The challenges of visually representing poverty for international non-government organisation communication managers in New Zealand

Literature review

Research into use of visual images by INGOs largely focuses on disasters such as famines, and how representations function for fundraising purposes. Until the 1980s, almost all imagery was ‘negative’ (Benthall, 1993) in that it portrayed people as helpless victims of events beyond their control and dependent on charity for survival. Media coverage of the Biafra (1967–1970) and Ethiopian (1983–1987) famines, and the 1984 Live Aid fundraising campaign featuring images of starving children with distended bellies and flies around their eyes were defining examples of such negative imagery. This essentialising of an entire continent into ‘a few frozen indicators of its existence’ (Shome, 1996: 507) comprises what Appadurai (1988) termed ‘metonymic freezing’, whereby whole communities become known for one particular aspect, rather than the entirety of their lived realities. Spivak (1985) condemns this silencing of people as ‘epistemic violence’.

The Ethiopian famine campaign imagery of the 1980s sparked considerable debate within INGO circles and led to the development of codes of conduct and guidelines for image use (Clark, 2009), with policies promoting ‘deliberate positivism’ which requires ‘showing self-reliant and active people of the South’ (Dogra, 2007: 163). Such policies also function to brand INGOs as humanitarian and caring about the dignity, rights and well-being of the people they work with (Manzo, 2008). However, many INGOs still depict poverty in crudely simplistic ways and tensions remain between the need to raise funds through strategies of ‘emotional capitalism’ (Orgad and Seu, 2014) and respecting the dignity of those being represented: Images of smiling children ‘saved’ by Western donors often simply replace that of the starving desolate child in need of help (Dogra, 2007, 2012). Manzo (2008) asserts, however, that the stereotypical impoverished-child image might never be abandoned by INGOs as it helps to ‘legitimise the foundational idea of all western-based development – that the global south is inevitably better off with on-going interventions’ (p. 652).

INGO representations can directly affect public perceptions of poverty and many claim that INGOs, along with the media, are the public’s primary source of information about the majority world (e.g. Alam, 2007; Franks, 2010; Scott, 2009). In these terms, visual images play a significant part in the social construction and ‘framing’ of poverty, its definition and solutions (Dogra, 2012; Green, 2006). Potter (2009) asserts that these frames of representation can lead to political action, but without an accurate and contextual understanding of poverty, it is impossible to identify appropriate solutions to it.

Indeed, in their study of the representation of the San people of Southern Africa in advocacy imagery, Francis and Francis (2010) concluded that how the San people’s poverty was portrayed determined and severely limited appropriate responses. The focus in advocacy material on the loss of the hunter-gatherer culture as the cause of their poverty brought calls for the allocation of lands to facilitate a return to that culture, despite many San people not wanting this outcome. This led Francis and Francis (2010) to conclude that advocacy based on cultural or ethnic representation ensures continuation of racialised imagery and ‘a future of poverty and marginalisation, rather than poverty alleviation and citizenship’ (p. 223).

Rideout (2011) argues that INGOs ‘are in a position to disseminate alternative depictions of the Third World and, consequently, contribute to the production of new discourses within the field of development’ (also see Surma, 2013: 26). Others are more pessimistic about INGOs producing alternative depictions because of the drive to use images that serve immediate fundraising needs. Parvez (2011), for example, theorises images as a form of ideological currency stating that ‘The power to frame, crop, enhance, concatenate and disseminate, translates as the ability to strengthen and reinforce existing narratives, whilst tapping into a wellspring of compassion and, ultimately, increased donations’ (p. 689).

Most literature investigating representations of poverty in the majority world explores media case studies, or the effects of one particular case on the public’s perception of the issue. Cottle and Nolan (2007) extend such research by studying interactions between aid agencies and the media. Although not specifically focused on the use of visual images of poverty, they identify how INGOs have fallen into line with contemporary media logics which prefer to report ‘images of distress (“the pornography of suffering”) rather than issues of structural disadvantage’ (Cottle and Nolan, 2007: 863). Clark (2009) and Surma (2013) have additionally examined the photographer’s role in the representation process. Yet, these are rare studies of the production process of the representational construction of poverty in the majority world. In this context, Dogra’s (2012) investigation of the production, textual representation and reception of INGO campaign materials in Britain is an important intervention. From postcolonial social constructivist perspectives, her research critiques the highly simplified, depoliticised, dehistoricised and often ‘hyper-positive’ imagery produced by INGOs. She argues that such imagery is the product of Eurocentric organisations operating in denial of their own cultural and institutional imperatives. Are INGOs operating in other geographical contexts similarly producing representations of poverty? It is to this question which this research turns in specifically examining the role that communication managers in four INGOs operating in New Zealand play in determining what images of poverty are used in fundraising campaigns.

