When you hear the word “famine”, what image flashes through your mind? Is it of a small, dark-skinned child with an impossibly large head, distended belly, ribcage showing, listless eyes, and stick-like limbs? Do you perhaps picture a huddled undifferentiated mass of helpless human beings resigned to the inevitability of their demise? For many, such images have become entrenched as the signifiers of extreme hunger.
This is the power of humanitarian imagery and the ethical burden it carries. Our collective visual vocabulary of crisis is neither accidental nor neutral. It has been shaped by decades of coverage, often from a narrow, Western lens – a lens that has taught audiences what suffering is supposed to look like. That vocabulary now distorts our understanding of crises and undermines the dignity and agency of those living through them.
For months, aid agencies and journalists have described Gaza as “on the brink of famine”. But what does that look like? The images circulating in Western media may show people protesting, cooking, salvaging belongings, praying. But these are not the images of surrender or passivity that are the expected iconography of famine, the kind of image that has long racialised suffering and equated victimhood with helplessness. And online messaging wars over the impact of Israel’s deliberate starvation of the population are waged on the back of the abundance or paucity of such imagery.
Palestinian academic and activist Yafa El Masri has described how refugee communities like hers refer to stock images of suffering, often featuring children, as “UNICEF photos” and spoken of the harm such portrayals can do, especially when it is the singular lens through which the world sees these communities. El Masri explains that the images flatten experience, erase resistance, and ultimately strip people of their personhood and agency.
Speaking earlier this year at the International Journalism Festival in the Italian town of Perugia, she told of her experience growing up in a refugee camp in Lebanon and “the consistent thread of people taking a photo of you at your weakest, when you are really vulnerable”.
Do these images force the world to look, or do they demand that Palestinians perform their suffering in order to be seen? Do they testify to injustice, or do they rob the dead of dignity?
“In the photos, you always look dirty, you go barefoot, you’re hungry, you’re helpless, you’re miserable, you’re dependent on a foreign entity, you’re being rescued by someone else. And I think what media doesn’t really understand, this photo that you export to the world becomes the only way the world is able to know you. So the rest of the world that has absolutely no contact with you is not able to fathom a refugee or a person of the Global Majority outside this scope, outside a person that looks like this,” El Masri said. “And therefore, for the rest of the world, they are not able to fathom a refugee or a person that comes from a displacement background as someone who can be clean, as someone who might be educated, as someone who can have an intellectual contribution, as someone who can contribute to policy, as someone who can work in politics, as someone who can shape their own communities. It just becomes this cage that you lock us in. It just becomes this prison [that] shapes how the world communicates with us.”
The situation is complicated by the fact that within many media houses, few ethical guidelines exist for selecting and publishing imagery from crisis zones, and when they do, they are often vague and inconsistent. Further, there is little investment in training editors in the principles and techniques of methodical ethical reasoning. As such, in newsrooms across the world, including in the Global South, editors make these decisions on gut instinct, peer consensus, or perceived audience tolerance, and rarely are ethical considerations treated as being on a par with other news values such as newsworthiness. The result is a limited visual template of suffering, curated not because it reflects reality, but because it is familiar and comprehensible.
And this can create serious blind spots. In a 2013 paper, Philippe Calain of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) described a “vacuum” at the intersection of medical, humanitarian, and journalistic ethics. Basically, graphic imagery published by journalists and humanitarians “would generally not meet ethical standards commonly applied in medical practice”. Over the past two years, graphic images of dismembered Palestinian bodies, especially children, as well as dire suffering inside what is left of Gaza's hospitals, have flooded social media. It is unclear whether those who produce and share this imagery would have engaged with issues of consent, privacy, and dignity.
Many have justified the proliferation of such images as necessary to pierce the Western wall of indifference and complicity in the genocide. And there is no doubt that they have been effective in prompting public outrage and building political pressure to stop the genocide. In fact, Western politicians have openly credited them with making the atrocities in Gaza impossible to ignore.
But at what cost? Do these images force the world to look, or do they demand that Palestinians perform their suffering in order to be seen? Do they testify to injustice, or do they rob the dead of dignity? We should ask ourselves: Would such images be published if the victims were white? Would we so casually share images of mutilated European or American children? Do Russian bombs, for example, not behead or mutilate Ukrainians? Do we need imagery of dead and mutilated Israelis in order to empathise with them?
Who gets to be seen and how?
These questions aren’t hypothetical. We have seen how differently death is portrayed in other crises. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, Western media routinely showed African bodies in starkly undignified states, uncovered, dead or dying alone on bare floors inside isolation wards. Less than a decade later, COVID deaths in the West were largely sanitised, hidden, or framed through images of care and mourning. In the Bosnian genocide, Western victims were portrayed as individuals with names, families, and personal tragedy, while Rwandans were shown as anonymous piles of corpses, often stripped of context or dignity.
This is not a call to sanitise atrocity or conceal the brutal realities of suffering. Rather, it is a call for greater consciousness in the choices we make around imagery.
Palestinians, like many in the Global South, are caught in this double bind: either invisible, or hyper-visible in death. One form of erasure denies their suffering; the other strips it of humanity. This is not just a question of taste; it is a matter of power. The ethics of humanitarian imagery must grapple with who gets to be seen and how, who gets to grieve, and who gets reduced to spectacle.
This is not a call to sanitise atrocity or conceal the brutal realities of suffering. Rather, it is a call for greater consciousness in the choices we make around imagery. Graphic images can be necessary and impactful, but they offer a curated perspective – one that captures a moment, not the full story. We must consider not just what these images show, but what they are used to say and at whose expense. The ethical obligation is to ensure that people are not reduced to their worst moments, their bodies not collapsed into spectacle. Further, if we only recognise genocide when it is marked by heaps of corpses, what do we fail to see? The destruction of a people does not begin or end with physical death; it can also unfold through the slow, systematic erasure of culture, identity, and hope. The gory truth matters, but it is never the whole truth.
In a world where visual evidence is essential to establishing truth, and especially when journalism is criminalised or suppressed – as it is in Gaza – graphic imagery can play a vital role. However, as early as the 1980s, critics warned of the dangers of “social pornography” – the voyeuristic consumption of suffering stripped of context or dignity. Calain's study on humanitarian medical imagery refined this into three overlapping ethical tensions: the need to tell the truth, to protect dignity, and to preserve agency. These are the same tensions that frame today’s challenges. Graphic images can tell necessary truths, but they also reflect curatorial choices that shape what kinds of suffering are seen and what is ignored. If an image erases identity or strips a person of agency, it risks dehumanising even as it reveals. But ethical witnessing must go beyond exposure. It must consider consent, context, and consequence. It must ask: Who benefits from this image? Who is harmed? Does it illuminate or exploit? Does it humanise or dehumanise? And it must look beyond the immediate exigencies and contend with the lasting impact of the imagery it employs.
While these considerations should be borne by all – including social media users posting and spreading images of suffering – professional journalists and editors have a special responsibility. As such, media houses should invest in training on methodical ethical decision – making that engages with their obligations to the communities they portray. That could include the practical use of tools such as the Potter Box method in the fast-paced digital age. And that capability should be supported by wider systems of incentives and accountability.
Ethical crisis imagery should not be about censoring pain, but about curating it with care. It should make space for resistance, for joy, for the everyday. It should show life, not just suffering. And above all, it must affirm the humanity of those it depicts and not reduce them to symbols in someone else’s narrative.
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