 6) referred to as a—warfare tourist: ‘people’ who ‘regularly travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of time’ and take a ‘camera along’ to ‘offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made’. Therefore, being exposed to computer simulated humanitarian emergencies cannot be automatically associated with the active participation of the viewer, who could also choose to contemplate these spectacles of suffering as detached aesthetic experiences.

Gorin interprets the affective politics of virtual reality as being conceived by contemporary aid agencies under a technological determinism. This is an ideology which celebrates 3D images as a kind of brave new world, where humans are expected to become a sort of android programmed to feel empathy or compassion: the central emotional capital that humanitarian organisations have exploited since the late nineteenth century in order to raise funds amongst audiences. Looking for other emotional regimes which could inspire humanitarian storytelling, Gorin suggests exploring feelings such as shame, anger and frustration. For instance, the former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recognised that—after having watched Clouds over Sidra—he felt disgusted and outraged, because the images performed in this movie were evidence of the lack of an orchestrated solution to the Syrian refugee crisis. Beyond empathy and compassion, Gorin advocates for a human-rights approach to virtual reality which could promote a regime of justice, rather than a moral economy of care exclusively destined to delivering aid. Inspired by a sentiment of solidarity in the age of post-humanitarian communication (Chouliaraki 2013), Gorin suggests developing virtual reality as an instrument that could allow to the spectator to deconstruct humanitarian crises by recognising the specific political causes of suffering which lay behind each disaster.

As shown by authors in the case studies gathered in this volume, the history of emotions reveals a great potential for examining the making and (un)making of humanitarian crises by shedding light on the shifting affective responses of audiences, which have been created around these images that have crystallised the pain of the others. However, what I have learnt myself from the studies presented in this volume is that using emotion as a historical category of analysis also reveals some conceptual limits when it is mobilised to scrutinise humanitarian images. Although the main objective of the history of emotions is to demonstrate that the division of emotion and reason is a recent construction, the use of emotion as a meta-concept still reinforces a dichotomic vision of affective and related rational phenomena when humans look at others’ suffering. As my colleagues Brenda Lynn Edgar and Valérie Gorin suggest in the afterword of this book, scholars may orient their future research towards the horizon provided by the ‘new history of experience’ (Boddice 2019; Boddice and Smith 2020; Hoegaerts and Olsen 2021); a more malleable notion which allows thinking about how people have been able to critically look at images of atrocities while being moved—at the same time—by their affective power.Footnote 7 All we need now is to conjure Sontag’s words (2003, 115) and let ‘the atrocious images’—which are at the heart of the following chapters—‘haunt us’!