Visual Depictions of Children

Ellen Tolmie

Tolmie:  Thank you very much for inviting me.  Do you all know what UNICEF is and does?  Would you like me to say a little about that?  It’s the United Nations Children’s Fund.  It’s the U.N. agency, which is mandated really to make sure that children’s concerns are part of any international action.  It was created in 1946 in the aftermath of WWII, one year after the creation of the United Nations, very much in response to the condition and the situation of children in the aftermath of the war.  UNICEF has 200 offices worldwide.  We’re in virtually every single country doing cooperation program work with governments.  We are an inter-governmental agency.  That means that we really can’t go and work in a country without the permission of the governments.  We work in cooperation and deal with human rights organizations.  Other independent groups have a very kind of relationship.  I say that only because I think that the role of an inter-governmental agency like UNICEF is an extremely important one, as a bridge between different kinds of sectors, but it also obviously has diplomatic implications.  There are 7,000 staff members worldwide.  Eighty-six percent of the staff is in the field.  We’re very decentralized in that sense and we have an annual budget of about $1 billion, 1/3 of which is spent on supplies. Actually the purchase and disseminations of core health care and education primarily, and emergency equipment as well.  Just so that you have a sense of where photography comes in to what we do, the programmatic framework since 1990 in what UNICEF does, and I hope I’m not being using too much jargon, is really based around the convention on the rights of the child.  It’s an international treaty, children’s rights, which has been ratified by every country in the world, with the exception of the United States and Somalia.  The United States government has problems with issues relating to fears that in some sense it undermines the authority of the family.  UNICEF’s position is that on the contrary, it reinforces and assists that relationship.  But that is very much--the convention on child rights has been extremely helpful to me in arguing for the importance of taking a lot of care in the depiction of children visually.  So it’s something that I feel very strong about.

I’m going to read for about ten minutes just to introduce some of the basic themes and then we’ll look at images and I won’t read anymore.  So hopefully it’ll be more interesting.  I was initially asked to talk about how sexuality is projected onto children in imagery.  This is in part because UNICEF was involved in an international conference on the commercial sexual exploitation of children at the end of last year.  I’m not here to relate this to the way sexual issues are projected onto children in fashion industries and other ways because I’m really not an authority on that at all but I felt it was important to understand the broader issues of how children are manipulated.  Do you have a problem?  Do you want to ask something?

Audience:  What’s the definition of a child?

Tolmie:  The child.  Thank you.  A child--the definition according to the convention on the rights of a child--is anybody under 18.  It is very important because we often think that adolescents aren’t children and adolescents don’t always want to be called children, and sometimes people call them young people.  I think that’s a lot of double speak, and legally speaking and in terms of their developmental growth, it’s everybody under 18. 

So I really asked, if I could, instead of addressing the particular issue of sexuality, I want to talk about the assumptions underlying how children are depicted generally speaking, visually.  On the whole, I believe that this is an issue that is not explored at all.  People rarely think about why and how children are depicted, and I also think the sex issue is not a very good one to explore, this larger issue, because the visual depiction of sexuality, whether it’s children or anybody else, is part and parcel of sexual exploitation.  It’s pornography and that isn’t the case with other ways in which projections of how children are depicted.  So the lack of debate or real examination of how children are depicted visually came to me over the years inside of UNICEF.  I was always wondering why the debate was always being reduced to rather we should have happy, positive or cute images of children on the one hand, or sad, negative, suffering images of children on the other.  The reality is that children live most of their lives between these two extremes of happiness and suffering, and I didn’t understand why, especially in UNICEF which is in the business of thinking about children in all sorts of different ways, didn’t have a more nuanced kind of approach to this subject.  I think over the years I’ve had two theories, which are underlying my presentation today.  One of them is that first of all, in spite of all the lip service that is paid to the fact that since the 1960s we are living in a predominantly visual image dominated culture.  Visual literacy is extremely low still.  People don’t think in terms of analyzing in the popular culture.  It’s not something that you automatically learn how to do, like you automatically are required to learn to write.  And amazingly sophisticated people, when you talk about imagery, the intellectual level just drops.  I think part of the reason is because obviously, and I’m sure that you know this very well, visual imagery communicates on an emotional level and people think that emotional levels shouldn’t be--not intellectualized--but it doesn’t have the same complexity and depth as other kinds of analytical things.  I think that it does.  And the other issue is the emotions with which adults approach children.  People automatically assume that the majority of uses of the depiction of children, and they are overwhelmingly with the exception of pornography and things like that, well intentioned.  We want to celebrate their innocence, we want to protect them, we want to do all sorts of things, but very often these are adult emotions that are projected onto children based on what adults want children to be based on their fantasies or their representations of how they remember their own childhood, based on how they want their children to represent the future for them, so it’s a very complex emotional premise which is largely unexamined.  I think that’s why visual representation of children, the sort of double-emotional combination, results in the real lack of examination of how children are depicted.  So that’s the prospective that underlies what I want to talk about.  I’m a documentary photographer; that’s the background of which I come, and the work that we do in UNICEF is strictly documentary.  We are out there to document, to illustrate, to record and to advocate particularly the real situation of children in the world.  So it’s not an interpretation in that sense, but obviously there are interpretations of every kind of image creation. 

I want to refer for a moment to Wendy Ewald’s book, I Wanna Take Me a Picture.  I don’t know if you know about it.  It came out last year about teaching photography and writing to children.  She noted that children’s – excuse me.  I forgot my most important point.  That in contrast to other kinds of depictions of people, photographs of children are extremely unique in the sense that children are usually completely uninvolved in deciding how they are depicted visually, and I think that this is a critical thing that has to change, and we have to think about, very much, taking into account how to try to make sure that a child’s perspective is represented in this way.  And this came through--this idea that children are really not necessarily being fairly represented by adults’ idea of how they should be, of who they are, in Ewald’s work as well.  She said that she found that the children’s work was sometimes perceived by adults as disturbingly frank.  “There was a marked difference between the openness and enthusiasm of the teachers in their classrooms and the kind of reception the work received in public exhibitions at the schools.”  These are children’s photographs.  Six out of seven of the exhibitions were censored.  Many felt that the content and sometimes the presentation of the children’s work weren’t suitable.  It didn’t look like the other art cheerily decorating the halls.  A lot of it wasn’t neat and much of it was about life outside the school.  It was clearly something more than cute mimicry of grown-up mass media imagery.  Ewald worked with children in many different countries around the world and it seems to reinforce my perception as well, that children – how they would like to be represented – might be very different from what adults assume they would like to be represented, or that they even have an opinion in the matter at all.  This doesn’t mean that children should only depict children.  It’s a silly and impractical suggestion, which also applies to adults.  Women should not be the only ones depicting women or black people should not be the only people depicting black people, and white men should not be the only ones depicting white men.  We all have to move into each other’s territories in order to discover the dimensions of it, but I do think that in respectful representation we have to consult the subject in some sort of a way.  It also doesn’t mean that children are always the best judges of how they’re depicted.  Obviously babies don’t have a lot of opinions on this subject, but children have opinions and perspectives more and more as they grow, and a way of expressing these, and I think that this is often underestimated.  So it means that adults who depict children have a responsibility to try to take children’s perspectives into account.  Taking a more critical view of the representation of children, examining who’s interests are being served by a particular depiction, recognizing that we, as adults, often project our own hopes, desires and fears onto depictions of children, ensuring that there’s a separation between the emotional values we associate with children such as innocence, in our understanding of the implications of how we use imagery, which is rarely innocent in that sense of the word.  So this attempt to create a critique and analyzing images of children owes very much to feminist critique that began in the 1970s of how women were being visually depicted, particularly in the popular media, at a time when these depictions were almost totally from a male perspective.  Sometimes they were respectful and complex, other times clichéd, one-dimensional, not infrequently condescending, and often humiliating and degrading.  When women’s perspectives on these images were heard, and when women began to participate in their own visual representation, a more realistic, interesting and complex portrait of women as capable, multi-dimensional actors began to emerge.  I believe this is also true and will be true with the increased participation of children.  I feel it will help us move forward in seeing the clichés, distortions and discriminations in the representations that many other social groups are subjected to.  It’s an interesting concept to examine the extent to which children are discriminated against.  Most people think we love children, we always want to take care of them, and protect them.  We think on an extremely simplistic level because of how emotionally loaded our relationship to children is, so we don’t examine the ways in which we do discriminate, condescend, dismiss, disregard, ignore--all of these sorts of things that we do to children all the time.  I think. 

