Humanitarian Photography: A History (Human Rights in History) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.2. Feeling the brunt of war (1901). Emily Hobhouse, The Brunt of War and Where it Fell (London: Methuen, 1902).

Although funerary photos were taken in the camps for families’ private use, Hobhouse did not publish any of these in her book. Nor did she use a now-famous shot of the severely emaciated Lizzie van Zyl, lying near naked and alone in a camp hospital bed shortly before she died.26 Hobhouse had befriended the young girl and obtained the photo (likely taken by camp inhabitant and photographer Mr. De Klerk) “out of affection for the child.” She did not circulate the photo publicly, although about a month after Lizzie’s death in May 1901, it was published by The New Age in London as a depiction of wartime suffering. Six months later, the pro-government press, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, used it to denounce Hobhouse and to suggest that Lizzie’s death was intentional: the result of maternal neglect, not camp conditions – a charge Hobhouse vigorously countered. At issue was who was to blame for child mortality: were Afrikaner women devoted and loving mothers, deserving of viewer concern, or something more unnatural and sinister? The photo of Lizzie showed a lone suffering child, with gaunt, empty gaze and no mother present. After its pro-government propagandistic use, Hobhouse chose to include it in her book but was blocked by her publishers who considered it “too painful for publication.” In reporting this fact, Hobhouse asked readers whether “it is right to shrink from a typical representation, however distressing, of suffering which others have to endure, and which has been brought about by a sequence of events for which we are partly responsible.”27

Hobhouse’s humanitarian campaign targeted her own government and criticized its wartime behavior toward noncombatants. “Never before have women and children been so warred against,” she wrote:

Is it to be a precedent for future wars, or is it to be denounced, ... by every humane person of every creed and every tongue, denounced as a ‘method of barbarism’ which must never be resorted to again – the whole cruel sequence of the burning, eviction, the rendering destitute, the deporting and finally the re-concentrating all of the non-combatants of the country, with no previous preparation for their sustenance.28

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