A valuable contribution to the emerging field of humanitarian photography, Lydon’s Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire focuses on the early development of a visual culture of human rights in colonial Australia between the 1840s and the 1950s (a spatiotemporal delimitation not obvious from the title). The author provides a sharp analysis of the mutual relations, contestations, and influences between and among the practices of photography, anthropology, colonialism, and humanitarian sentiment since the nineteenth century. The richness and quality of her study lie in often-overlooked visual and anthropological material. The diversity of archival sources not only includes a wide variety of Australian and British periodicals and newspapers, but also multiple libraries of the former British Empire, as well as engravings and pictures disseminated in several collections and galleries across Europe and the Commonwealth. Bringing to life representations of Australian Aboriginal people from the first daguerreotype portrait in the 1840s to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the book discusses how photography operates as a site of contested and shifting meaning. Lydon has thus chosen to emphasise the use of pictures as ‘testimonials’, to explore how they shape power relations between the governed and governments, or, to rephrase it in visual language, between the viewed and the viewers. This is a stance she underlines in her research questions: ‘Who benefits from the production of empathy and in what circumstances? Who should feel empathy for whom? What change has such imagery brought about?’ Through pictorial and historical investigation, Lydon adds to the well-known paradigms of distant suffering and of the mobilisation of empathy and the ethos of compassion that have shaped the long history of humanitarianism, beginning as a sentiment aiming at improving the fate of mankind or abolishing slavery in the nineteenth century to its institutionalisation and internationalisation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Using a rather broad and inclusive view of the relationship between human rights and humanitarianism, Lydon considers how the humanitarian sentiment not only developed as an action-oriented mentality towards suffering abroad, but was also influenced by strategies of humanisation and dehumanisation. Humanitarianism thus participated in a growing human rights framework since the end of the nineteenth century, slowly considering humanity a global category. Challenging the ‘current interpretive orthodoxy’ of the human rights discourse embodied in visual representations of atrocity and violence, the originality of her approach also resides in her analysis of a commonly imagined humanity through representations of contentment. Therefore, her theoretical discussion convincingly borrows from the theory of emotions, starting with Adam Smith’s seminal Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759, and continuing with critics of photography as an empathy tool such as Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, 2007), Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, 2012), or Sharon Sliwinski (Human Rights in Camera, 2011). The affective component is the strongest argument of her study and is also part of a new paradigm in humanitarian photography studies which does not consider pictures as passive objects but as traces of transformative encounters between indigenous people and colonial representatives and, in perfect embodiment of Roland Barthes’s ‘ça a été’, as affective and cognitive encounters through the circulation and dissemination of photographs in time and space. Exploring how ‘challenges to oppressive racial taxonomies are significant in defining the limits of contemporary acknowledgement of Indigenous humanity’, the case of Australia makes perfect sense, filling a gap in the visual history of colonialism, which has largely focused on Africa. However, Lydon’s contextual background lacks a clear articulation of nineteenth-century humanitarianism and how it evolved into the 1950s. Her description of ‘humanitarians’ relates to those who used photography to naturalise ideas about humanity and humanness, and thus ranges from bishops to missionaries to anthropologists – an array of different profiles that could have been treated more deeply in relation to the history of humanitarian action, charity, and philanthropy. The book is divided into seven richly illustrated chapters that include careful analysis of the pictures, contexts of production, dissemination and reception. Chapter 1 begins with 1840s portraits of Aboriginal people by the professional photographer Douglas Kilburn, reprinted in illustrated newspapers and circulated to distant British audiences

中文翻译：

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摄影，人道主义，帝国

对新兴的人道主义摄影领域的宝贵贡献，Lydon 的摄影，人道主义，帝国专注于 1840 年代和 1950 年代之间殖民地澳大利亚人权视觉文化的早期发展（标题中不明显的时空界限）。作者对 19 世纪以来摄影、人类学、殖民主义和人道主义情绪的实践之间的相互关系、争论和影响进行了敏锐的分析。她研究的丰富性和质量在于经常被忽视的视觉和人类学材料。档案来源的多样性不仅包括种类繁多的澳大利亚和英国期刊和报纸，还包括前大英帝国的多个图书馆，以及在欧洲和英联邦的几个收藏品和画廊中传播的版画和图片。从 1840 年代的第一张银版照片到 1948 年的《世界人权宣言》，这本书生动地再现了澳大利亚原住民的形象，讨论了摄影作为一个充满争议和不断变化的意义的场所是如何运作的。莱登因此选择强调使用图片作为“证明”，探索它们如何塑造被统治者和政府之间的权力关系，或者用视觉语言重新表述，在观看者和观众之间。这是她在研究问题中强调的立场：“在什么情况下，谁会从同理心的产生中受益？谁应该同情谁？这种意象带来了什么变化？通过绘画和历史调查，莱顿补充了众所周知的遥远苦难范式，以及塑造了人道主义悠久历史的同理心和同情心的精神，最初是一种旨在改善人类命运或废除人类命运的情感。从 19 世纪的奴隶制到 20 世纪头几十年的制度化和国际化。Lydon 对人权与人道主义之间的关系采取了相当广泛和包容的观点，他认为人道主义情绪不仅发展为一种以行动为导向的对待国外苦难的心态，但也受到人性化和非人化策略的影响。因此，人道主义主义参与了自 19 世纪末以来不断发展的人权框架，慢慢地将人类视为一个全球范畴。挑战体现在暴行和暴力的视觉表现中的人权话语的“当前解释正统”，她的方法的独创性还在于她通过满足的表现来分析普遍想象的人性。因此，她的理论讨论令人信服地借鉴了情感理论，从亚当·斯密 1759 年开创性的道德情感理论开始，并继续将摄影批评作为移情工具，如马克·莱因哈特、霍莉·爱德华兹和艾琳娜·杜甘尼（美丽的苦难：痛苦中的摄影和交通，2007），Geoffrey Batchen、Mick Gidley、Nancy K. Miller 和 Jay Prosser（描绘暴行：危机中的摄影，2012 年）或 Sharon Sliwinski（相机中的人权，2011 年）。情感成分是她研究中最有力的论点，也是人道主义摄影研究新范式的一部分，该范式不将图片视为被动对象，而是将图片视为原住民与殖民代表之间变革性相遇的痕迹，完美体现了罗兰·巴特的'ça a été'，通过照片在时间和空间中的流通和传播，作为情感和认知的相遇。探索“对压迫性种族分类法的挑战如何在界定当代承认土著人性的界限方面具有重要意义”，澳大利亚的案例完全有道理，填补了主要集中在非洲的殖民主义视觉历史上的空白。然而，Lydon 的语境背景缺乏对 19 世纪人道主义及其如何演变到 1950 年代的清晰阐述。她对“人道主义者”的描述与那些使用摄影将人性和人性的观念自然化的人有关，因此范围从主教到传教士再到人类学家——一系列不同的人物本可以在人道主义行动的历史中得到更深入的处理、慈善事业和慈善事业。本书分为七个插图丰富的章节，包括对图片、制作背景、传播和接受的仔细分析。第 1 章以专业摄影师道格拉斯·基尔本 (Douglas Kilburn) 拍摄的 1840 年代土著人肖像开始，