'Shock effect' appeals --- The campaigns of Oxfam 1956 and Red Cross 1961 rely on a documentary mode of representing suffering in its plain reality. Oxfam's 1956 mother-child visual complex constitutes the classic imagery of the 'ideal victim' . The lack of eye contact suggests that the mother is unaware of being caught in camera, yet the picture is focalised on her arm reaching out to an imaginary benefactor in plead of help, while the urgency in her emaciated face testifies to the despair of her condition.

Source author: Emmanuel Henry Pierre manniepierre@hotmail.com