The last concept that I want to talk about is the whole question of trying to keep in the mind the idea of otherness.  Obviously, any kind of projection of somebody else’s, of putting another notion onto them, but particularly in an international environment when we are dealing with photographs and depictions of children who are far away, who are unknown, who live in cultures that we’re not familiar with, the tendency to make them “others,” and especially if they’re experiencing something that we’re not used to or have no particular familiarity with, their otherness, it’s very hard not to turn them into objects of an experience that really has nothing to do with us. 

Before I show the photographs I want to credit all of the photographers who do work for UNICEF and who are represented here in this particular presentation.  Achinto, Cindy Andrew, Alexandro Balegar, Ralica Shalisane, Jacque Danwa, Donna De Cesare who is here and who will make a presentation after me, Stuart Freedman, Jose Hernandez-Cliade, Jeremy Horner, John Isaac, Roger Lumines, Susan Marquis, Shizad Norene, Jaqueline Polatze, Betty Presh, Shawn Sprague, Jonathon Shahid and Claudia Vertioni.  Okay, so I’m going to try to speak directly to the images.  I wanted to open this course with this image because this is a child in Sudan who is basically turning the equation around, who wants to be the photographer, who’s looking at the photographer, although I think it also undermines the child is naked, the child does not really have a camera, the child is essentially in a relationship with much, much less power to the photographer.  At the same time, I think the child has a very witty take on what the photographic process is. 

The reason I want to bring this image as a beginning to the analysis is to talk about how images are read, and how we all project our own attitudes and the kinds of things that are circulating in the environment around us, which we don’t necessarily, on examination, believe.  I think a great way to figure out how you really think about--or what the image tells you and what you think about it and what is real or fair or not, is just to let it out, whatever’s going through your mind.  So when I look at this image, without knowing anything about it, I think, “Who is this kid, why is he wearing sunglasses, who does he think he is, is he some sort of a street kid?”  You can read in all of the kinds of prejudices that we are fed all of the time, so it’s very important in looking at imagery of anybody, but particularly of children, to look at those kinds of immediate reactions, which are not necessarily what you think.  This boy is actually in Brazil, I’m sorry I’ve forgotten which city, and he created the mural in the back.  He lives in a very poor neighborhood.  He’s actually, what is the phrase that they use?  He’s at risk of social abandonment.  This is in the caption which I edited and I think it must be a literal translation from Portuguese, but I find that the phrase itself, risk of social abandonment, it’s precisely what happens to a huge number of children all over the world in rich environments as well as poor, and I think it speaks--it’s trying to offer vocational skills and other kinds of things so that these kids have some sort of an alternative because they don’t have a social meeting place. They don’t have lots of options but he’s obviously a very talented person.

I want to go back a little and run through some key images that start with the history of UNICEF which was in the late 40s, early 50s, which is also a time when the camera documentary photography was introducing to rest of the world, but also in that process, which was very well intentioned, highly positively motivated, it has begun to establish some of the preconceptions and prejudices which have become the clichés of how children are portrayed today and often assuming a kind of meaning that was not necessarily intended at the time.  Obviously in the aftermath of WWII, because of the terrible impact of the war on everybody, but particularly on children, that was really the impotence for the creation for UNICEF, but also for a worldwide appeal for doing something about it, and photographs like these assisted incredibly in bringing together resources and an international response to provide some access.  However, it is also--there’s always double alternative meanings in this--it’s also the beginning of the depiction of the child as a needy person who needs our help, which is not to say it’s not true, it’s just a question of understanding the implications.  This is a child in Greece and we also use imagery, of course, to document the fact that we do deliver what we say, we’re working on the ground; this is the distribution of blankets in Greece and the distribution of milk to children, many of whom are displaced or orphaned in Greece as well.  It required, in those early ages of course, not only the sensitivity and the depiction; this is a girl who’s an ex-camp victim.  You can see on her foreground the little blur which is actually her number tattoo, so for a child who’s been through that kind of experience, the kind of sensitivity that’s required to give them a vaccination, against TB in this particular case, is really extremely important, as well as photographing her.  At the same time, one of the principles of UNICEF, which I think it has stood by quite consistently throughout its more than 50 years of existence, is that no children are enemies in any kind of situation.  This is a displaced German girl who was just as entitled to aid as any other child. 

The creation in the 1950s, following from the successes, really, of responding to the post-war situation in China and Europe primarily in the aftermath of the war, there was a belief, which was very much part of the times, that we could go out and fix a lot of the problems that are out there in the world, we can do things.  That’s a wonderful, energizing issue and way to be in many ways, and it created a lot of good.  There were huge anti-disease campaigns, which really made a very big difference.  This is the beginning of the documentation of those efforts.  This is a campaign against malaria, one of the diseases where the campaign was a singular failure because of the nature of the disease. 

Then we have the proliferation, the first of what I call the “white man/white coat” images, which really proliferated everywhere in the 1950s and were very important in terms of disseminating knowledge and resources and services.  However, the continual depiction of this sort of situation obviously has paternalistic and racist overtones, which were essentially not recognized at the time. 

Much more appropriate is the kind of an imagery which we always focus on in UNICEF now, which is showing local people doing what they obviously know how to do very well. 

That’s Burma.

Then we have the emergence of the happy child image, what I call a “happy child image,” which is not to say that one does not--children should be happy but we should recognize that we should try to make them happy but this consistent--it also tends to suggest that we just give them something and they’ll be happy.  It’s a quick-fix kind of a solution, and also particularly ironical in relation to milk.  In the early years there was this huge surplus of powdered milk in the richer countries who decided to distribute it to the rest of the world, many of whose cultures do not use cows milk, so it was a spectacular failure in those places, but it was obviously very much a learning process as well.

The counter-point to that happy child image was the emergence, particularly in 1968 during the conflict in Africa, was for the first time or one of the biggest times, that there was a real dissemination throughout the world of the image of this starving African child.  This is an image, which dates from this period and was made famous throughout the world and it’s an image that we are living with the consequences of today and continue to live it in all sorts of ways. 

