Seeing, feeling, educating: British and American Quakers and the visual record of humanitarian relief work in Russia and Poland, 1916-1924

In chapter 6 Siân Roberts uses the visual turn to trace the extensive use made of images between 1916 and 1924 by Quaker humanitarian relief teams to educate the public about the consequences of war. Examining two different collections of images, (one created at the organizational level and one a personal archive), the chapter explores the emotional geographies such images embodied about relief work in Russia and Poland at this time. Well-meaning Quaker agencies, under pressure to raise funds, used increasingly disturbing and stereotypical imagery that focused on the horror of naked and emaciated bodies of children. The image was also used by Quaker relief workers to disseminate their message to missionaries via lantern slide lectures and voiced testimony. Focusing on the work of English Quaker Florence Barrow and other fellow Quaker activists, this chapter argues their use of images went further, aiming to produce pedagogic outcomes for these children by encouraging audiences to recognize their shared humanity with distant others. The chapter examines the contextual narrative of these images to give additional depth to this analysis, which includes the use of the author’s own subjectivity when assessing the agency of such women regarding their work in Eastern Europe.