The Visual Culture of Human Rights. Observations on Amnesty International

Abstract

The focus of this project is the visual dimension of transformative powers within society, which is approached by inspecting the visual communication of a human rights organization, Amnesty International. My interest towards this type of thematic arose from my previous concentration on human rights discourse and the rhetorics related to it, and now I wanted to prolong my scope on visual rhetorics. My intention was to find out what kind of registers and narratives are used by a human rights organization when human rights are communicated through visuality. I came up with an idea to work with two organizations for gaining a comparative perspective, and these fields turned out to be two local sections of Amnesty International, those of Portugal and Finland. The intention was to follow the paths that these sections have taken in terms of the use of photograph during the transformation related to organizational change and the need to be globalized and unified at once. Visual culture is treated within this project in its strong sense, by emphasizing its cultural dimension, the values and identities that are constructed and communicated using visuality as a medium (Barnard 2001:1-2). The organization, Amnesty International, and its two national sections, the Finnish and the Portuguese one, are all seen as cultural groups that reproduce their particular character and identity with the use of visuality.