The other issues that were coming up at the same time; this is Vietnam in 1972.  This particular image was taken, but not only is there a reminder that in spite of the recovery from the Second World War, that wars are happening everywhere.  Wars are continuing to occur.  The consequences for children are continuing to be felt and in addition to the fact that children obviously imitate the realities that surrounds them, so they play war games in war zones, but also what was special about Vietnam as we all know, is that it was a TV war.  For the first time the Western world was watching what was happening somewhere else and it was the first time, also, there was a major cultural media invasion of that country the implications of which we’re still trying to sort out.

Then in 1971 the war of independence that basically created Bangladesh out of East Pakistan created an enormous refugee exodus into India of 9.5 million people.  I really cannot get my head around that kind of a number.  Imagine the quantity.  I can’t imagine it.  The number of children--so this is also establishing that not only is the child helpless and a victim and is suffering, but so are the parents.  This is a projection, which is factual, it’s true.  It’s something that we have to deal with, but it often, too often, is an exclusive diet of how the developing countries are represented. 

In the same case of 1979 in Cambodia, this was a genocide that the world essentially allowed to happen.  There was access and care only for those who got out and then the opening when the Vietnamese went in and took over the country and refugees began to get out.

This photograph shocked me very much, actually, because I came upon it in 1996, just a couple of years after we did a book on the writings and drawings of children in the former Yugoslav republics who were affected by the war and trying to cope with their experiences going through that.  We had only by that time organized a systematic way to take into account trauma treatment for children in the midst or in the aftermath of conflict, and drawing is a very big part of it.  This image by a child of what he really witnesses, which is the killing of children, is shocking and incredible but I think extremely important because it also shows the level to which the child is aware and is able to articulate, and needs to express all those sorts of active qualities which are very important to emphasize.  So here we are after ten years essentially, between 1968 and 1979, with a barrage of representation for the western world, what Asia and Africa is apparently like according to the visual evidence.  There was a very interesting survey by somebody who worked with UNICEF who spoke a lot to young people between the ages of 16 and 17 in the U.K. in the early 1990s and asked them what their impressions of developing countries were, based on the imagery and the media and the information that they were getting access to.  I think it’s very much a product of this kind of imagery.  What percent of developing country people are starving, (defined as visibly malnourished)?  The response was 50-75%.  The reality is 1-2% of the population.  What percent are living in absolute poverty?  The response was 75%.  The reality 20-25%.  What percent of 6-12 year olds start school on time in these countries?  The response 10-20%.  The reality almost 90%.  What percent of poor world’s income comes from international aide?  Response:  50-70%.  Reality:  1%.  And the absolutely unknown facts for anyone was that the loan repayments, the quantity, the total of loan repayments made by poor countries to rich countries has almost always exceeded the amount of aide that they receive.  So anybody who manages a family budget, or any kind of individual budget, knows that if you give away more money than you take in you tend to stay poor. 

So, what can an international organization, which is trying to represent a broader picture of these countries and their situations, do?  What UNICEF tried to do in many ways was to counter this with images about the daily life, about the real world where the majority of the people live; not the crisis situations, although of course, we are responsible for representing the crisis as well.  That’s a big challenge, trying to balance those needs.  And of course we have to do this as well because this is UNICEF’s program work is, so we’re also talking about and documenting what we’re doing and what we’re collaborating and cooperating with.  So a child is born and introduced to his sibling; children are confronted even though this is a draught crisis situation, but the children are not alone, they are cared for.  They play.  I think this is Vietnam.  They flirt with adolescence.  There’s not a problem with acknowledging the sexuality of children, either or the complexity of their lives.  This is in Georgia.  Fathers are also active teachers and parts of their family’s life.  I think that in the effort to compensate for the position of women, in many ways, there has been a sort of tendency to demonize men as not participating in family life, and we very much want to--and that’s certainly not going to help them participate more--it’s very much a question of showing that kind of positive imagery as well.  Men’s participation in the early years of their child’s life.  Immunization campaigns, which reach the remotest villages.  Early childhood care for children in India.  Children in schools.  The reality that many of the solutions to respond to these, the low technology or appropriate technology that is being used to solve issues in these developing countries are mostly invented and created by the people there.  They’re not handed over by experts from richer countries.  A very good example is oral re-hydration salts which is what this child is receiving.  It’s a combination of a certain balance of salt and sugar with water, which was invented in Bangladesh and is now used worldwide to stop the diarrhea that causes dehydration and is a major killer of children.  This costs a couple of cents.  UNICEF also distributes it in prepackages but it has significantly reduced child deaths around the world due to that particular problem.  This pump--this particular image is taken in Iraq--this is called a Mark 2 Pump and it was invented in India and is also used worldwide in villages.  It’s much sturdier, it’s easier to assemble, it’s cheaper, it’s better to maintain, etc., etc.  And even in situations where the challenges are greater, so to speak, where children are more impoverished, these children cannot afford to go to the local schools, they can’t pay the school fees, this is in Zambia, many of the children are affected by AIDS and have been further impoverished because of the impact of this.  There’s the creation of community schools to try to compensate somewhat for the lack of schooling in whatever areas are possible.  It’s also recruiting young people as peer educators.  This girl is leading a discussion about reproductive health and HIV/AIDS prevention in Namibia. It’s working together with international organizations on creating complete responses to the kinds of issues which children face.  These are displaced children in Bosnia during the attack on the cities of Tuzla and Srebrenica and the provisions and supplies.  It’s very important to respond to the psychological needs of children who’ve been displaced or traumatized, to get them into a normalized, routined, quasi-normal situation as quickly as possible where they are also able to express themselves.  This is the use of some of the materials that are included in Edu-Kits, which are pre-packaged kits for children or for schools and for teachers that either were the infrastructure for the schools that have been destroyed, or they’re too poor to have access to these sorts of things.

So some of these images are effective whiled some of them are merely documentary.  I think obviously in documentary image one of the principle functions is evidence.  We want to be able to demonstrate that things are happening and present a different kind of picture.  This is a local Albanian woman who was hired to work with children who are refugees from Kosovo.  Prosthetic devises for a child whose leg was lost to a landmine explosion.  I included this image because this was taken about four weeks after the receding of the major floods in Mozambique flood a couple of years ago.  At the time of the flood, when the water was up very high, all the media in the world was there taking pictures and then they got home and the real work began.  For me, a very interesting story of the rehabilitation.  Digging your house out of all of that mud, responding to the health and other kinds of challenges, recreating your world all over again, is a fascinating story which many people--and also many people in their own countries as well as others, this is not just an international problem we’re not hanging around to do.  The other thing that we were trying to do in the representation of our images is how do we equalize relationships between local people and people who come from other places.  Between different cultures, between different ethnic groups, between different skin colors, so that we present a balance which is not a representation of people helping each other, which is not paternalistic or reinforcing negative stereotypes.  I’m including this image right here, but how does one get these kinds of images out?  How many of those images that I showed you have you ever seen in major media--those stories being told?  Very few.  We all know that bad news is covered much more often and much more prominently than good news.  This is a photograph by Sebastiao Salgado.  I don’t know if you’ve seen the recent coverage in the newspaper but he’s done a documentation last year on the international campaign to eradicate polio, which was a spectacular success story and a huge international mobilization.  In the last two years, 550 million children have received two billion drops of polio vaccine to really stop the spread of the polio virus and it’s succeeding.  In a couple of years we now have--in 1998 I think there were 350,000 new cases of polio every single year in the world.  It’s now less than 500.  We are only a couple of years away from a spectacular success against a disease, which many people in this country have forgotten about.  Many people in older generations--Mia Farrow had polio, Frances Ford Coppola had polio, those are the famous ones--lots of other people have had and have been affected by this disease which, however, was officially eradicated here in the United States in 1994, but really taken care of in the 1960s.  It hasn’t been taken care of in the rest of the world because the peanuts, in terms of money that are required to do it, have just not been made available.  It costs $3 billion to carry out this international eradication campaign compared to $812 billion, which the world spent on arms last year or the $400 billion, which the United States spent on advertising last year.  So just to give a sense of the relative expense:  this year there’s a shortfall in funding right now of $80 million to carry out the campaigns and are big international, huge immunization campaigns, and some of these programs have had to be cut back because there’s not sufficient funding.  So Sebastiao actually became interested in this subject, he documented it, and he has the media clout to get it delivered.  We had an exposure in major media and major magazines on this issue, which we were otherwise unable to achieve. 

