The Visual Rhetoric of Self-advocacy Organisations on Poverty: All about Courage?

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, several European welfare states installed a policy on poverty that explicitly recognised the voice and life knowledge of people in poverty. The idea of talking ‘with’ the poor came to prominence instead of talking ‘about’ or ‘to’ people in poverty. Beresford and Croft (1995) proclaimed a possible paradigm shift from advocacy to self-advocacy . In Belgium, in the aftermath of the General Report on Poverty (1994), grassroots organisations such as ATD Fourth World and BMLIK (Movement of People with Low Income and Children ) gained recognition as ‘organisations where people in poverty take the floor’. BMLIK launched the photobook Courage (1998) which contains prominent black and white photographs portraying families in deep poverty combined with oral testimonies. The central question we ask is whether and how this photobook can be considered an emblematic case for the framing of poverty as a violation of human rights, and for the way the self-advocacy paradigm has been materialised in this. Through a visual-rhetorical analysis (Foss, 1994) of Courage we present our research findings wherein the ‘pedagogical aesthetic’ (Trachtenberg, 1990) of socially engaged photography comes to the fore, as well as how this contributes to social change and justice.