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Photographs can make human-rights abuses visible and give people a way to shape how they are seen. But an image’s meaning is never guaranteed: captions, circulation and who controls the photograph can turn it into evidence, propaganda, protest or self-representation. Jane Lydon’s ten examples, spanning a 1949 UNESCO exhibition to refugee images shared online, show both the power and the limits of photography.
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These photographs matter not because each can be shown to have caused a specific law or policy change, but because they reveal how pictures enter arguments about dignity, violence, belonging and memory. Lydon’s essay, published by The Conversation and republished by SBS News on 2 October 2018, treats photographs as objects with histories: made for particular purposes, circulated to particular audiences and capable of acquiring new meanings.
How the ten photographs frame human rights
1. UNESCO’s “Families” collage, 1949
In UNESCO’s Human Rights: Exhibition Album, a collage of four families from different cultures offered a visual counterpart to the idea of a shared human family. The exhibition followed the United Nations General Assembly’s proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948. UNESCO designed portable photo albums for exhibitions that could be recreated around the world, across language and racial boundaries.
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The collage makes universality easy to grasp, but it also shows the risk of simplifying difference. A picture of shared humanity can imply that people live in harmony when their histories and circumstances are not the same. The image’s hopeful message does not erase that tension.
2. “War dead,” UNESCO Human Rights: Exhibition Album, 1949
Images of war dead, including corpses at Buchenwald, set a different register beside the family collage: human rights are not only an ideal of common belonging but also a response to atrocity and struggle. Such photographs can serve as testimony to suffering far from the viewer.
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3. Frederick Douglass, c. 1841–1845
This full-plate daguerreotype, made by an unknown photographer and held by the Onondaga Historical Association, portrays Frederick Douglass, an escaped enslaved person and abolitionist. Lydon describes Douglass as recognizing dignified photographic portraiture as a way to counter racist caricature.
The portrait matters not only for what it records but for the alternative it offers to dehumanising representation. Douglass’s example foregrounds a person’s agency in how they appear: a portrait can assert dignity rather than leave identity to hostile images made by others.
4. Koetö Réh, 14 June 1904, photographed by H.M. Neeb
During the Aceh War, military doctor H.M. Neeb photographed the massacre of villagers by Dutch KNIL forces at Koetö Réh. Lydon’s 2018 account reports that more than 500 people were killed, including 130 children; those figures are reported by that secondary account.
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The photographs’ uses show how little an image’s apparent documentary character guarantees a single interpretation. Dutch authorities subsequently used them to present colonial rule as protective. They are now read as evidence of imperial atrocity. The image’s historical meaning depends in part on who circulates it, what argument accompanies it and what viewers know about the event.
5. “Soldier distributing biscuits to Indonesian children”
In the Indonesian Revolution of 1945–50, Lydon writes, it became taboo to show massacres of civilians, while photographs of soldiers distributing food could portray them as humanitarians. The image, credited to the Bob van Dijk Collection at NIOD’s image bank in Amsterdam, illustrates how a carefully chosen scene can shape a public account of conflict.
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A picture of aid may document a real act and still leave violence outside the frame. What is shown, what is absent and what captions say all influence the story viewers receive.
6. Brenda L. Croft, shut/mouth/scream, 2016
Artist Brenda L. Croft reworks a cropped official mug-shot of her grandmother Bessie. The original photograph was made to classify Bessie racially; Croft turns that bureaucratic image into a forceful portrait. The change in authorship and use challenges the purpose the image first served.
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Lydon connects the work to the history of Croft’s father, Joseph, who was removed from his Gurindji/Malgnin/Mudburra family as a child. Croft’s art participates in reconstructing kinship and place. Here, an image made within a system of classification becomes material for a family’s own account.
7. Vera Mackie, “The Peace Monument, Seoul”
Vera Mackie’s photograph records demonstrations at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul protesting militarised sexual abuse during the Asia-Pacific War. The monument functions as an “icon of peace” in Lydon’s account: it gives protest a visible focus while keeping the past present in public life.
The photograph is therefore about more than a monument as an object. It records people gathering around a contested history and shows how commemoration can become part of ongoing political action.
8. Kate Geraghty, Pezhma Gorbani, 2013
After arriving on Manus Island, Iranian asylum-seeker Pezhma Gorbani held his ID card against a bus window in a photograph by Kate Geraghty. Lydon reads the image as conveying despair and defiance at once. It also points to restricted press access to the setting.
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9. Alisha Fernando as a baby, 1982
Alisha Fernando shared a photograph of herself asleep aboard a ship after her Vietnamese family was rescued at sea. By pairing the image with #iwasarefugee, she connected a personal history to solidarity with refugees.
In this use, the person represented is also the person choosing how the image circulates and what story it carries. A private family memory becomes a public statement without losing its connection to one person’s life.
10. Alisha Fernando and Willem Christ, 2013
Fernando set the baby photograph beside a later image of herself with Willem Christ, the captain of the boat that rescued her. By then an Australian citizen, she used the pair to narrate her own history and assert control over her image.
The comparison across time changes how the earlier photograph is read. Fernando is not only a child pictured during a rescue; she is an adult authoring the connection between past and present.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What these images show about photographic power
- Meaning changes with use. The Koetö Réh photographs could support a colonial paternalist account and later serve as evidence against colonial power; Croft transforms a classification image into family portraiture.
- Visibility has ethical costs. Images can make distant suffering legible, but displaying people in pain can exploit them or leave audiences numb.
- The photographed person can exercise agency. Douglass’s portraiture, Croft’s artistic reuse and Fernando’s paired images show different ways people can challenge or shape how they are represented.
- Access and publication shape public understanding. The Manus Island example underscores the significance of restricted press access. As a comparison, the Smithsonian American Art Museum describes how photographs of Birmingham protesters attacked by police dogs and high-pressure hoses brought the freedom struggle into homes; it identifies the mainstream press’s increasing willingness to publish images of racial violence as a turning point in the movement. Andy Warhol later altered Charles Moore’s source photograph through reversal, cropping, enlargement and contrast.
Other photographic histories widen the picture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Sojourner Truth using a portrait bearing “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance” to promote her causes and control the sale of her likeness. Its account of Lewis Hine’s child-labor photographs describes their use in reports, exhibitions, pamphlets and lectures to sway public opinion. These examples show photography serving both self-representation and organized reform advocacy.
World Press Photo’s ICONIC exhibition offers further comparisons involving migration, resistance to racism, protest and conflict: Douglas Martin’s 1957 photograph of Dorothy Counts facing racist hecklers during school desegregation; Charlie Cole’s 1989 Tank Man image; John Moore’s 2018 photograph of Yanela Sanchez at the US–Mexico border; and Amber Bracken’s 2021 image of red dresses commemorating children who died at Kamloops Indian Residential School. These are related examples, not replacements for Lydon’s ten.
How to look at a human-rights photograph
To understand what an image does, consider more than its subject. Ask who made or commissioned it, who controls the subject’s image and caption, what the original purpose was, where it circulated and how it was later reused. Then look at what it makes visible, what stays outside the frame and whether the people pictured are represented only through suffering or have room to speak and act.
These questions help distinguish a photograph’s historical significance from a claim about measurable impact. Lydon’s selection is an interpretive account of images that shaped human-rights discourse; it does not establish that each image independently produced a particular legal or policy outcome.
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