By the way, I have to do my little plug.  There’s an exhibition of his imagery at the Aperture Gallery on 23^rd Street through August if you want to see it. 

But, the positive imagery can go too far sometimes.  I find there is often a tendency--I want to show you, these are some kids in Columbia, and I want to assure you that none of these shots and I know the individual photographers and I know the circumstances, none of these shots were set up although this one looks set up to me, but it wasn’t.  The kids were there, they were sweet, they were smiling and he made the picture.  This is a photograph in Namibia.  This is like, “Ah, racism has disappeared! Everybody’s happy!” which is a nice idealization of a perfect situation, and it happens to be also a real situation of children who are together in a particular situation, but what is the value.  This more than anything, like all of these images, say that context is absolutely everything.  How are we going to use this image?  What is the message it conveys in what particular context?  Is this saying that all the problems are solved and we don’t have to do anything anymore or is this an ideal situation we would like to work towards?  All those questions are raised.  The other is what I call the tourist view of development and the “exalting other.”  The turning child who happens to be, this is just a poor Somalia child who put a veil in front of her face because it’s a beautiful bright red scarf, we read into it our own interpretations of reality and we impose that kind of exalted other sense on people which is not very helpful in the end, in terms of trying to understand who they are.  The same case here.  These gorgeous giggling girls in their beautiful clothes, they’re wonderful and it’s a great shot and we can celebrate who they are, but I think we have to be extremely careful about how we use images like this and what we use them for, because in the same way that one can objectify the suffering child, the other cute one on the other end is just as objectified.  So how do we represent the more dramatic sorts of situations in the world, the reality in which an unacceptable number of children live.  Children in Nepal who make a living by scavenging in a dump.  A boy who’s a coal miner in Columbia.  The issues of street children in Brazil.  A child who is severely malnourished in Iraq as a result of the international sanctions.  A girl returning to Kosovo after the war was over and stepped on a landmine and lost both of her legs.  A woman who’s living in Northern Uganda in an area that has been a conflict zone for some time, trying to survive in this horrible landscape.  Palestine boys--this was last year not this year--in the West Bank territories.  It’s very important to also see and analyze the full dimensions of this.  There are many images.  It’s a really terrifying image, the fact that these kids with nothing but slingshots are taking on a major military machine is frightening, and I think an indictment of how the world treats children in general.  However, it’s also important to recognize that these kids represent 1% of the population, or maybe 2% according to latest UNICEF surveys of the number of Palestinian children in the occupied territories who are actually involved in combat or in challenging or in aggressive, fighting acts.  I think this is important to recognize because there are accusations to Palestinian parents saying, “what are you doing allowing your children to be exposed to this kind of danger?”  There’s all kinds of preconceptions about things.  However, it’s also important to recognize that 53% of the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank are children; children who are third generation--50 years of conflict--who’ve been living with displacement and all of the conflict, essentially.  One does not have to take sides in order to recognize the damage that it’s done to children in these circumstances.  A girl who’s confronting her future in the Taliban occupied city of Herat last year.  And how does--this is strange image for us--how do we represent such an extreme situation without sensationalizing it?  And the AIDS pandemic.  This is the issue that is affecting every single other one that there is. There are 34 million people affected by AIDS in the world.  Ten times as many Africans died of AIDS than died of all the conflicts in that conflict-ridden continent.  Back to the starving child image.  This is a malnourished child.  The hair, if you are missing some basic nutrients, will often go red.  That’s another sign of severe malnutrition.  In Sierra Leon.  He’s essentially a victim of the conflict.  There’s no other reason in that country why children are starving.  That’s the reason.  And that’s the reason in most of the countries of the world; it’s the lack of the ability to access those children of basic resources, the disruption of services, the displacement of their normal family life.  So what do we do?  Do we use this image or not?  I find myself always conflicted.  If this is what the reality is, I think it’s important that we show it and that we document it, but I think it’s also extremely important that we measure how we use it.  And how do we represent the adults who are responsible for these children?  I think there is also a perception with all these children, nothing is being done.  Where are the parents?  Let’s blame them.  I think that it’s also extremely important that it’s very complex.  That the people in the rest of the world are just like us.  They want homes, they want basic security, they want the ability to enjoy themselves, they want healthy children, etc.

So in the context of all that history and baggage from the past and the current crisis’ of the world, how do we deal with a really big crisis like the genocide in Rwanda in 1994?  And, especially from a media perspective and a visual depiction.  The one thing that we often forget, and I try very much to keep in mind myself, is what the real scene in these places looks like.  If you had all of the media who are also covering the event.  In many ways the whole point of taking a photograph is to isolate a particular moment in time, and it’s the media photographer’s job in many ways to make that photograph without the rest of the media in it.  But the reality is that there’s often these places are swarming with media.  What is the impact on the people who are being photographed in this process?  I think that this photograph illustrates it beautifully simply because coincidentally this AP photographer is exceptionally tall in relation to the people he’s photographing. 

So we really tried to confront this issue in 1994 when the genocide began.  This is in Tanzania, a camp where at the time there were 300,000 predominantly ethnic Tutsi’s who moved over into this area quite quickly.  At the time people said this was unprecedented and this was one of the biggest camps in the world.  Well, I thought that was true until I read about the 9.5 million in 1971 in Bangladesh who had moved.  There’s that point, for me that shows that there’s also a lack of historical memory.  I’m not sure this is happening again and again, we have to remember what’s happened in the past in order to be able to understand better what’s going on in the future.  A couple of months later when the killers, essentially, were defeated and the many ethnic Hutu’s moved out, either implicated or in fear of reprisals themselves.  I think it’s very important to make distinctions in these situations.  Actually, in one week, and this was pretty unprecedented, one million people crossed the border into another country and they took over.  There was just no place to put them so many of them were living on the air fields in Goma even while the transport relief planes were coming in.  It must have been deafening. 

