Britain is home to 166,000 charities that last year received £10 billion in donations. Those are statistics that challenge the belief that “compassion fatigue” is an incurable part of the modern condition (a claim I plan to examine in greater detail in the near future). To be sure, giving declined 11% last year, largely because of the recession. But the speed and scale of the public response to disasters like the Haiti earthquake (for which the Disasters Emergency Committee’s consolidated UK appeal has raised £80 million shows that compassion for what are understood to be immediate, natural disasters is as great as ever.

Keane’s documentary did not dwell on the particular problems of photographic appeals, but it was at its most interesting when it turns to Africa (around 25:15), a continent he describes as “fixed in the mind by charity appeals” that trade in the symbols of disaster and distress. Here the need to simplify and shock diminishes context, leading to compassion without understanding.

In his conclusion, Keane claims there is a new public mood with respect to charitable appeals. Comprising a heightened scepticism and weariness, he declares the template of misery out of date, and sees a more sophisticated approach moving us away from “the age of dependency.”

While a more sophisticated approach is surely needed, and something other than a template of misery long overdue, I am in turn sceptical about claims the public suffers from weariness. In many ways – as the success of recent appeals suggests – “the public” seems as happy as ever with charity as a response to the problems of development and disaster.

Rather than suffering compassion fatigue, there might even be an enjoyment of the “excess of compassion.” This is something, Keane argues, that deflects attention away from the important questions of who is responsible and how they are culpable.

This documentary is worth listening to, so click on the player below to hear a full recording. (If nothing else, enjoy this 56-minute programme for the patrician tone in the archival recordings of British charity appeals broadcast in the 1920s and 1930s!).

Here are the programme notes from the BBC:

“Fergal Keane examines the history of charity appeals and the relationship between charity organisations and the media.

Be it a malnourished child in Africa, a neglected dog or a day centre desperately in need of new equipment, it seems that there is no end to the number of people, animals or organisations that could benefit from a charitable donation. And if charities can harness the power of the media with a hard-hitting advert, a celebrity endorsement or an emergency appeal, then it is likely that their cause will reap far greater financial rewards.

Fergal charts the history of the relationship between charity and the media, and considers the way the message is conveyed, the impact of celebrity endorsement, the quality of charity programmes and the responsibility and risks to the media in encouraging us to make a donation.

The history of charity and the media goes back to the earliest days of broadcasting. The BBC’s first charity appeal was in 1923, when it broadcast an appeal on radio for the Winter Distress League, a charity representing homeless veterans of the First World War. The appeal raised 26 pounds. In 1927 the BBC set up the Appeal Advisory Committee, whose role, to this day, is to decide on the BBC’s choice of charity partners and to oversee campaigns including The Radio 4 Appeal, Comic Relief and Emergency Appeals such as the Haiti Earthquake Appeal, which was broadcast recently.

Commercial broadcasters have also played their part in raising money for charity. In 1988 ITV launched its own all-night charity appeal, in the guise of the ITV Telethon. The 27-hour TV extravaganza saw all of its regional broadcasters come together to raise money for disability charities across the UK and the programme was repeated again in 1990 and 1992. In 2009, Sky Sports ran an interactive red button campaign during the Champions League final so that viewers could donate to a David Beckham-endorsed campaign to raise awareness of malaria.

Programme contributors:

Diane Reid, BBC Charity Appeals Advisor
Lucy Polson, UK Representative for the charity SOS Sahel
Caroline Diehl, chief executive of the Media Trust
Jenni Murray, broadcaster
John Grounds, director of Child Protection Consultancy.

Broadcast on:

BBC Radio 4, 8:00pm Saturday 20th February 2010.”

You know the pictures without even seeing them – the photographs of mothers and their distressed children, or western aid workers ministering to victims who are passive, pathetic, poor and sick. Over on the duckrabbit blog – a regularly insightful source of photographic critique – there is an interesting breakdown of the Medecins Sans Frontieres photoblog that shows how these representations are alive and well even for one of the best activist organizations.

As they note, the photographs used by MSF show aid workers who are white and western even though the bulk of humanitarian assistance, even when provided in the name of European organizations, is delivered by local people. The images also suggest that dependency rather than empowerment is the best modus operandi.

Recently I have been trying to think about photography in ways that shifts our focus from representation to enactment, from the meaning of pictures to the work they do (see ‘War images at work’). From this perspective, even the most common visual representations can have important and unusual effects in certain circumstances.

This is not entirely the case with the MSF photoblog, and the problems raised by duckrabbit are significant. However, that MSF pursues these visual strategies is not all that surprising. Their purpose is to put MSF at the centre of aid work, show they are making something of a difference, and get viewers to open their pockets to fund that work. Whether we like it or not – and its part of what the social psychologists call “the identifiable victim effect” – when people like us are pictured aiding individuals who are helpless, those pockets open more frequently.

This is not to overlook the problems of the MSF photoblog as an example of the limitations of humanitarian photography. But it is not meant to offer a full pictorial account of aid, development and Africa. As such, I would put the problem this way: it less about the presence of these stereotypes and more about the absence of alternative visual stories in news from Africa, in particular. When it comes to the photographic production of ‘Africa’, it is largely disaster and humanitarian photography that we see. Sure, we get the exotic nature stories and the romantic travel accounts, but you won’t see many complexities of African culture, politics and society in those glossy narratives either.

The absence of these alternative stories is often put down to the alleged lack of local and indigenous photographers, and the duckrabbit post makes this point. But I am a bit sceptical about this as the source of the problem. Can we say categorically that local people would be better storytellers? To me that assumption has as many problems as the reliance on the international photographic elite it seeks to replace. Are “local people” a single, homogenous entity with only one voice? Surely they are as diverse, plural and conflicted as our own societies, so which local voices are going to get to tell their stories, and which local voices are we going to pay attention to?

At about this point I’m going to be misunderstood as seemingly wanting to retain the status quo. Not so. The issue of greater attention to and work for indigenous photographers is an important issue of labour justice and political economy. There are many talented non-European photographers in this world whose work deserves greater play, and initiatives like majorityworld.com are important in redressing the economic imbalances. And nobody could object to more assistance and training for locals to tell their own stories.

But the idea that their work, simply because they are non-European, offers a fundamentally different and automatically better visual account of the issues and places they cover is as sweeping a generalization as that offered by the stereotypical images that dominate our media. It may be true in some instances, but, for example, having viewed the work of many talented Asian photographers at this years Chobi Mela festival in Bangladesh, I was struck by how familiar were both their subjects and their aesthetic style.

It is also getting to hard to clear divide from “the local” from “the international”. The Palestinian photojournalists who produced impressive pictures to cover the war in January were in many cases already employed by the big news agencies like AP and Reuters – that’s how they could get their work out so quickly. Are they local, or are they part of the global image economy? They are obviously local to the war zone, but in their professional practice they have to conform to the codes of their global media employer, and these norms condition the pictures that are taken and published.

We must get to see more work from local photographers in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. But we also need better work from European photographers covering those areas. If both local and international photojournalists take the time to engage with the issues rather than just parachute in and out we will all be better off. In the end, though, we should judge them, not on their birthplace or nationality, but on their ability to employ visual strategies in the service of a complex and compelling story.