Methodology and method

Based on critical-interpretivist inquiry (Deetz, 1982), this research aims to ‘capture and reconstruct the meanings’ (Hay, 2011: 171) that INGO communication managers bring to their actions and behaviours in the production of visual images of poverty, and to identify how meanings are connected to wider socio-cultural systems of power. Critical theorists argue that ‘all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations that are social and historically constituted’ (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2005: 304). Our position as critical researchers is informed by literature which raises extensive concerns about humanitarian representations of poverty (e.g. Dogra, 2012; Hoijer, 2006; Kurasawa, 2013; Manzo, 2008; Spivak, 1985) and the debilitating effects these social constructions have on minority world perceptions of the majority world. It is additionally informed by each of our experiences working in the communication industries and in racially tense poverty-stricken multi-cultural environments. In applying a critical-interpretivist lens in the project, our aim was to explore the relationships of power and broader socio-political and economic contexts which encourage communication managers to draw on and present particular discursive social constructions of poverty and its potential remedies, and how they negotiate, challenge and/or reinforce these power relations.

Participants were recruited through deliberate purposive ‘key informant’ sampling (Gilchrist and Williams, 1999) aimed at recruiting those key knowledgeable expert individuals with first-hand experience of the phenomenon of interest (Brink and Wood, 1998). Invitations were sent to communication managers in the five largest international ‘household name’ INGOs with offices in New Zealand working in international development, humanitarian relief and poverty alleviation. Four agreed to participate. While the sample size is small, participants represent the cultural domain of four of the five top international aid organisations in New Zealand. The study does not attempt to draw generalisations across all INGOs: It unpacks the issues faced by the communication managers in those INGOs that participated in the study, and discusses these with reference to the wider context of poverty representation.

The study was guided by the principles of qualitative interviewing (Fontana and Frey, 2000; Gubrium and Holstein, 2001) which explores the meanings individuals bring to their work. To gain a full understanding of the complexities of their role, the first author conducted semi-structured interviews with the communication managers where they discussed how the INGO represents people living in poverty, how visual images are selected for communication materials, factors influencing the representation process and the managers’ role in this process. The interviews, which lasted between one and two hours, allowed access to a range and depth of information with flexibility to discover new information (Frey et al., 1991; Gubrium and Holstein, 2001). Each INGO’s code of conduct, image guidelines or equivalent policy document was read to supplement the interview data.

Transcribed interviews were analysed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Owen, 1984). All three of Owen’s (1984) criteria were used when identifying themes: ‘recurrence of the same thread of meaning’; ‘repetition of key words, phrases or sentences’ and ‘forcefulness of vocal inflection, volume or dramatic pauses’ (p. 275). Following Wetherell and Potter (1988), and Lofland and Lofland (1995), coding involved identifying which themes tended to recur and be emphasised more than others, and which ‘assumed the status of overarching ideas or propositions’ (Lofland and Lofland, 1995: 193), therefore taking a central place in the analysis.

In what follows, we explore the key themes that arose from the interviews about image use by the INGOs, the reasons behind the use of particular images, as well as the role of the communication managers in the selection of those images. In order to protect the confidentiality of our interviewees and the organisations they work for, in reporting these findings, we have removed any comments or words that would reveal the identification of the INGOs that participated in this research.

‘It wouldn’t work without an image’

The dominant theme in the interviews was the emphasis placed on the importance of visual images in fundraising campaigns, and the perceived power that images have in connecting with the public. One participant spoke of images as a mobilising force:

A powerful image is incredibly effective. An image can inspire people. An image can move people. And we do our best to pick those images that are inspiring and moving for people and make them feel like they are a part of the situation …

Two interviewees drew on the adage that ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’, with one emphasising that without a visual image campaign material might ‘not even get read … We are not going to play with that, we are not going to test this out … Why would we waste our money?’ All interviewees were adamant that producing material without an image was not an option because, as one asserted, ‘we live in a visual world; text just doesn’t do it these days when you have got Facebook’.