So what is UNICEF going to do?  How do we represent what UNICEF is doing?  Our mandate is children in a particular emergency where every news organization and every relief organization that is offering a photograph of a suffering child to depict the epic proportions of what is happening.  I try to argue for the use of this image because one of the things that UNICEF immediately became involved with is what to do with the huge number of unaccompanied children who were separated from their parents because of the killings inside of the country, because of the dramatic and very fast exodus out of the country, and because of the cholera epidemic which accompanied that exodus, including huge numbers of babies, too, which was extremely difficult to take care of properly in proper conditions.  So I thought this was the beginning of an automatic system that was created to take care of them, and I thought this image showed the drama and the seriousness of what happened, but also not the child in total isolation in the context of other children who at least had each other for support, and I don’t think it should be underestimated the degree to which children really support each other.  And again, extremely important to show people helping themselves, doing things themselves.  These things could not be done, international relief would achieve nothing without the on-the-ground networks and numbers of people and skills that are there.  At the same time we have to show what UNICEF is doing.  This is actually one of the truckloads of kids who were being picked up all over the place at that time.  The IUN peace-keeper taking care of a landmine victim inside Rwanda.  And very simple images – one doesn’t have to be sensationalistic to demonstrate the drama of what is happening.  I can’t get over this woman’s eyes.  She’s looking for her children.  And a year later, they’re still looking.  Other people are looking for their children.  Same problem.  Three years later, in Zaire, it goes on.  In 1996 many of the Rwandans who were in the Zaire refugee camps returned, but those who were still afraid of retaliation because of the genocide refused to go home and traveled—walked thousands of kilometers across Zaire and then came back again and basically were encircled by hostile rebel forces within that country and came to rest, basically, and were finally accessed by international agencies.  I think details like this often tell the story better than other images.  The state of the children was absolutely dreadful.  This image reminds me of holocaust images from the Second World War.  One of the things that we try to do as well is to tell a story.  This is the last image in an essay.  This particular little girl who was discovered, she was prostrating by the side of the road, picked up, taken care of, cleaned very tenderly by a lovely elderly woman.  In the process of recovery each night, for security reasons, all of the relief workers had to leave the camps and one night it was attacked and anybody who couldn’t run was killed, so she was probably killed.  But, if anybody thinks these sorts of things only happen in Africa or predominantly happen in Africa, the experience in Yugoslavia through all of the 1990s should disabuse anyone of that notion.  The extraordinary thing for many people in the western world, and this is also something that was allowed to continue to happen for eight years in the back yard of Europe, was that many of the displaced and the refugees were middle-class.  This was a big surprise for people who are used to seeing and thinking about people who are displaced or deprived of their homes as poor people who somehow are implicated in their desperate plight.  This is a color version, I think, of the kinds of images that we all saw from the Second World War in Europe happening again, 50 years later.  And who pays the price?  And who keeps the ethnic hatred bubbling?  This is totally unacceptable.  This is a photograph of Serbian ethnic children, after the conflict in Kosovo was finished, who are in a church helping to commemorate the anniversary of the 12^th century defeat by the Ottoman Turks of the Serbs, which is the rationale for much of the ethnic hatred, or one of the flash points for it being passed on to children.  On the other side we have an ethnic Muslim child who’s flashing the sign of the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army forces, and also sewing the seeds of future ethnic discord.  And that’s the end of those slides. 

(Applause)

Thank you very much.  It’s not over.  Oh, I’m getting late.  I’ll speed along.  There’s not that many.  I want to talk about ambiguity in imagery as well. That everything isn’t black and white; that everything isn’t suffering and cute and that everything isn’t straight forward in imagery.  And people are extraordinarily different everywhere in the world as well.  This is an Afghan refugee in Pakistan at the end of last year who’s father tattooed a Kalashnikov gun to his child’s forehead, and when asked by a photographer, “Why did you do this?” the father said, “Because it is our fate.”  And he didn’t elaborate.  So I really don’t know what it means.  I think it’s not permanent.  I hope it’s not permanent.  But also that there are many other layers of meaning behind a particular photograph.  These are also Afghan refugees in Pakistan where basically the children are the sole support of the family, making or weaving carpets.  The father, who was a truck driver in Afghanistan, became unemployed and they had to leave the country.  He cannot get a job in Pakistan either because he’s an ethnic minority and he’s probably there illegally, so the children support the family.  The devastation for the father is almost total.  He cannot--he says, “I’m too big, I cannot sit there, I cannot work.  My fingers are too big to be able to do this kind of work so I’m useless.”  That’s the father’s statement.  The other thing too is the representation of sexuality. This is a workshop to do make-up and to teach these kinds of skills in a poor community in Brazil.  This is also the sort of notion of how we project our own preconceptions about how things should be or not in different cultures and different situations.  In many ways this workshop was created to promote self-esteem, which it’s apparently accomplishing, and to create an area for these girls to come together and to help reduce the risks of prostitution in the neighborhood.  In many ways, my immediate response was, “reduce the risks of prostitution?  When they’re being . . .?”  On the other hand, I think it’s working.  I think this is creating self-esteem, this is what the girls are interested in, this is what they want to do, they’re learning how to do something, it’s a meeting place, it’s an ability to talk about other subjects.  It’s not for me to say from  my middle-class North American perspective that this is not something that they should be doing.  And people spoke very, very positively about the program and the affect that it was having on the girls.  This is a photograph of a girl in Iraq.  Her father asked that this photograph be taken, and very significantly I believe, she lost an arm and was injured in her leg because of a landmine and he was so angry and enraged about what had happened to his daughter that he asked her to expose her leg, basically, which in normal circumstances he would never do.  1994 in Rwanda.  These children are acting out the attacks that they have witnessed by creating these extraordinary weapons.  Look, they’re made out of tubes and leather bits and sticks and all these things, which are really quite convincing from a distance.  Many adults protested this particular psychodrama, as it was called, because the children were extremely aggressive acting out what they had witnessed, because adults don’t like to see children being extremely aggressive, but this is something that was probably very important for them to do.  Also, extremely important to be in a position of holding a gun, of being in a position of power even if it’s a toy gun, but to understand not to use it, not to encourage a culture of using guns, but on the contrary, to be able to understand and to work through what it’s like to be on the other side of an intimidating power situation.

This is a very interesting photograph because this is a girl in Afghanistan at the end of last year, who has put a veil across her face to be modest.  It has had, from a Western perspective I think, absolutely the opposite affect.  She looks much more seductive and provocative precisely because she happens to be smiling.  But it’s a misinterpretation.  It’s not what she intended.  So we have to also take that into account.  We have to be extremely careful about how we use the image. 

And how’s that for a contradiction?  This is a project of children, the girl is 18 actually, but given cameras to try to document their immediate surrounds, and this girl who is used to always wearing a burqa and continued to do so, and I think some extraordinary contradiction that’s she’s hiding herself while seeking to unmask others, so to speak, in a documentary process.  This is her with her veil off and so turning the tables on who is documenting who.  I love this photograph from Columbia.  These are kids.  Their video cameras are made out of cardboard and their microphone is a stick with a ball on the end, but they really know how to stand.  They’re imitating the professional media in this, and it’s also a question of power and humor and it shows the sophistication of children.  You only think they don’t know what’s going on.  I think it’s hilarious.

