The audience interpretation

The focus on the audience has also prompted studies into how images can harm both the subjects in the images and the viewers. Commentators from both the NGO sector and visual studies have questioned the morality of images of suffering, if indeed through their decontextualisation, their mass use by media, their commercialization of poverty and stereotyping, they may cause more harm than the good intended by them (D. A. Bell & Coicaud, 2007; Elliot, 2003; D. Kennedy, 2009). Kennedy, citing Sontag, notes the following dangers in imagery:

Sontag cautions that photos can backfire: viewing the horrors of war will not necessarily make one anti-war. In fact, these images may actually convince the viewer of the justice of the endeavor, align her with the cruelty of the perpetrator, or blunt her sensibilities. (D. Kennedy, 2009, section II)

Studies from disciplines such as psychology, consumer behaviour and marketing have different epistemological perspectives to understanding audience reactions. With many, the emphasis is on either how people conceive of the poor and charities, or their response to the demand of the NGO. Very few studies comprehensively explore all forms of interpretation yet viewers may evaluate the message, the messenger and the subject of the message in varying ways. The NGO, as messenger, is often both making a demand and representing the poor. Broadly speaking, NGO-led research is mostly concerned about the audience response to the demand – will the images propel people

to donate? Research that sits outside the NGO framework looks at the wider

implications of the imagery, how it forms perceptions and creates relationships, both with the NGO sector and with the people they represent. This is not to claim that NGOs are not interested: their response in research is varied across the sector. In the past decade, there have been several studies by NGOs into audience interpretations of their marketing (for example, Darnton & Kirk, 2011; VSO, 2002)

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Fiske (1994) uses the term ‘site of audiencing’ whereby the process of developing meaning about an image is negotiated, and in some cases rejected by an audience. Audience studies has its foundation in Stuart Hall’s work and is primarily concerned with the semiological tool developed by Hall of decoding a text or image (discussed in Rose, 2007, pp.197-200). Hall argues that people do not passively take in all messages, but that they can react in three different ways: acceptance, opposition or negotiation. There is a relationship that is formed between the viewer and an image, and the viewer is able to negotiate the meanings from that image. Early questions raised by photography and media critics called for greater attention to be paid to the emotive and psychological power of the photograph (Barthes, 1977; Sontag, 1977). Both Rozario (2003) and Ash (2008) raise questions regarding how deeper psychoanalytical responses are often a simmering and understudied by-product of a well-intentioned media campaign. The agency of the viewer, particularly their cognitive and emotive response, and the conditions under which they view the image have increasingly become important elements in understanding audience response.

Studies conducted both within academe and the NGO community have found that audiences are aware that the images of the poor are often simplistic or inaccurate and lead to the formation of stereotypes which they don’t necessarily agree with (Iyengar, 1990; VSO, 2002). Viewers may try to suppress unwanted stereotypical thoughts when viewing aid advertisements. Within psychology and marketing there exist explanations about audience behaviour that are determined largely by inputs and outputs. Research within a positivist framework often places emphasis on extrinsic determinants such as location, demography, socio-economic status etc., and intrinsic determinants, such as emotional state, ego, previous history of reaction etc., and how these affect audience reception. (see Sargeant, 1999, for a detailed example). What is important is that as Cohen (2001) suggests, images of the suffering of others cause both an emotional and cognitive response; they do not leave us untouched.

Carr (2003, p. 47) notes that within the charity image so commonly used by NGOs, salience is often given to the single human figure, subtly emphasizing the individualization of poverty through decontextualization, whilst situational or structural causes are in the background or not mentioned at all. Such deliberate

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framing of poverty leads viewers to make significant attribution errors (Krull et al., 1999) possibly entrenching dominant discourses of poverty and individual helplessness. Carr concludes that a “wide range of theory and research indicate that conventional media depictions of the poor reinforce rather than reduce donor bias among advertisement viewers” (p. 48). He is referring to studies in social psychology that have shown that donors can be biased towards attributing poverty as a dispositional problem such as, ‘they are lazy people’ not a structural one, due to the deliberate framing (Campbell, Carr, & MacLachlan, 2001). Many of these studies employ a methodology that is often of a behaviouralist nature. In these situations the physical actions of people (such as their intention to donate) in reaction to an image or NGO appeal is studied under certain artificial conditions (Dyck & Coldevin, 1992; Hibbert, Smith, Davies, & Ireland, 2007).

An example of this is Kennedy and Hill’s (2009) work around cognitive processes that occur when a person tries to suppress unwanted thoughts, such as stereotypes. From her original study, Kennedy (2009) identified that unwanted thoughts, such as racism and bigotry can resurface involuntarily, creating a form of rebound. Within these forms of research, participants are often asked to complete certain tasks through which attitudes and opinions are surmised from the physical actions that occur. For example, participants may be shown an image of a person and then their subsequent actions towards the type of people represented by those in the image are recorded under laboratory conditions. The researcher is often looking for a certain trait to appear in participants, such as racism or apathy towards the object in the image. While this type of research has its value, it is often deductive and not open ended and this can limit the exploration of both why and how audiences interpret images. The effect is observed and the causes surmised, but I would argue that the connections between the two are weak, in part due to the limitations of the methodology.

These studies may not tell us why people behave in certain ways and what they are thinking when they do. Seu (2010) takes the view that questions about these unwanted thoughts and their outward manifestations remain largely underexplored, there is more to it than, ‘will they donate or not?’ Positioned somewhere along this continuum between the representation and the audience action are questions about what viewers

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are actually thinking. This unknown factor has been termed a “black hole in the mind” by Cohen (as discussed in Seu, 2010, p. 441) and there has been very little research in mapping how, and why, audiences respond to both the representation and the demand of the NGO appeal. Seu maintains that to understand what people are thinking when they view humanitarian images, particularly those that call for a response from the viewer, a qualitative approach is more appropriate. Researchers are seeking to understand how NGO images work on their audiences, both cognitively and emotively and the focus has turned towards qualitative methods.