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Pictures in Development: The Canadian International Development Agency’s Photo Library

Sonya de Laat

Images captured by the photographer’s eye give us insight, can communicate some of the poetry and drama of others’ lives, can make the people of the Third World become real in our imaginations. Because it is so important to our future, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has built up a valuable resource [the International Development Photo Library] to help Canadians see our world better.

—Monique Landry, Minister of External Relations, 19871

With these words, Monique Landry invited Canadians to become spectators of lives that were lived at a geographical, cultural, economic, and political distance. They were invited to do so through the rich visual resources of the Canadian International Development Agency’s International Development Photo Library (IDPL), more colloquially known as the CIDA Photothèque. Since its public launch in 1987, and with photographs that have spanned CIDA’s 45-year existence, the IDPL has been indispensable in building the agency’s legitimacy and public support. Described in 2000 as “one of the world’s leading holdings of images of southern-hemisphere countries and people,” the IDPL features diverse social documentary photography.2 For over a generation, CIDA mobilized photography from its collection in publications, travelling exhibitions, and educational material to try to shape Canadians’ conscience, imagination, and perceptions of life in the developing world, while also building Canada’s international reputation as a caring and helpful nation.3 For scholars, the pictures are invaluable for accessing official views and for tracing shifting conceptions and practices of development.

The Photothèque images reflect changes in public sentiments and global aid trends, including who is worthy of attention, how aid recipients are imagined, and what practices were used for foreign assistance. In approaching photography as a cultural phenomenon that is much more than a technology for making pictures, this chapter explores the history and content of the IDPL and its role in mediating social relations within a national and global aid system. As the aid sector undergoes a renewed period of external critique and self-reflection, this chapter is an invitation to consider this collection, and historical photography more generally, as being simultaneously of the past and a site of contemporary civil engagement.

Recent studies of aid agency visual media and strategies have expanded the definition of humanitarians and what constitutes humanitarian actions, while adding historical depth to critiques of humanitarian photography.4 This chapter explores the Phototèque collection and considers its relevance for further academic study through a brief history of the IDPL, a broad thematic overview of its content, and an exploration of the significance of this collection for aid historians and practitioners. Along the way, opportunities for future research are identified. While photography is of historical and rhetorical significance, the chapter concludes with an invitation to consider photography as opening a civic space in which modes and powers of signifying and mediating global and local relations can be questioned and negotiated.

Developing a Photo Library of International Development

The history of the IDPL reaches further back in time than the year of its official launch. Even before CIDA’s inception in 1968, staff members of the External Aid Office, which preceded CIDA, were making photographic records of their job experiences overseas. In its first decade, CIDA’s use of photography was mainly for internal accountability and training purposes, as there was little in the way of general, let alone expert, knowledge about conditions in developing countries.5 The photographs were commissioned and used by the Briefing Centre, whose role it was to train development officers before they headed into the field and to debrief them on their return.6 Photographs from this period were dominated by images of development officers and local staff pictured in front of project signage or equipment, or their involvement in infrastructure project activities (Figure 9.1). These first photographs were rarely shared beyond the agency; they were not intended for public consumption.

During this first decade, however, the Canadian public’s exposure to life in the “Third World,” to use the terminology of the day, was expanding. Expo ’67 created a momentum that propelled and heightened Canadian public interest in all things global. Other events held in the agency’s first decade, including the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat) hosted by Vancouver in 1976, further bolstered interest in and knowledge of the world beyond Canada’s borders.7 By this time, CIDA was attracting employees with theoretical and practical knowledge of developing countries. CIDA benefited from those who found international development appealing “not only to idealism but also to a sense of adventure and/or the exotic.”8 As Canadians were demonstrating an interest in global cultures, CIDA expanded its educational mandate, turning its attention to informing the broader Canadian public about life in the developing world.