So the other thing we can do in imagery is also to document and show the situations where children are, and even though the photographs are not necessarily fascinating images from the point of view of composition, they tell a very positive story.  Is this yours Donna?  Yeah.  This is a photograph by Donna.  There were other photographers who also document.  This is Maralee.  She’s one of three children who were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in Columbia as representing the Columbian Children’s Peace Movement, and she is one of the leaders of this group.  She’s doing volunteer work in a community with children who are poorer than herself.  She was galvanized by the death of a friend of hers.  She is visiting the cemetery where he was killed.  These children take on enormous personal risks, are subject to threats, in order to take a stand against the hideous violence which has been such a dominant feature of that country for so many years.  I lived there for four years and I have a great love for Columbia.  The extraordinary violence just keeps on going on but these kids are the solution in many ways.  Will Frita  is another member of the group.  He’s talking about peace initiatives and the importance of pressing peace issues with young men who are just a little bit older than he is who are soldiers.  This is a girl.  She’s acting, actually, in a skit on HIV/AIDS awareness.  The girl who’s crying in the foreground--she’s 17 years old and she’s pretending to be the mother of a girl who has died of AIDS and she’s part of a network of different communities in her district to promote HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.  Mexican kids participating in a vote referendum.  This kid who refuses to be a victim. She’s been paralyzed by polio; her poem is called I Can Do It or I can’t remember quite exactly, but something like that.  A wonderful affirmation of who she is and what she can be.  This girl in the top foreground is 17-years-old and she’s in Afghanistan.  As soon as the possibilities to be able to learn openly and go to school.  This is a home-based school.  Her sister is paid $10 a month to run it, which is the total income for the family.  She’s about two steps ahead of the rest of the younger children in learning, but they’re doing what they can to be able to take the opportunity to educate themselves.  This boy, he’s 8-years-old.  One of 11 children.  Walks two kilometers every day, both ways, to go to school.  In a freezing classroom.  This girl is 13-years-old. She was bringing with her colleague the recommendations of a three-day meeting of something like 300+ children who met to make the recommendations to the governments of the world.  This special session was covered by a lot of youth journalists as well.  Here they’re interviewing the executive director of UNICEF.  This boy is--this is what it looks like at those meetings.  You’re laughing at the man, aren’t you?  This Sierra Leon boy is testifying to the Security Council.  The Security Council is one of the most important centers of power in the world.  This is the second time the children testified to it, a few weeks before, a boy from Sierra Leon who was a soldier, testified.  These kids are talking about the impact of war as well.  A girl from Bosnia.  A boy from East Timor.  So these are not extraordinary photographs, but they are important testaments. Speaking of child soldiers in Sierra Leon, this is an image of-- these boys belong to a tribal group in Sierra Leon and they look very strange to a westerner.  This combination of western garb on the one hand and their tribal garb and other things, plus they’re carrying rifles, they’re shocking to western eyes and people who have not--and people of many, many cultures outside of Sierra Leon, and they are in a demobilization center participating in activities, although they have not obviously yet made their decision to be demobilized.  This was a--because it’s so sensational, this photograph, because they are so strange looking to many different cultures, we very soon made the decision not to allow unrestricted dissemination of this image because it was being used too much for sensational purposes rather than for depicting the life.  This was an ex-child soldier, also in Sierra Leon.  I think it’s a very interesting contrast to the previous image.  All he has to do is change his clothes for everybody to think very different things about him.  He looks like the ideal studious young man in this picture, which he is, which is not to say that he’s not.  Then they’re talking about, coming around full circle, to the kinds of issues that also has to do with sexuality and the closing of this and the need for special protection and the need to protect the identities, visual and names, of children who are in special or high risk situations.  This is also in Sierra Leon, this is a boy who was abducted forcibly into the RUF, the rebel group, most well-known for chopping off people’s limbs, and he tried to escape once and they carved RUF into his chest.  He escaped again and he is back in his community trying to reintegrate and obviously needs protection from being identified. 

This is another photograph by Donna.  Actually, we assigned her to cover the Columbian peace movement even though many of these children have been visually identified and photographed in different kinds of contexts, we wanted to use photographs to illustrate a book which told a particular individual story.  We felt that the threat to the potential risk of some sort of harm coming to them, being related to their imagery, required that they be protected and that their identity be protected.  But I think this is a very powerful photograph nevertheless and the fact that the identify of a child has to be protected and is protected is just making another kind of visual point about the vulnerability of children, which would perhaps not be made as strongly if he was facing the camera.

This was the issue that we had to address very much in relation to the sexual exploitation of children.  When this Congress came along many people were saying that we need photographs to illustrate and I kept banging my head saying, “photographs of what?  What are we supposed to do?  How are we supposed to represent this issue?”  And I was really working with Donna and we figured out, based on that previous image, that this was how we were going to tell the story.  I think this is extremely powerful.  This is not Donna’s image, this is by Claudia Vertiani in Brazil.  This is a girl, I’ll have to go to my notes now so I can tell these incredible stories, but she’s 17.  From 11-15 she was abused by an older cousin.  At 15 she became pregnant and had an abortion.  The abortion was reported to the police but the abuse was ignored.  She’s been coming for 18 months and she’s recovering.  She would like to help other children.  So the fact that she’s had to protect in order for this child to be protected, she has to cover her face, and the contrast between what her experience is and the child-like environment in which she is surrounded I think is a devastating indictment and a very powerful statement against sexual exploitation. 

I just wanted to show you this image because this girl, too, has the most extraordinary story.  I don’t know how these children survive their experiences, but also I want to point out that this guy is just passing by.  I don’t think that he’s necessarily soliciting, but it’s important to also make the point that overwhelmingly, it’s prostitutes and the victims of sexual exploitation who are always being portrayed or targeted or talked about in the representation of this issue when obviously it is the clients who are initiating and creating the problem. 

In this case, this is a photograph in Guatemala by Donna.  I just selected an image that projects the identity of the girl, the minor, and the man as well. But the man seemed to have absolutely  no problem with being photographed, which means he has absolutely no problem in being identified with soliciting sex from a child.  Pretty extraordinary.

This is a girl who’s 6-years-old in Brazil who was raped when she was three.  She doesn’t speak, but she is beginning to recover.  The boy behind her is the brother of another girl who was also raped and who is also getting counseling. 

The woman on the left is 24-years-old.  She’s been a prostitute since she was 13.  She’s a victim of severe poverty and very, very few options.  She’s the sole support, with one brother, of a very large extended family which includes another sister who is mentally disabled, a brother who has severe physical disabilities, taking care of an extended family of children, some of whom are the children of two brothers who were killed in gang violence in her neighborhood.  And she was given away by her mother to go to work as a prostitute in Columbia.  She introduced her niece who is on the right, 15-years-old, sold to prostitution as well.  I defy anyone to judge her.

And of course prostitution in boys is very common as well.  This is in Bogotá.  This is a street that is so familiar, I mean not this particular street I don’t recognize it, but these ordinary little streets, a guy hanging out on the street.  It’s shocking to me what his story is.

This is a girl who’s in therapy.  She’s three years old.  She was sexually abused at the age of six months and she’s recovering because of this wonderful woman.  There are lovely photographs that show what a tender, wonderful counselor she is.  Also because her mother found out about it and took care of it and is prosecuting the boy.  It was a cousin of a babysitter.

I’m including this photograph from Guatemala because this girl is a prostitute as well.  A child prostitute, but it’s also a question about what kind of prejudices and perceptions we bring to the images that we look at.  Wearing an indigenous dress one does not necessarily associate with the possibility that she might be a prostitute.  On the other hand, all of our judgments start going out in a girl like this who is also a child, but should we start blaming her because she’s wearing provocative or suggestive clothing?  I think it’s really important that we examine our own reactions to who people.

This was when we were trying to figure out--this is a Cambodian girl--when we were trying to figure out--it was actually a photographer who encountered these girls and told their stories and was trying to protect their identity.  We actually are not using and disseminating this image with the attendant information because we believe her image is not sufficiently protected, but she was molested by a family member, left home, went to a brothel for a week, was picked up essentially by a pimp in Cambodia, forced into a brothel, ran away.  She’s HIV positive.