All four participants spoke about using images to ‘show reality’ and tell a story, but expressed this in different terms. One talked about showing that people in need are hard working, active and want to help themselves, adding:

We generally don’t have shots of people standing around, because that is not reality … they are never just standing around, lolly-gagging waiting for your charity. They are working hard; they work harder than we work. So I think the imagery reflects that. And that is a conscious move.

In contrast, two interviewees spoke about using images to depict ‘the truth’ of children who are severely underweight, and having to decide between depicting this or cropping the photo to give the subject greater dignity: ‘… a child can be absolutely skeletal, really malnourished almost to the point of death, and that can be quite horrendous. But it is also the truth of the situation’. Depicting ‘reality’ was also described in terms of avoiding staged images and opting for more ‘natural’, ‘in the moment’ shots, or images that were ‘representative’. In these terms, two participants noted a shift in image choice from the 1980s Ethiopia Famine era: one claimed that ‘people want an overall picture now’ and another explained, ‘The imagery that the development community uses has shifted … and people are actually going to uni and studying this stuff and there are professionals out there’.

Despite the recent professionalisation of development work and resulting shift in imagery, INGOs still fail to represent the complexity of peoples’ lives in fundraising campaigns. This may be partly because, as was the case with all four of our interviewees, INGO communication managers and those in related professional communication positions are likely to come into such roles from media and communication, rather than development backgrounds. It has been suggested that this failure to communicate complex understandings of poverty in aid campaigns is a problem of representation (Hoijer, 2006) as much as a problem of how INGOs use representations. Indeed, one interviewee expressed exasperation at how images simplify complex situations and provided a lengthy and comprehensive explanation of the flow-on effects of poor water quality exclaiming, ‘Well, how do you show that in a photo?’ While all the interviewees alluded to wanting to present a comprehensive and rounded story about those they fundraised for, and one that might extend people’s perceptions of poverty, two specifically talked about using visual images to challenge perceptions of poverty. For example, ‘I hope that we are starting to show that people living in poverty have a lot to offer, that they are not hopeless, or lazy’. However, using images to challenge perceptions was not high on the list of priorities − fundraising came first because it brought an immediate return on investment: ‘You can make something that is thought provoking, but it doesn’t work in terms of raising funds. It might make people think and that is awesome, but it won’t make them part with their money’. Similarly, fundraising and education were described by another participant as an either/or proposition: ‘Personally I like the idea of making people think, but the reality is if they are thinking they are not doing’. ‘Thinking campaigns’ according to this participant were public relations activities involving tactics such as getting feature stories placed in magazines. These were valued for building trust in readers who would, at a later date and on encountering an emotion-based fundraising appeal, remember the article ‘and think, “well they are okay, they are obviously doing really cool work”’ and make a donation.

Representing poverty and campaign successes through ‘waves’ of communication

Another recurring theme in the interviews was the use of ‘waves’ of communication in fundraising appeals, where the first wave (a television commercial or a mail-out for example) portrays an immediate need for money to help communities. Subsequent waves depict improvement in the situation (e.g. programmes being delivered in an affected area), but continue to show the need for more donations. Communication managers explained how they selected images to reflect the goal of each campaign wave. To start an appeal, they ‘need a handful [of images] that … show the need’. Interviewees were quite specific about the type of images that fitted this description – vulnerable ‘ideal victims’ (Moeller, 1999). Close-up images of malnourished children, especially those under 10 years old and making eye contact with the camera, were regarded as most successful in grabbing people’s attention and creating the emotional connection to stimulate donor giving.

Further into the campaign, images are selected that show people benefiting from the INGOs’ programmes. One interviewee explained,

You have to have a mixture of ‘this is the need, we have got all these refugees that need help’ and ‘look at what is happening here, this is [an INGO] project where this child has been helped’. You have got to get both, otherwise people feel a bit hopeless.

Communication managers use the ‘waves’ strategy to strike a balance between conveying urgent humanitarian crises and convincing potential donors that they are making a difference. The ‘waves’ approach certainly caters to the donor’s need in this regard, but it also, problematically, promotes a fairy tale narrative (Dogra, 2012) of minority world charity saving the majority world from impending tragedy.