By CIDA’s tenth anniversary, the Briefing Centre began contracting “highly skilled reporters” and photographers in order to improve the “depth and diversity” of the collection.9 One internal document asked photographers “to record: CIDA projects in all sectors; all aspects of daily life, both rural and urban; landscape, geography, flora and fauna, and urban environments. People are to be included as often as possible.”10 The operating philosophy considered informing Canadians about daily life in developing countries—particularly through images that represented local people as active participants in development—as the more ideal and democratic way of generating support for CIDA and its official development assistance projects without having to be prescriptive or didactic.11

The relationships CIDA developed with its photographers further encouraged a democratic approach. Contracted photographers worked relatively independently, at times piggybacking CIDA assignments onto those from other aid organizations for which they also worked.12 The result was a field of view that extended beyond CIDA projects. The pictures that came back represented a new aesthetic for CIDA that differed greatly from the images originally made for the Briefing Centre. Replacing the more didactic training photographs were evocative and formal portraits of people and life in the developing world. Less visible in the photographs were CIDA development officers facilitating overseas projects. The focus became the people who were (or were meant to become) recipients of Canada’s official development assistance. In 1983, the Briefing Centre collection was transferred to CIDA’s Public Affairs Branch, and in 1985, with growth in the wealth and breadth of the collection, the decision was made to create a publicly accessible International Development Photo Library.13

The library was officially launched in 1987 with the travelling exhibition Development (Figure 9.2). The intention of the Photothèque was that it would be a “professional photo-library available to the public as an educational resource.”14 The IDPL’s main clients were CIDA’s Public Affairs Branch and government departments, but other non-government agencies and media also made use of the photographs.15 The library, with its twenty-year-old collection, had already become a rich repository of culture, life, and conditions in parts of the world that many Canadians would only ever come to know through photography. Over the course of the following decades, IDPL photography would be centrally featured in CIDA’s publications, including magazines such as Development, Action Plans, and Global Citizenship in Action, as well as numerous policy briefs, newsletters, handbooks, and reports. These publications represented some of the more formal public engagement documents.

Building on the success of the inaugural Development exhibit, CIDA recognized the affective asset of the photographs themselves: their capacity to mediate emotional ties between Canadians and foreign assistance. CIDA joined forces with the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP) to produce travelling photography exhibits that were more accessible for a larger swath of Canadians.16 Joint CIDA-CMCP exhibitions included Other Children (1989) and Rights and Realities (1995), first exhibited at the World Conference on Women in Beijing. Finally, but in no way less significant, in the 1990s, CIDA created a nationwide school education program on international development. The educational material created for the Development Information Program leaned exclusively on Photothèque images.

In 2010, the library celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, and marked it with another travelling exhibition (Figure 9.3). By this point, the collection included the work of many award-winning Canadian photographers, including four who received the internationally renowned World Press Photo Award: Dilip Mehta (1984), David Barbour (1985), Roger LeMoyne (1999), and Lana Šlezić (2007). David Barbour’s winning photograph was made while on assignment for CIDA in Egypt the same year the IDPL was started, setting a standard of excellence for the collection (Figure 9.4).

By the time CIDA was dissolved in 2013, with much of its programming either disappearing or merging into the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, now Global Affairs Canada (GAC), the IDPL had already become the victim of changing political, economic, and technological times. Despite the quality of the photography and the high profile of the photographers, already in 2010 the IDPL stopped acquiring photographs.17 Today, the IDPL collection consists of some 150,000 photographs composed of the original Briefing Centre photographs, the pictures made by commissioned photographers, and the corporate collection.18

At its height, from the mid-1980s to mid-2000s, the IDPL would go on to serve many functions for CIDA, from raising its profile in a time when it encountered its first intense external critiques to bolstering its legitimacy when it faced its first budgetary cuts after decades of growth.19 The IDPL would also have unforeseen impact that resonates still today. In the context of the history of humanitarianism, the IDPL emerged at a time of global intensification and expansion of aid activity that brought with it intense media scrutiny. Marked by events such as the catastrophe of the Ethiopian famine followed by the horrors of genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda, humanitarianism in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s underwent a period of disillusionment. The following sections situate the IDPL in the larger visual humanitarian context, and consider the significance of the IDPL for humanitarian and development action going forward.