Same story with her.  I find it totally extraordinary that this innocent--when we talk about the kinds of values we want to project onto children--this innocent looking happy girl has had this experience as well.  She was molested for a long time by her father, felt that she had to stay at home to help her mother take care of her younger siblings, finally ran away, bumped into a pimp, went to a brothel for seven days before her mother rescued her and she’s HIV positive.

I’m ending with this image which is the way that children should more consciously confront many of these photographers who are representing them.  I don’t know; he’s just turned around, he’s at a meeting somewhere, maybe he’s thinking about something else, maybe he’s angry.  It’s also very interesting to note how very few images we ever see of children being angry.  We don’t see a lot of adults being angry either because we don’t want to see ourselves in that kind of situation or projection, but we certainly never see children who are always happy, unless they’re suffering.  I think that this much more complex presentation of who children are is very important for all of us to begin to think about.

(Applause)

Audience:  You had mentioned in your presentation that there is at least some initiative to arm these children, so to speak, with cameras so that they can document their own surroundings.  Could you speak a little more about that.  I’m kind of curious as to how that works and if there’s any kind of implementation of that in the representation or the images that actually get to the public from these areas.

Tolmie:  No, there’s not particularly.  If you’re talking a UNICEF program.  If there is a UNICEF program to do this sort of thing?  There are lots of people who are working with children and educating them in the use of photography as well, but UNICEF as a whole does not do this.  This was an exception that the photographer--the initiative that the photographer took himself in collaboration with the local people UNICEF people in the Kabul office to make cameras available.  It’s something that we really don’t have a lot of resources to do, but it’s something the country . . . The Columbia example of the cardboard video cameras, the sticks and that, this is a program that is being supported by UNICEF. 

Audience:  I’m a little unclear about the role of the photography department within UNICEF, beyond obviously documenting what UNICEF does, but as you mentioned, a lot of these pictures we haven’t seen in the  mainstream media, but then you’re talking about disseminating to the media, so I’m just curious as to other roles that these photographers make.

Tolmie:  I’m in charge of the headquarters operation for photography, although there’s a lot of photography that goes on completely apart from the headquarters and the individual country offices.  In fact I worked very closely, when I was living in Columbia as a photographer, with the Columbia office which did an initiative of all kinds of documentation which headquarters never saw.  So that also happens a lot in individual countries.  Our responsibility is more or less to try to present a representative sampling of the kinds of priorities and programs that UNICEF is involved with.  Given the large number of emergencies and decreasing resources, we spend a disproportionate amount of our time on emergency coverage.  But at headquarters we do disseminate to a network of national committees who are affiliates, sort of, of UNICEF in richer countries, which raise money and basically represent the U.S. fund for UNICEF.  It’s one of these which basically represents and raises money and awareness about UNICEF issues in individual countries.  So they use them in all sorts--they disseminate to media, there’s a lot of NGO partners who use them, they use them in their own fund-raising materials or magazines or publications.  In field programs, in country offices, the images are often used to make presentations to build up--for all kinds of programmatic purposes as well.  There’s a diversity of uses.  We get quite a significant number of requests from media of all sorts, whether it’s textbooks or the New York Times or an education something or other, for the use of different kinds of images. 

Audience:  Do these images always come with captions or do they stand alone?

Tolmie:  Almost always.  Obviously we do presentations once and awhile but I’m a strong believer in captions.  I believe that the additional information that one gains, everybody wants to know especially where the photograph is taken.  I think that this adds tons of information and because of this layered meaning problem, it’s very important.

Audience:  I want to express my appreciate for your discussing the ambivalence or ambiguity of a lot of meanings that can be attached to visuals of all kinds, especially of photographs.  I feel that one of the terms you used early on, which I think needs to be problemetized, unpacked or just done away with entirely, is visual literacy.  I think there’s a problem with the semantics of that, just as I sometimes feel there’s a problem with the term “literacy” in general.  I think there’s a tendency to believe that it can be universalized.  I don’t know how you feel about that.

Tolmie:  I don’t have very strong opinions about it.  It’s basically a shorthand for people being able to intelligently analyze and dissect and also to express themselves through imagery.  What do you mean, that literacy refers more to verbal stuff?  Is that your objection to the word?

Audience:  Yeah, I guess the problem for me is actually the literacy aspect because it assumes that there is a possibility of assigning a grammar to something that’s visual, and I’m not even sure that’s possible.

Tolmie:  Well, I would suggest that there is the possibility.  Obviously grammar is something that’s primarily attached to text, but different kinds of aspects--I think we have to learn how to do this, and Wendy Ewald’s book is very, very interesting in the way of how children are--it’s absolutely essential that we become more sophisticated and understand all the uses of visual media and express it.  I used to have, as a professional photographer, a thing where I’d say, “Oh, I’m not interested in looking at that amateur stuff,” and I think that’s bologna.  I think that everybody’s got to be able to use it, and like they learn to write, they’ve got to be able to use visual media, otherwise we’re stuck in this society where there’s this extremely sophisticated use of visual media by advertising companies, for example, and we are just sitting ducks for that kind of messaging which we may not necessarily agree with at all, but which we are essentially defenseless against unless we educate ourselves.

Audience:  I guess I’m just sort of cautioning against any sense of totalizing, in terms of communication, because for example, just in terms of language, verbal language, often times when you speak of literacy in the media, things like dialect are totally disregarded so that there this one to one translation assumption which really doesn’t hold.  One word for one person is not the same for another person, so one sentence is a sort of compound of totally different meanings, so the same is true for an image.  I just think it should be approached cautiously.

Tolmie:  Absolutely.  Certainly approached, though.  Much better than leaving it alone.

Audience:  I was curious about the relationship between the people, in this case I guess it’s you, and other people within the administrative kind of role, and those people who are out in the field taking the photographs, and then of course, between the photographer and the subject.  First, a really simple question:  Do the kids or guardians sign a waiver or permission form?  And going back towards the other direction, you often spoke about the photographs and how they’re constructed, and it’s so crucial to try to figure out how they will function in the world.

Tolmie:  You mean how they’re going to be used?

Audience:  How they’re going to be used, how they’re going to be read, how they’ll be interpreted, and the different types of meaning that are inherent.  There seems to be this specific agenda around UNICEF, and it’s to promote . . .

Tolmie:  Everybody’s got an agenda and we most definitely have one as well.  Absolutely.

Audience:  Yeah, and it’s crucial to be clear about the different types of agendas and the strategies.  I just wonder what that relationship is between the . . .

