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"humanitarian agencies are almost never held to account for doing wrong, even as they do not hesitate to take credit when they do good. What's more, I wrote, the humanitarian claim of political neutrality is a fiction: humanitarian action always has a political consequence, and one cannot deny responsibility for it. My focus was on humanitarian responses to armed conflict (rather than, say, natural disasters, or peace-time economic development) and on how, time and again, aid serves to cater conflicts, or to transform a crisis into the status quo. "

"In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Foreign correspondents in the blockaded enclave spotted the first signs of famine that spring, and by early summer there were reports that thousands of the youngest Biafrans were dying each day. Hardly anybody in the rest of the world paid attention until a reporter from the Sun, the London tabloid, visited Biafra with a photographer and encountered the wasting children: eerie, withered little wraiths. The paper ran the pictures alongside harrowing reportage for days on end. Soon, the story got picked up by newspapers all over the world. More photographers made their way to Biafra, and television crews, too. The civil war in Nigeria was the first African war to be televised. Suddenly, Biafra's hunger was one of the defining stories of the age-the graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to conscience-and the humanitarian-aid business as we know it today came into being. "

tools and services designed to make life easier for reporters when covering humanitarian emergencies

NEED magazine creates exposure for humanitarian aid via an educational, artistic, visual narrative of human stories.

Changing Ideas helps photographers and charities turn humanitarian ideas into reality.

"January 12 marked the anniversary of the devastating earthquake that shook Haiti last year, killing more than 230,000 people and leaving several million inhabitants of the small island nation homeless. Though natural disasters are common, the humanitarian response this time was different: New media and communications technologies were used in unprecedented ways to aid the recovery effort. A report recently released by Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities, with support from Internews and funding from the Knight Foundation, takes a critical look at the role of communications in the crisis and recommends ways to improve the effectiveness of utilizing media in future disaster relief efforts. (The Knight Foundation is a major funder for MediaShift and its sister site MediaShift Idea Lab.)"

Episode III - Enjoy Poverty is the second in a series of three films by Martens that raise issues regarding contemporary image production. For Episode III Martens travelled for two years with his video camera in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area marked by humanitarian disaster, questioning why the Western 'poverty' industry are benefactors rather than the people in the images. Working with Congolese photographers, he attempts to guide them in earning a living from poverty photography - a project doomed to failure. Episode III was screened at London's Wilkinson gallery for several weeks this winter, and during that time Martens also spent an evening discussing his work with ArtReview's J.J. Charlesworth. This is the second and final part of that

Citizen photo journalism outlet Citizenside has teamed up with FrontView Production to launch FrontView Report. The site is a collection of photos and videos from social, humanitarian and environmental activists who witness and record key events from around the world. "Some of them find in photography and video a powerful means to express and document their commitment and feelings," explains the summary on the site.

Episode III - Enjoy Poverty is the second in a series of three films by Martens that raise issues regarding contemporary image production. For Episode III Martens travelled for two years with his video camera in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area marked by humanitarian disaster, questioning why the Western 'poverty' industry are benefactors rather than the people in the images. Working with Congolese photographers, he attempts to guide them in earning a living from poverty photography - a project doomed to failure. Episode III was screened at London's Wilkinson gallery for several weeks this winter, and during that time Martens spent an evening discussing his work with ArtReview's J.J. Charlesworth. This is Part I of that discussion.

Photojournalism and ethics - How far would you go for a photo? Duckrabbit takes Pulitzer Center to task over ethics Posted on April 21, 2010 by mirandagavin| 4 Comments Benjamin Chesterton from duckrabbit alerted me to the following story. He has just published his views on A Developing Story with quotes from his letter to the Pulitzer Centre. Briefly, and according to Chesterton: "The Center has recently funded the photographer Macro Venaschi to do a story on child sacrifice in Uganda. His highly stylized black and white photographs are deeply disturbing on a number of levels. One of the pictures shows an abused boy with a catheter protruding from where his penis has been cut off. I believe that if published in the UK, this picture would be illegal on the basis of indecency. Beyond that, there is an account on the Pulitzer website of how Vernashi persuaded grieving parents to have their murdered child's body exhumed so that he could take photographs of the body. A payment was then made to those present.