Situating the IDPL and Its Themes

In the recent survey of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) photographic library, Valérie Gorin called the collection “encyclopedic” because of its broad coverage of humanitarian themes and historic crises.20 Like the CIDA Library, the ICRC collection started with photographs made by delegates on the job. The collection grew when the ICRC commissioned professional photographers in similar ways and for similar public relations reasons as CIDA did. The ICRC also included donated and purchased photographs to round out the collection, transforming it into a visual memory project of humanitarianism, albeit from one institution’s perspective. Rather than a repository of historical memory, the CIDA Photothèque was an active and contemporary source of information on life in the developing world—a resource for Canadians to learn about the people, daily activities, labour practices, and work conditions in distant and unfamiliar lands for current and future ODA activities. The IDPL is nowhere near as encyclopedic as the ICRC library, which stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century and covers a range of humanitarian concerns from conflicts to natural disasters to development. CIDA’s 45-year project is much more modest, yet it is a robust example of a particular moment in the history of humanitarian photography, a subset known as development photography that ballooned after the end of the Second World War.21

Humanitarian photography is defined as “mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries.”22 It is as old as the medium itself and encompasses pictures made by missionaries, reformers, professional and amateur photographers, and professional humanitarians. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, its two dominant forms included “atrocity photographs” and the visual form of the “humanitarian narrative.”23 Atrocity photographs, such as piles of corpses resulting from conflict or epidemic, or photographs of “living skeleton” famine victims, were meant to raise awareness of suffering, all the while shocking spectators into action. People campaigning for emergency relief or political reform often wrestled with their consciences over using this type of imagery, knowing the risks of feeding people’s morbid curiosities and possibly titillating some spectators. Such shocking photographs also risked utterly shutting down spectators’ ability to generate any action other than looking away out of disgust or fatigue.24

Meanwhile, the visual form of the humanitarian narrative emulated what had, until the popularization of photography, been the dominant mode of expression and persuasion of reform writers.25 Conventionally, the humanitarian narrative centred on the progressive story revolving around a victim (idealized as innocent and passive) who was suffering at the hands of a perpetrator (a disease or condition if not a person), only to be rescued by the hero (predominantly presented as active, white, and superior in some way).26 The visual humanitarian narrative may have included elements of atrocity for added “truth” effect, but its main concern was on building a visual narrative of salvation and supremacy that emulated the written narratives. Both atrocity and humanitarian narrative photography coexisted through the period of the two world wars. New technologies and approaches then emerged enabling photographers to represent visually and share human experiences and emotions by focusing on individual portraits, bringing a human face to wartime and postwar suffering.27

The end of the Second World War and the onset of the cold war conflict between Soviet totalitarianism and Western democracy ushered in an era of decolonization within the former European colonies in Asia and Africa. Aid agencies, many of which had materialized during and after the war, turned their attention from relief and reconstruction to development.

With the shift in geopolitical trends, development photography also changed, becoming a distinctive style of humanitarian photography. Representing local aid recipients as participants in their own social, political, and economic uplift proved to be visually challenging since there were no immediate affective or shocking focal points such as those that came with natural disasters or conflict. To create more visually stimulating imagery, and to bring a human face to development projects, development iconography turned to the personal portrait style generated and honed by war photographers.28 The aim of this photographic approach was a focus on the active role of recipients rather than Western aid providers. To this end, there emerged a “‘deliberate positivism’ in imagery “showing self-reliant and active people of the South,” smiling and actively participating in determining their own destiny.29

As optimistic and innovative as such imagery might have appeared, development agencies recognized, and were swayed by, the financial benefits that came from negative imagery. Thus, pictures of severely malnourished children with bloated bellies (a symptom of kwashiorkor), with flies on their eyes, or with runny noses represented the flip side of development aid appeals.30 These types of negative imagery became the focus of a passionate critique within the aid sector in the last decades of the twentieth century. Ultimately, that critique pointed out a paradox in the iconography of suffering: the attempt at doing good contributed to demoralizing and dehumanizing the very subjects that humanitarians and their organizations pledged to help.31 Accused of having become “merchants of misery” by exploiting and perpetuating stereotypes that objectified, essentialized, and infantalized victims and their communities in an effort to further organizational ends, aid actors adopted codes of conduct and ethics guidelines that have been adhered to with varying degrees of success.32