Marketing and achieving organisational objectives through visual images

How images functioned to ‘market’ the INGO was a further theme in the interviews. While interviewees mentioned how organisations work in partnership with others in the field, they did not want campaign imagery reflecting this: ‘From a fundraising perspective the reality is you are competing for the same dollars. [We’re] trying to highlight the way we do things and reasons why we think it is particularly effective’. Consequently, images that include individual organisational branding – such as logos on medical equipment, tents and staff tee-shirts – are preferred. One interviewee explained, ‘We may strategically do that just so the public know that [our INGO] is working there and if they put their money through us then it will reach where it is meant to be reaching and make a difference’. In these terms, brand imagery attempts to persuade viewers to support a ‘crusading saviour’ INGO, when in fact this individualistic representation fails to depict the reality of collective aid work. This reflects the ‘instrumentalised’ (Chouliaraki, 2013) nature of Western humanitarianism where organisations compete for market share and donor funding (see also Cottle and Nolan, 2007). In using a commercial product differentiation model to appeal to donors, INGOs are strategically selecting images which misrepresent how western organisations work to alleviate poverty. It should be noted, however, that not all INGOs are able to use this ‘point of difference’ marketing approach. The communication manager of the least resourced INGO involved in this research explained that they were so limited by choice in selecting images that they were unable to distinguish themselves from other organisations that were fundraising in the same issues.

Another common theme in the interviews was the description of images as a means to meet an objective or get a message across. Communication managers talked about selecting images that would work best to meet the fundraising targets of an appeal, and how an image would work as a fundraising message was a prime factor in selection processes. Specific images ‘worked’ in terms of meeting targets, so those images were chosen over others: ‘the fundraising people know what works best for them; children under 10 generally work better because those images resonate more’. This ‘whatever works’ approach overrides any ethics of care (Surma, 2013) and respect for the dignity of the subject. Alarmingly, one participant stated, ‘there is never a wrong image to use. I think it is just knowing what’s best for your target audience’. After talking about instances where images of children would not be used for ethical reasons because they would put children at risk (such as identifying children as HIV positive, or as child soldiers), one interviewee said, ‘but there are often reasons why it is valid to use those images …’. She went on to describe particular campaigns where images of HIV-positive children were used because they ‘worked’ for the campaign and would ultimately ‘benefit that group of children’.

The communication managers’ role in image selection

Many factors influence communication managers in their selection of visual images, including media demands, resource constraints, INGO values, and the type of publication being produced. Often image choice is about choosing images that fit within the constraints with which communication managers are working. The following sections examine the key factors that the interviewees identified as determining their choice of images to represent poverty.

Discussion

While the visual representation of poverty in the majority world by the minority world has been a matter of ethical concern since the mid-1980s, there has been minimal change in the nature of these representations. This can largely be attributed to the needs of fundraising campaigns and the fact that communication managers working in the minority world still regard images of ‘ideal victims’ as the best leverage for attracting donations. These images continue to bolster hegemonic power and dependency where the minority world constructs itself as responsible for civilising and bringing agency to the majority world.

Because of the ideologically constructed conviction that the best way to alleviate poverty is through charitable aid, coupled with INGO communication managers’ apparent lack of awareness of debates about alternative, imaginative, ethical and effective mediations of poverty, they continue to reproduce reductive representations. Visual images, and still images in particular, feature in fundraising campaigns to evoke emotional feelings of compassion – ‘solidarity as pity’ (Chouliaraki, 2013) – and the belief among audiences that they are in a unique position to alleviate suffering, and/or support people’s ongoing personal and social betterment. Even while INGOs might want to depict alternative and empowering visual images and narratives of communities in the majority world, a fundamental belief in the imperatives and use-value of emotional capitalism undermine and prevent this happening.

The ‘waves of communication’ approaches used in fundraising campaigns could be seen as challenging these assertions. However, as Shome (1996) has argued, showing people’s lives being transformed by the ‘civilising mission’ of the minority world again ‘ultimately serves the hegemonic function of justifying (white) Western intrusion into the “third world,” and the imposition of Western ideologies on “third world” people’ (p. 508). Indeed, the findings of this research into the role of communication managers in visually representing poverty in the majority world lend considerable weight to Vestergaard’s (2008) claims that asking only for donations from campaign audiences is problematic, because ‘For the spectator to be offered no other option in response to suffering than paying, could be argued to impede his moral response’ (p. 487). Vestergaard suggests that alternative ‘speech’ actions should be encouraged, such as writing letters to government and signing petitions.