Over the years it seems they've done exactly that, funding the kind of international journalism that often is without a sponsor in the USA.   But for journalism to retain any integrity it cannot simply rely on something as intangible as 'a deep sense of responsibility', it must be grounded in a solid set of ethical principles and it must be accountable.   Without these principles journalism doesn't shine the light into dark places, it becomes the dark place. Several weeks ago I came across  a set of pictures on Facebook and Photoshelter by the talented photographer Marco Vernaschi which focus on the subject of child sacrifice in Uganda. The work is both being funded and promoted by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It's a decent enough story, but not one that is in any way new. The pictures are black and white, often blurred, without hope and even evoke a sense of nihilism.  Nothing however in my journalistic career could prepare me for the disturbing truth as to how a number of the photos were taken.

The New York Times is running a slideshow by photographer Jan Grarup about life in the Daadab, reportedly the oldest refugee camp in the world. "The strength of the project rests within its immediacy," Mr. Grarup said. "It has an honesty to it." I was in Daadab not so long ago myself. I may not have been there for long but I was there long enough to notice that life in the camp wasn't one you would wish on the  worst of your neighbors -Kenyans and Somalis from Somalia aren't the best of neighbors. In the camps there is of course suffering but I would also have loved to see images of the children that were playing in the camp, images of the schools set up, images of the street with all the shops where refugees who've refused to be victims of circumstances are taking charge and rebuilding their lives. Where are the photos of the weddings that happen in the camp and where are the photos of people who despite their many tribulations, still observe prayers without fail? Where are the photos telling the other side of the story?

One surefire way to irritate blind people is to think that you can put a blindfold on for an hour or two and understand what it is to be blind. It sounds like a good idea until you really start to think about it. I should know. I once set out to make a radio documentary for the BBC about the contrasting ways in which the visually impaired and the sighted experience the countryside.

In the vanguard of the Marines, the press corps had already stormed Somailia. Now we will see more of the famailiar pictures of grotesque human degradation, with foreign angels of mercy ministering to starving children, juxtaposed with images of trigger-happy teen-age looters. Such pictures prompted President Bush's military adventure-now they will justify it. The camera can't lie, we are told. But anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the "right" image. Photogenic starving children are hard to find, even in Somalia. Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her feeding a little girl-three times. This is disaster pornography.

We've all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out.  Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things. I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008.  I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to.  How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people?

Have you ever seen one of those photos where there's a starving child with distended belly, looking forlornly up at a camera, asking you to save them? On the TV news, in magazines, and occasionally on advertising for charities. Playing on our fears and sympathy, they try to push a giant button on our forehead labeled "GUILT." These images make me angry. They make me angry because that's just not what extreme poverty is really about. Yes, it's real - people really do live in such challenging circumstances, but when it's the only image we see, it sends all the wrong messages. It's poverty porn - gratuitous and explicit images that strip away people's identity and personality, making them out to be little more than meat. It makes out that people in extreme poverty aren't willing or able to do things for themselves. It makes out that people in extreme poverty are victims, that they need us to save them. And, without really even thinking about it, it reinforces the idea that people in extreme poverty are somehow less than us - less valuable, less capable, less intelligent … and less human.

In 2007, Dóchas members adopted a Code of Conduct on Images and Messages. The purpose of this Code is to provide a framework which organisations can refer to when designing and implementing their public communication strategy. The Dóchas Code offers a set of guiding principles that can assist organisations in their decision-making about which images and messages to choose in their communication while maintaining full respect for human dignity. By signing the Code, Development NGOs commit to a set of principles, ensuring that they will avoid stereotypical or sensational images. The adoption of the Code means that aid agencies will choose images and messages that represent the full complexity of the situations in which they work, and that they will seek the permission of the people portrayed in the photos they use.

"Nick Kristof has one answer: Focus on the individuals in the story, leaving the aid bureaucracies just outside the frame. Make readers care about places and people they will probably never see by bringing them stories of hope and inspiration: the American woman who leaves behind her family to help rape survivors in the Congo; the orphan boy in Zimbabwe who dreams of and gets a bicycle."