The IDPL emerged within this context, and its photographers and staff were sensitive to the critiques.33 As an entity of a development agency, the IDPL also followed some of the same visual practices that circulated through the international aid sector. The Photothèque collection includes pictures with positive and negative content, but there is little in the collection that can be considered atrocity photography.34

By and large, the photographs CIDA distributed in its official publications, educational material, and public relations posters and calendars were of the optimistic development photography sort characterized by smiling faces of children and adults, often in close-cropped portraits filling the pages and covers (Figure 9.5). Many take on the form of the humanitarian narrative, even if Canada-as-hero is only gestured at through farming, transportation, education and health equipment, or the CIDA logo (see Figure 9.3).

A large proportion of CIDA exhibition photographs consist of harsher depictions of the lived realities of people in poorer parts of the world (Figure 9.6). In these pictures, sober-looking individuals stand in ankle-deep mud between makeshift houses, or children of all ages crowd into one-room schools, and long lines of women wait under the hot sun for food or water. While less uplifting, they are not of a sort that would make spectators cringe, and turn away in disgust. The IDPL’s acquisitions program was about counteracting, and presenting an alternative narrative to, the “pornographies of suffering” swirling around at the time.35 By and large, the Photo Library successfully avoided succumbing to the temptation to exploit extreme misery. That being said, media scholars have recently put forth critiques of this positive development photography. While originally lauded as a corrective to the numbing aspect of atrocity pictures or the superiority inherent in humanitarian narratives, this critique sees positive pictures as concealing difference and perpetuating deep-seeded biases that see people in different geographic or social locations as perpetually dependent and ignorant beings.36

That a mixture of positive and negative themed photographs constitutes the IDPL is not surprising given the history of humanitarian photography and the emergence of development as an ideological and practical form of aid. There is, however, a unique set of photographs also interspersed throughout the Photothèque that insist on being reconciled with the broader collection. This other set of photographs had their origins in the Briefing Centre’s training program and were never intended for public consumption or mass circulation. These photographs depict rather mundane, everyday content such as civil institutions and infrastructure in Rwanda, shop windows in Botswana, and domestic scenes of CIDA families enjoying rest and relaxation while employed overseas (Figure 9.7). They are neither obviously positive nor negative, as they fall outside the typical development photography genre. Their presence in the collection opens new lines of questioning about the representation of development and the mediation of social relations associated with it.

Situating the IDPL in broader histories and themes of humanitarian photography anchors the CIDA collection within the larger history of humanitarianism: a time when national governments were finding economic and political benefits in foreign aid assistance. Consideration of the role of photography in shaping the meaning, interpretation, and understanding of CIDA and Canadian ODA requires exploring the ways in which photography can be analyzed.

Signification in and Significance of the IDPL Collection

Until recently, dominant approaches in photography studies and criticism focused on the politics of representation and semiotics, or, put simply: the pictures’ content and symbolic meaning. Historians have long treated photography as a more or less static artifact. It has been used predominantly illustratively, depicting who was present at what event, and the details of their physical appearance or that of the places in which they appear. Historical photographs have been considered as pictures of the past: of what has already been socially and politically achieved.37 Photographs have also long been recognized for their rhetorical force, and as such have been sources for accessing dominant ideological and emotional trends that structure images of people as worthy of receiving or providing care. Photography is widely acknowledged as shaped by ideologies, politics, economics, and socio-cultural constraints that form along changing hegemonic lines.38 CIDA’s photography can certainly be seen in this light considering that the pictures were commissioned, curated, and captioned by agents of the state. Recent trends in visual theories propose shifting attention to the actors and arena of activity beyond the content and frame of the picture to locate photography’s greater cultural and political forces. Here, briefly, is a consideration of the CIDA Photothèque collection with these long-standing and more recent visual theories in mind.

