Photography as Activism

Other photographers from this era traveled to find images of the

same horrible conditions that activist photographs image today. British

photographer William Hooper shot the first “famine” photographs in

Madras, India, in 1876. Although these images are not as elegant as the

ones shot in the Sahel region of Africa in the 1980s by Salgado, Hooper had

an artistic eye for space and perspective. One of his photographs, titled The

Last of the Herd, has a classic composition (Figure 1.7). A cow, starved to

nothing but skin and bones with its ribs protruding, is so weak it can’t move

and lies about midpoint in the frame. The two peaks of its horns frame

anot ...