The incorruptible Kodak: photography, human rights and the Congo campaign

The significance of photographs for the humanitarian campaign to end atrocities in the Congo, which gathered strength from 1903, was not lost on contemporaries, as Roby’s attempt to undermine them makes clear. This chapter takes issue with the argument that photographic images of atrocities in the Congo represent an important moment in the way that ‘spectators’ and ‘audiences’ thought about and came to understand ‘human rights’. Apart from the fact that the ‘spectators’ are never defined, nor even quoted, beside the loose assumption that they were horrified audiences in Britain and the United States, these approaches employ a teleological understanding of ‘human rights’ which assumes that this was a shared narrative of common understanding in the early twentieth century. The Regions Beyond Missionary Union had used photographic technology to great effect long before their involvement in the Congo campaign.