As Ted Cogan demonstrates in the preceding chapter, discourse and popular conceptions of development assistance altered throughout Canada’s development assistance history. Through a combination of changes in political leadership and public interests, impressions of international aid would shift already before CIDA’s inception. By the time of the IDPL’s official launch in the mid-1980s, its content had significantly moved away from pictures of large-scale infrastructure and capital projects to a focus on individuals and lives in developing countries.

While part of a global trend for visual representations of development and humanitarian action, this focus on the people and places where CIDA operated presented several significant opportunities for the agency. Paying particular attention to recipients or potential recipient communities reflected dominant public perceptions and discourse of Canadian aid in the 1970s and 1980s. The focus on people in developing countries, whether living in difficult conditions of poverty and deprivation or working in situations made possible by CIDA, would be the central subject matter of the IDPL for the coming decades.

According to the 1987 Development exhibition catalogue, the photographs on display “provide us with clues that enable us to be aware of our differences.” With that in mind, Figure 9.6, which was part of that exhibition, presumably equates those differences with global structures of inequality that need correcting. Such a message certainly suited the moral internationalist and global justice perspectives that originated from the L. B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau governments and upon which the IDPL’s operational imperatives were founded.39 When juxtaposed alongside other images from the IDPL collection, such as those in Figures 9.4 and 9.5, a narrative structure emerges that legitimated the existence and presence of CIDA. The combination of pictures of people in developing countries in apparently negative and positive situations built a narrative that could foster a particular emotional (and subsequently political) stance toward aid and toward those on its receiving end. The negative photographs symbolized life without, or before, CIDA support. Meanwhile, the positive pictures symbolize a progressive outcome following Canadian development assistance. In concert, they work to evoke a set of emotions that shape an impression of and legitimate the agency’s actions.

The result is a CIDA iconography that bolsters uncritical support for CIDA’s work, for who could deny the importance of Canadian ODA in the presence of those sorrowful and smiling faces? The combined positive-negative portrait photographs adapted with ease to changes in political leadership while continuing to build support at the risk (or benefit) of distracting attention from CIDA’s actual actions (or inactions). With a focus on this visual narrative, CIDA’s public image could remain consistent despite regular changes in political leadership and agendas.40 This consistent representation concealed behind a veil of altruism potentially contentious projects or decisions that could go virtually unnoticed by the public eye. While further research might detect subtleties within the collection associated with ideological differences of political leadership, on the whole the dominant messaging remained relatively unchanging.

More recent visual theories reconsider photography as an event rather than a technology for making pictures. According to the visual culture scholar, Ariella Azoulay, the “invention of photography was the creation of a new situation in which different people, in different places, can simultaneously use a black box to manufacture an image of their encounters: not an image of them, but of the encounter itself.”41 As such, all the people involved in that encounter, including all subsequent spectators of the picture, are necessary to realizing the photographic event. The photographer and the distributor of the pictures may have (professional, political, economic) intentions with the images, but when photography is considered an event it is no longer the photographer’s vantage point, their intended meaning, that is the only—or even the dominant—one. As an event and an encounter, photography “can no longer be seen as a personal property, but [as] a complex set of relations” in which “everyone gain[s] the opportunity to see through the gaze of another.”42 In this sense, the invention of the camera is not just a new mechanical technology to make pictures, but one that creates a new “civil space” within which bonds and responsibilities are forged between those implicated in or articulated to the photographic situation. With this approach, photography inherently invites the possibility of “restoring and re-establishing as many links as possible between the photograph and the situation in which it was taken.”43

These recent theories open new lines of inquiry, inviting analysis of the entire IDPL collection, questioning the events and actors associated with it rather than just the content or frame of individual pictures. Doing so expands the field of vision in development photography and explores its role in mediating social relations within development assistance. Indeed, a look at Phototèque content even invites critical reflection about global structures of inequality and mechanisms of exclusion.44