An unexpected and alarming finding in this research was the prevalence of a ‘whatever works’ attitude among the four New Zealand based communication managers. Although the INGOs involved in this study all had some form of image guidelines, these were overlooked if an image which did not fit with such guidelines was judged likely to ‘work’ for fundraising, or if there was no time for approval processes. On a pragmatic level, this might be considered excusable because of the ‘greater good’ that could be achieved (lives could be saved). And yet, if fundraising was not the primary target of many communication managers’ roles, and education and advocacy were higher on INGOs’ lists of priorities, the type of imagery would undoubtedly change to reflect that different ‘end’. Evident, then, is that while communication managers acknowledge the ethical guidelines and policy documents of their organisations, these play a lesser role to a discourse of ‘the end justifies the means’. This gives considerable traction to Manzo’s (2008) claim that guidelines brand INGOs as humanitarian and caring about the dignity, rights and well-being of the people, but are not documents that INGOs are entirely committed to because of the tensions that come with fundraising demands.

Reducing the likelihood of organisational ethical guidelines informing visual image use decisions are communication managers’ perceptions of their own tacit knowledge providing their most valuable decision-making resource. This echoes Lee’s (2011) study of public relations practitioners, where ‘practitioners characterised ethical knowledge as a form of tacit knowledge that is personal in nature’ and guided by a ‘universal ethics’ rather than a professional codes of ethics (p. 96). The danger in this approach is that unguided by explicit professional ethics, managers simply become focused on achieving financial objectives, rather than reflecting on how their practices detrimentally impact on social understandings of poverty and people affected by it.

How INGOs visually represent themselves in fundraising campaigns also reflects the capitalist–corporate pressures of marketing and branding. Because the western political economy is based on an individualist and competitive economic model, where profit is linked to having a strong and distinct corporate identity, INGOs construct themselves as exclusive transformative saviour organisations participating in poverty alleviation. This portrayal is far from the reality of the complex inclusive collectivist shared generation of action and knowledge necessary for long-term poverty elimination (Krumer-Nevo and Benjamin, 2010).

Communication managers and INGOs are both deeply constrained and influenced by the hegemonic power of ‘media logics’ in how they visually represent poverty. The parochial focus of the New Zealand media, which determine that stories need a local angle, to feature ‘local heroes’ or celebrities, but which are resource-intensive requirements to fulfil, severely reduces the likelihood that news and feature stories will succeed in communicating complex and structural understandings of poverty. Indeed, while the ‘local hero’ approach may bring media traction, it overlooks, marginalises, and overshadows the work of many indigenous staff and other local people contributing to help those living in poverty overseas. This localising strategy may also further entrench the division between ‘us’ - the potential agents of change, and ‘them’ - the ‘helpless victims of poverty’, in the eyes of the New Zealand public.

Concluding remarks

Reflecting a particular social context, point in time and country, the scope and scale of this project is limited. The findings cannot be generalised beyond the INGOs studied, yet they do offer insights into the conditions under which communication managers in New Zealand INGOs are working and how they make sense of their roles. The communication managers who participated in this study are constrained in how they visually depict poverty by many factors outside their control, including resource constraints, media logics and the competing requirements to balance INGO values, policies and aims of empowering people, with the remit to raise funds. However, while communication managers may be constrained and caught in-between seemingly incompatible objectives, they have an obligation of care to recognise their role in the social construction of poverty. There are opportunities available to present alternative and empowering narratives of poverty in the majority world. Indeed, INGOs which claim to ‘empower’ the people they work with need to more explicitly address the issue of what empowerment means and communicate this message to audiences (Surma, 2013). The importance of ‘empowerment’ and examples of what constitutes empowerment should be explained in campaigns, in such a way that those campaigns include strong advocacy and educational elements.

Communication managers must also examine and question their ‘gut feeling’ or tacit knowledge about what makes a good image and what an ethical image choice is. Challenging the idea that image choice is ‘common sense’ will help communication managers to realign their image selection with INGO guidelines, and, over time, shift tacit knowledge to be consistent with those guidelines. They should also be prepared to challenge media logic, and take a stand on not catering to media needs if doing so will compromise organisational values and ethical guidelines. Exploiting other media representational opportunities, such as those afforded by social media, and in ways that embed an ethics of care into communication can reduce these tensions. In these controlled media platforms, the communication manager can select images that better reflect the INGOs values, rather than be swayed by mainstream corporate media values.

INGOs could also hand over responsibility for the representation of poverty to those portrayed in campaigns through, for example, the allocation of cheap hand-held cameras. Aid benefactors could then be encouraged to create images from the stand-point of their own lives, and to communicate what they think is needed to improve their situation. Often referred to as Photovoice, this approach has been successfully employed in other fields, predominantly in health (see Catalani and Minkler, 2010; Wiersma, 2011). This would give a voice and agency to peoples of the majority world.