Sights of benevolence : UNRRA's recipients portrayed

The last years of World War II and its immediate aftermath offer meaningful glimpses into the complex and uneven historical path of humanitarianism. Initially, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and later the UN itself, were in charge of rebooting humanitarian action in the new international order. These two intergovernmental organizations portrayed themselves as the champions of a “new humanitarianism” that was based on revived ideas of internationalism and the modernization of relief practices. This chapter concentrates on the case of UNRRA and analyzes the role played by photography in representing the postwar years as the founding period of modern humanitarianism. Photography also contributed to forging a very particular humanitarian narrative. This narrative claimed that rehabilitation was a necessary aim of immediate relief and made much of UNRRA’s effectiveness in providing it. The visual representation of UNRRA’s duties did not dwell on distressed victims and suffering bodies: images that might be expected to raise sympathy among the public. Rather, photographs focused on displaced men, women, and children who – in the Administration’s view – were being successfully rehabilitated both physically and spiritually. Should we regard portrayals of children beaming with joy as they consumed their meals or of displaced persons (DPs) being trained in the camps as examples of humanitarian photography? I argue that UNRRA regarded them as such, since the physical and spiritual rehabilitation of recipients was the heart of the organization’s humanitarian mission, and such pictures were intended to show the job was being successfully accomplished. UNRRA’s photographs call on us, as historians, to investigate the emergence of different humanitarian narratives and the role played by visual language in shaping them.