Some of the “everyday” photographs that appear in the IDPL and that originate from the Briefing Centre are instructive here. Figure 9.7, for instance, may well have been made disinterestedly, with the intention of showing what types of shops Canadians might expect to find for their own convenience upon their arrival in Botswana. Other photographs made for the benefit of development officers exhibit more self-conscious irony. For instance, Dilip Mehta made exposures of typical Canadian civil servants enjoying a moment of repose in their expat housing compound in Bangladesh. Behind them a local dark-skinned Bangladeshi labourer waters the garden. The scene, as Mehta composed it, reflects traditional, hierarchical colonial relationships. Mehta is an Indo-Canadian photographer and visual artist, which may have contributed to a more critical stance.

The photographs of shops, banks, and domestic activities present an “everyday” that is distinct from the “daily life in the developing world” depicted in CIDA publications and exhibitions. These are much more ambiguous and introduce the possibility of questioning CIDA’s actions and presence: Why here? For what purpose? What is the relationship between CIDA and the developing nation on the receiving end of Canadian ODA? What is being concealed behind the expressions of the evocatively portrayed aid recipients? In what way do cultural or social positions (e.g., gender, class) from CIDA photographers shape their field of vision? Given that CIDA photographers were not always picturing specific CIDA projects, but rather the life in countries in which they operated, what details were Canadians learning about Canadian development assistance activities? Considering the consistency of CIDA’s image despite changes in political agendas and ideologies, were Canadians being presented an equally homogenous view of the Third World or of development assistance? To what extent were there distinctions being made, in educational material or exhibitions, between actions taken in different countries? To what extent were Canadians enabled to distinguish between life in Botswana and Rwanda, or Nicaragua and Nigeria?

As aid agencies globally, and Global Affairs Canada itself, undergo ongoing renewal processes, resources such as photographic libraries and picture archives are invaluable entry points for self-reflection. They are also indispensable and yet underutilized wells for exploring the relationships built, fostered, neglected, and rebuilt between those on the giving, receiving, and spectating sides of aid.45

Conclusion

. . . one thing I am always looking for in my photographs is a kind of cross-current. I never want the photograph to be just one thing, one mood, one idea. Rather, it should be a place where multiple, often contradictory, impressions overlap.

—Roger LeMoyne, photographer46

Roger LeMoyne’s comment is built on an approach to interpreting photography that remains bound by the frame of the image. If nothing else, recent innovations in photographic theory expand the field of vision beyond the picture’s borders. LeMoyne’s instincts are correct, even though not explicit; photography is not “just one thing,” it is always open to different signification, in spite of anyone’s intentions. Considering the event of photography rather than the product of the photograph reveals that the medium is inherently a point of convergence, a place where different points of view intersect and have an opportunity to interact. In the event of photography, spectators come to the photographs at different historical moments or with different political and social positions in relation to the image. Considering photography in this way renders all of the Photo Library pictures, not just the outlier “everyday” pictures, civic spaces that invite reflection and debate about the relations mediated and represented in them.

Images from the Canadian International Development Agency’s Photothèque helped shape Canada’s identity at home and abroad as a caring, helpful nation. Sharing portraits of apparently positive and negative examples of daily life in developing countries enabled CIDA to appear unchanging despite regular changes in political leadership and agendas. The development iconography the IDPL acquired and mobilized, while building broad and relatively constant support for CIDA, could also conceal aspects of Canada’s ODA that might be points of debate or critique.

Until recently, photographic theories would conclude that the IDPL photographs could only illustrate past CIDA activities or be resources for accessing dominant political and social ideologies. Photographic theories that explore the arena of activity beyond the border of the pictures and seek out the disruptive force of contingency inherent in photography offer opportunities to use the Photothèque pictures to think about social relations in development work. Mediations and representations from the past can inform considerations of those today, something that is especially relevant in the present era of reflection and renewal in development. As the line between subjects and creators blurs with the growth and accessibility of social media, the knowledge of histories of representations is enriching and valuable to future development relations.

