Citation:
Abstract:
My thesis research explores the perception of disability in the global imagination, informed by the images of postwar UN humanitarian photography. I analyze the United Nations and World Health Organization’s archives in Geneva and New York of photographs, films, posters, and other visual sources, disseminated to the public, to help contextualize the postwar construction of “the disabled” as a distinct category in need of special global attention.
Historians who write about UN and international organizations have traditionally focused exclusively on textual archives. There has been budding interest in the UN’s visual history, but the scholarship is in its infancy. This project seeks to add a new dimension to the study of projection and gaze during postwar decolonization: How did and does the UN perpetuate or problematize the same images of the disabled as objects of pity? Who is “disabled” in the UN’s images? Who is the “public” in these films? Using samples of WHO photographs on disability, and It’s the Same World, a UN film produced for the 1981 International Year of Disabled Persons, I argue that the audience for these images was primarily the West. These images are a product of the able-bodied West’s collective need to reaffirm a completeness of self amidst suffering, disabled bodies. The enthusiastic reception of the UN’s photographs and educational films by a predominantly Western audience provided a sounding board that reaffirmed both the UN’s internationalism to the global public and the potential of media to extend the UN’s visual identity.