Tolmie:  Should I start my talk all over again?  (Laughter)  There are very many complex issues which you’re addressing here.  To start out with the first one, actually, there is--the business of UNICEF, so to speak, is its programs.  Program delivery in the field, which is a cooperation program.  What we do as communicators on top of that is to really try to maximize, advocate for the issues and priorities as we see them, and through the various kinds of media and express that, so there’s a very close collaboration and consultation process that goes on about what is the issue.  And really, I get enormous satisfaction working with people who are steeped in a humanitarian agenda and have a much more complex and nuanced view of the world that they are asking me to direct the documentation of in photography, for example, than many news media.  I find news media are very often not aware of the degree to which the particular assignment dictates how they see a subject that they are covering, and what shot--I need to get a shot of this and I need to get a shot of that--and by that time, the relationship of what they’ve captured to what the situation really is on the ground is quite different.  A photographer was very revealing to me at one stage, when he showed very dramatic suffering starvation in Sudan and I had just had a take the week before by a photographer that I had contracted, so I knew what it looked like on the ground and it was all in his tape, devastation, starvation, and I said, “Well what about this and what about the operation,” and he said, “Well, that wasn’t my job.  My job was to show Americans the dire situations.”  And I thought, “Well I think your job is to show them the entire situation and what is happening,” but there’s obviously a disagreement there.  With regard to how--we do not get guardian releases for most of the images that we take because they are documentary photographs of real situations.  If we interrupted every situation to get an individual release, we would have no spontaneous photographs at all.  I believe that there is absolutely, in a public situation, it is perfectly fine to take a photograph of somebody as long as it’s a respectful rendering and treatment of that subject.  If somebody says, “Don’t photograph me,” I think that has to be respected.  But I don’t think that getting a model release or not--getting a subject release, I think it’s very important to distinguish, solves that problem.  I do think that there are definitely situations--and it’s an educational process inside UNICEF and as well with anybody else who wants to use our images--what is the image being used for.  And I’m saying again and again, this is a documentary image of a real person in a real situation, you don’t have the right to doctor the image, you cannot change expressions, you cannot do anything except correct contrast or color, but you cannot change the content digitally or by any other means.  You cannot say that this child is from Guatemala when they’re from El Salvador because you really want an El Salvador shot.  There are all sorts of things and you have to respect the reality of that individual.  And if they are not interested in my point of view then I tell them what the legal implications of that are, including the convention of the rights of the child.  This is very, very clear.  Children have a right to be respectfully and accurately depicted.  Also, I just want to talk about the issue of commercial releases as well.  We do not permit the use of any images for commercial use.  My faith is that I don’t have a commercial release, so I say, “Forget it, you cannot use these.”  But obviously we have to be very careful about that as well, because there are partnerships with commercial corporations on certain fundraising ventures, etc., where we do not use documentary images.

Audience:  How successful do you find--I mean, I know you’re a photographer and you’re working in that capacity for UNICEF as an editor--but how successful do you find the photographic information as opposed to research and written information in promoting the mission of UNICEF around the world.  Are photographs more successful?

Tolmie:  One cannot live without the other, I think that that’s certainly true, and I think the credibility of UNICEF is fundamentally and finally based on what happens with the program in the field, and we have a very good record.  There’s always problems, there’s always limitations, there’s always--but on the whole, UNICEF delivers on the ground. There’s a lot of expertise in terms of the--and it’s also, we don’t implement programs, we actually support.  We give technical advise, we provide seed money.  We don’t have the resources or the money.  People in the country do it.  Overwhelmingly, the governments do it.  They’ve got the health networks, they’ve got the people and tons of volunteers.  The polio eradication initiative depends on millions of volunteers in individual countries to support that eradication effort, and people do it because they’re committed to doing it.  In terms of whether other kinds of messaging is more successful, UNICEF has always been very much identified with the image of the child.  It’s a visual image, without a doubt.  We’ve got a fabulous mandate.  There’s no other U.N. agency that has such a fabulous mandate, and as a photo editor I’m completely honored and privileged to be able to sit as a documentary photographer.  That’s what I’m interested in--photography.  The mandated documenting of the situation of children and women around the world?  I can’t think of anything better than that. 

Audience:  Do the subjects or the parents of the subject, when you’re taking photographs of children, do they ever ask why you’re taking these pictures and what the purposes are?

Tolmie:  I’m sure that they do.  Obviously you can ask that question to Donna who’s been doing some assignments for me recently.  But I think that in my experience as a photographer, of course people do, and I think people should be encouraged to ask, “What are you taking this photographer for?  Who are you?”  And the other thing, very important, that I remind photographers of many times is that when you’re photographing on assignment for UNICEF, if you’re saying, “I’d like to take this photograph for UNICEF,” you represent UNICEF.  That means that you have to represent a certain kind of standard and respect, but every photographer--I don’t think a UNICEF photographer has to behave in a way different from another photographer.  I think all documentary photographers have to respect their subjects.

Audience:  First, let me apologize in advance.  I’m about to ask a compound question which I really don’t like to ask, but I’m writing this critical analysis.  I’ll try to make them as short and as succinct as I can.  The foundation of this new vision has to do with collaboration between the photographer and the subject matter, if I got that correct.  So not just photographing children as objects, but allowing them to participate as collaborators in being photographed.  Did I hear that correctly?

Tolmie:  Yes and no.  I don’t think that you can have--it’s really the nature, when you’re documenting a certain kind of a situation, it’s not always--there has to be in the nature of getting access of winning trust, of establishing some sort of relationship, but this can be also, with a working photographer, you know something like, do I catch your eye and you do not object so that means I can take the photograph.  There’s all kinds of different levels.  Sometimes it will be more of a direct collaboration.  That’s fine but that doesn’t happen very often.  What I was speaking about more importantly, in practical terms, I think that the photographers and users of photographs have to run it through their heads.  If I were a child, or would I like this kind of projection or presentation of this child if they were my child?  And some people with very good intentions want to give some names and stories to generic photographs of children that we didn’t have the names for, and they said, “This is Jane, the daughter of a prostitute.”  And I said, “No, it’s not Jane, and I have no idea if her mother is a prostitute.  How would you like your child to be presented up on a screen as the daughter of a prostitute?”  I think that is a really excellent standard to apply and if you apply that, then you also cut through all of that abstract bologna about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.  It doesn’t mean that you’re personalizing it in a negative sense or you’re not being objective.  I think in that case you’re being truly objective.  You’re understanding what it is to be the other person.

Audience:  The second part of my question has to do with the very idea of my concept of a photojournalist sort of as being someone who’s very evasive in their training and their experience and their practice.  Historically it’s been this very evasive kind of individual who does not participate in culture or interact with the civilization that they document.  They just document.  Does UNICEF provide training to its photographers for this model that it’s trying to create?

Tolmie:  UNICEF just doesn’t have a lot of resources and we don’t have time to do that.  What we do really is we build relationships and connections with working photojournalists who have experience in these situations and try to build and work with them.  But I do want to take issue with the sense of photojournalists being evasive.  I think there’s a whole mythology about who a photojournalist is.  I think there has been this sort of glorification.  There’s a cliché in the feature film industry that if you want somebody who’s living on the edge or facing danger or going off to war, let’s call them a photographer and put them there.  Definitely, photographers in war situations are on the front line and they’re very much at risk.  There’s no doubt about that, and maybe there’s glamour and thrills associated with it.  But most photojournalism is about a relationship with a small group of people in a rather intimate kind of situation.  And there are hacks and there are exploiters like there are in every field, and there are tons of them out there who are very competent, extremely sensitive, and not evasive.  They want to create a relationship with their subjects, they want to represent them in a real way, which is the only interesting way to do so.  These clichés are ultimately boring and they don’t contribute anything to the international dialogue.  There are wonderful photographers out there, most of them extremely underpaid who do it for the love it and the love of the dialogue and the art and the relationship and the challenge of representing people respectfully as they really are.

Tolmie:  Any other questions?  I think we could have a little bit of a break.

Younger:  Thank you.

(Applause)