Notes

I am grateful to Mary Bramley and Blaine Marchand for their insights and recollections about the origins and functions of the IDPL. I would also like to thank Bramley and her colleague Paul Richer of the IDPL for their assistance in scouring the library collection on my behalf, as well as Library and Archives staff and members of the Canadian Network of Humanitarian History for their additional supports. I would also like to thank Stephanie Colvey for sharing her insights as a photographer who began her photographic career with CIDA.

1 Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Development: CIDA’s Photographic Library (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1987), 2.

2 Blaine Marchand, “Lives Lived,” Globe and Mail, 4 November 2000, A24-5.

3 It is worth noting that a rich scholarly debate exists around the concept of development. I use the term here not to signal allegiance to any one point of debate but because it is the language (and ideology) of Canada’s official aid program.

4 Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, eds., Humanitarian Photography: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kevin Grant, “Christian Critics of Empire: Missionaries, Lantern Lectures, and the Congo Reform Campaign in Britain,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29, no. 2 (2001): 27–58. Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

5 Personal communication with Mary Bramley, 14 December 2016.

6 According to Morrison, the Briefing Centre was created in 1969 to take “a more professional approach to preparing Canadians for placements abroad.” David R. Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide: A History of CIDA and Canadian Development Assistance (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), 66.

7 Personal communication with Blaine Marchand, 17 February 2017.

8 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 64–74.

9 The Briefing Centre and the Public Relations Branch were both under the auspices of CIDA’s Communications Department. CIDA, Development, 1–27.

10 CIDA, n.d., internal IDPL document, provided by Bramley.

11 Personal communication with Blaine Marchand, 17 February 2017.

12 While ownership remained with CIDA, photographers were allowed to use the pictures they made for the agency for non-profit, self-promotional purposes. Stephanie Colvey, photographer, personal communication, 27 July 2017. Also see personal communication with Mary Bramley, 14 December 2016.

13 According to Marchand, one of the key figures in creating the CIDA Photothèque was Roberta Borg (1943–2000), who, coincidentally, had previously worked with the National Film Board to create the “highly acclaimed Habitat film series, which premiered at the United Nations Habitat Conference in Nairobi.” Blaine Marchand, “Lives Lived,” Globe and Mail, 4 November 2000, A24-5.

14 CIDA, Development, 1–27.

15 During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 50 per cent of the IDPLs clients were civil society organizations who required professional photography for their promotional material.

16 The CMCP is now part of the National Gallery of Canada. Their archives include documents and material related to the joint CIDA-CMCP photography exhibits.

17 As a result, CIDA began to “beg, borrow, and steal” from other departments or purchase photographs on an as-needed basis. A project to put some 90,000 digitized photographs onto a publicly accessible online portal was quietly scuttled at the time of the agency’s merger. Despite the completion of hours of vetting, culling, editing, and making Web-ready, the project did not go ahead due to platform incompatibility between the different departments’ operating systems; see personal communication with Mary Bramley, 14 December 2016.

18 The IDPL is a public collection; however, access to it is limited. Another 8,291 original Briefing Centre photographs from 1972 to 1985 are housed, and accessible upon request, at Library and Archives Canada; these are among the first pictures made by professional photographers for the agency. The corporate collection consists of photographs of ministers and CIDA personnel performing official duties. For the sake of brevity, I do not include these photographs in this paper, as they were not explicitly a part of CIDA’s education and information practices. It bears noting that this by no means diminishes the space for civil engagement opened up by their existence.

19 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 313.

20 Valérie Gorin, “Looking Back over 150 Years of Humanitarian Action: The Photographic Archives of the ICRC,” International Review of the Red Cross 94, no. 888 (2012): 1349–79, http://doi.org/10.1017/S1816383113000568.

21 The genre has earned its own social media hashtag: #DevPix.

22 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 1.

23 Valérie Gorin, “‘Millions of Children in Deadly Peril’: Utilisation des d’enfants affamés par Save the Children pendant l’entre-deux guerres,” Revue Suisse D’histoire 37: Special Issue on Media And Famines (2014): 95–112; Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. L. A. Hunt (Ann Arbour: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 1989), 176–204.

