Photojournalists as NGO advocates: Balancing between two realities

Abstract

This chapter explores photographic practices and the relationship between professional photojournalism and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) producing visual content about humanitarian issues. I examine how the boundary between professional photojournalists and non-professional image producers is being renegotiated as the NGOs increasingly recruit photojournalists in order to increase their media visibility (Dencik & Allan 2017). Those photojournalists who are commissioned by an NGO are wearing two hats, as they need to balance between the organisation’s expectations and their background as journalism professionals obliged to truth telling. As for humanitarian photography, there is a burden of using colonial metaphors and creating humanitarian identities for the depicted subjects (Manzo 2008). <br/>Journalism has a long history of using images outside its professional domain (Becker 2011), and I consider NGO photography represented in the media as part of the same continuum as citizen journalism or eyewitness images. What is different, however, is that the initiative for collaboration usually comes from the NGOs, while both parties equally seek to benefit from it (see also Powers 2018, 1–25).<br/>I seek to shed light on the photojournalists’ double role and their balancing between the two realities through a case study examining photojournalists and other communication professionals working at two Finnish humanitarian organizations (Red Cross and Finn Church Aid). From these grounds, this research asks, how do professional photojournalists balance between journalism and advocacy in their visual storytelling? And what kinds of incoherencies they face regarding their truth telling mission? The data consists of semi-structured interviews with the professionals.<br/>The findings suggest that humanitarian photography is not about a single defined category but rather many image types under one umbrella term. I apply the notions of participatory photography from artistic research (Turnbull 2015; Robinson 2011), objective document from photojournalism and media studies (Carlson 2009; Zelizer 2007; Burke 2001) and realistic illusion from cinema studies (Ang 1985). These concepts describe the different uses and roles of humanitarian photographs and shed light on the somewhat contradictory aspects of utilising photographs in humanitarian contexts.<br/>