24 Heather D. Curtis, “Picturing Pain: Evangelicals and the Politics of Pictorial Humanitarianism in an Imperial Age,” in Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 22–46; Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–34; Kevin Rozario, “‘Delicious Horrors’: Mass Culture, The Red Cross, and the Appeal of Modem American Humanitarianism,” American Quarterly 55 no. 3 (2003): 417–55.

25 Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” 176–204.

26 Gorin, “Millions of Children in Deadly Peril,” 95–112; Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” 176–204.

27 Davide Rodogno and Thomas David, “All the World Loves a Picture: The World Health Organization’s Visual Politics, 1948–1973,” in Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 223–48.

28 Jorgen Lissner, The Politics of Altruism: A Study of the Political Behaviour of Voluntary Development Agencies (Geneva: Lutheran World Foundation, 1977).

29 Nandita Dogra, “‘Reading NGOs Visually’—Implications of Visual Images for NGO Management,” Journal of International Development 19, no. 2 (2007): 163; Henrietta Lidchi, “Finding the Right Image: British Development NGOs and the Regulation of Imagery,” in Culture and Global Change, ed. T. Skelton and T. Allen (London: Routledge, 1999), 275–96; Ian Smillie, The Alms Bazaar: Altruism Under Fire – Non-Profit Organisations And International Development (London: Intermediate Technology, 1995).

30 Jeremy Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993).

31 Suzanne Franks, Reporting Disasters: Famine, Aid, Politics and the Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Dennis Kennedy, “Selling the Distant Other: Humanitarianism and Imagery – Ethical Dilemmas of Humanitarian Action,” Journal of Humanitarian Assistance 28 (Feb. 2009): 1–25; Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal Of Experience: The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in our Times,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 1–23.

32 Jorgen Lissner, “Merchants of Misery,” New Internationalist 6, no. 1 (1981): 1–11; General Assembly of the Liaison Committee of Development NG0s to the European Communities, Code of Conduct Images and Messages Relating to the Third World (1989): International Federation of the Red Cross, Code of Conduct in Disaster Relief (1994), http://www.ifrc.org/en/publications-and-reports/code-of-conduct/.

33 See personal communication with Mary Bramley, 14 December 2016.

34 Sensitive images include photographs such as childbirths. These types of photographs have not been published but may have been used for internal organizational purposes.

35 See personal communication with Mary Bramley, 14 December 2016.

36 Nandita Dogra, Representations of Global Poverty: Aid, Development and International NGOs (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014).

37 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

38 Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo-Works 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984); Judith Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, ed. Judith Butler (London: Verso, 2009), 63–100; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003); John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

39 Ted Cogan’s chapter in this volume.

40 While underlying Canadian financial interests in ODA has been a criticism, it need not be. An attempt to conceal or deny such interests when they do exist is much worse.

41 Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2012), 92–93.

42 Ibid., 113.

43 Ibid., 86.

44 See also Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” 63–100.

45 Recent photo-based oral history projects that focus on the experiences and perceptions of the people (or their community members) in the photographs have emerged in collaboration with the opening up of visual archives. Not all of them are humanitarian or development specific. Project Naming is supported by Library and Archives Canada and aims to identify individual Inuit people contained in that photographic archive collection; see Carol Payne, “‘You Hear It in Their Voice’: Photographs and Cultural Consolidation among Inuit Youths and Elders,” in Image and Memory: Oral History and Photography, ed. Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson (London: Palgrave, 2011), 97–114. For a recent project on refugees in UNHCR photographs, see Caroline Lenette, “Writing with Light: An Iconographic-Iconologic Approach to Refugee Photography,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 17, no. 2 (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-17.2.2436. For a project learning from people in contemporary aid photographs, see S. Warrington and J. Crombie, The People in the Pictures: Vital Perspectives on Save the Children’s Image Making (London: Save the Children UK, 2017), https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/node/12425/pdf/the_people_in_the_pictures.pdf.

46 From LeMoyne’s online biography: http://rogerlemoyne.com/bio.