In 1855, Roger Fenton, widely considered the first war photographer, covered the Crimean War for four months. Constrained by the technical limitations of the medium, his images were staged independently, with an exposure time of fifteen seconds each.1 Today, civilians can livestream the daily impact of war, conflicts, and humanitarian crises. Pictures are created not only by external journalists but also directly by those involved. Equipped with a smartphone and internet access, victims gain the additional status of reporters. Social media is transforming the public’s relationship with humanitarianism in two opposing but complementary ways. First, it does so through the standardization of global attention, as crises in local geographies are consumed globally through posts with similar imagery. Second, it relocates architecture as a place of situated asymmetries, displaying spatial tectonics as props in constructing power, violence, resistance, or emancipation. In both cases, mobile phones foster mediated empathy by bringing viewers closer to the embodied experiences of victims. Unlike external reporters, civilians use smartphones to create real-time images and videos. This shift emphasizes bodies in space as expressions of suffering, relief, or resilience, where architecture is neither neutral nor uninvolved. At the same time, algorithms act as gatekeepers, often operating as black boxes that can trigger new biases, such as diffusing a single, normalized narrative of conflicts.
The change brought about by digital imagery in the history of humanitarianism parallels previous paradigm shifts, from Robert Capa’s frontline photography during the Spanish Civil War to American televised portrayals of the Vietnam War, and more recently, the use of social media in the 2023 Gaza War. As CNN reported in January 2024, “Palestinians are documenting the war for millions on social media. Their followers have come to see them as family.”2 The fact that news feeds have recently seen a surge in conflict-related content highlights the role of online social networks in shaping public perceptions of humanitarianism, which now appears alongside personal content—from friends’ photos to influencers’ posts. Analyzing various sites of violence, conflict, and displacement—ranging from Ukraine and South Sudan to the Darién Gap and Bangladesh—and considering diverse perspectives, from international reporters and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to local organizations and individuals (often victims), can reveal how social media is transforming contemporary perceptions of humanitarianism and architecture.
Genealogy of Humanitarian Imagery
The words “image,” “imagination,” and “imaginary” share an intricate genealogy, all deriving from the Latin imago (meaning picture, copy, likeness).3 Historically, images have been produced and interpreted within specific social and geographic contexts, and as Chiara Bottici suggests, “Whereas the imagination tends to be conceived as a faculty that we possess as individuals, the concept of social imaginary is meant to encompass significations within which individuals are socialized and that thus precede the formation of individuals themselves.”4 In the context of humanitarianism, Lilie Chouliaraki coined the term “humanitarian imaginary” to refer to the “configuration of practices which use the communicative structure of the theatre in order to perform collective imaginations of vulnerable others in the West, with a view to cultivating a longer-term disposition to thinking, feeling, and acting towards these others.”5
In other words, humanitarian images are constructed and evolve structurally according to the expectations and values within which they are intended to be interpreted. While Chouliaraki’s concept refers to the cultural stages through which distant suffering is represented and made intelligible to Western audiences, the broader term “imagery” denotes the multiple representations used to evoke empathy and prompt action. This results in a corresponding political evolution of this gaze, alongside the historicity of image production, its techniques, and its modes of consumption. Five evolutionary categories, which are not strictly sequential but often overlap, can be identified here: narration, denunciation, activism, provocation, and participation.
The genealogy of humanitarian imagery can first be traced back to its role in the narration of conflict. While Roger Fenton had to stage his photographs of the Crimean War (1853–56) away from the battlefield, eighty years later, Robert Capa was able to capture the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) with unprecedented immediacy and emotional depth from the frontline. This phase later evolved into what Susan Sontag termed “tele-intimacy” during the Vietnam War (1955–75), where the conflict penetrated viewers’ daily lives through televised broadcasts.6 The Persian Gulf War (1990–91) marked the culmination of this acceleration with CNN’s live coverage, enabled by satellite transmission technology, itself becoming the object of journalistic debate.7
A second phase in the evolution of the humanitarian image unfolded through practices of denunciation. From Jacob Riis’s late-nineteenth-century documentation of impoverished neighborhoods in New York (How the Other Half Lives, 1890), to Walker Evans’s focus on rural life during the Great Depression (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941) and Dorothea Lange’s poignant portraits of migrants (Migrant Mother, 1936), these works sought to expose harsh realities and raise social awareness.
Third, in an activist register, the dissemination of pictures mobilized ideals of resistance. Abolitionism, the political movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals globally, marked a turning point from the 1860s onward, when photographs such as The Scourged Back (1863) of Gordon, an escaped slave from Louisiana, taken by McPherson & Oliver, became a powerful weapon in the visual arsenal of the movement. In the twentieth century, Eglantyne Jebb’s Save the Children campaign (founded in 1919) instrumentalized images of children to promote humanitarian objectives. The global utopia of collaboration reached its zenith with mass fundraising events like Live Aid (1985), which broadcast a problematic yet enduring narrative of suffering in the Global South.8 Concurrently, individual action gained prominence, with Audrey Hepburn becoming a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1988, embodying a personalized approach to humanitarian advocacy with celebrity status.
Humanitarian imagery adopted critical standpoints in a fourth, provocative phase, directed both at its own principles and at a widespread social passivity. In this vein, the Colombian mockumentary The Vampires of Poverty (1977), by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, helped popularize the term “pornomiseria” (the practice of turning poverty into spectacle, indifferent to human suffering), by parodying misery shots alongside the making-of their staging. In a reverse register, transforming reality into advertising, photographer Oliviero Toscani’s campaigns for Benetton in the 1990s were characterized by provocative and controversial images—drawing on themes such as AIDS, racism, war, or the death penalty—aimed at questioning social and political issues and mobilizing broader communication channels.
Finally, the proliferation of internet access and online platforms in recent decades has ushered in a participatory moment of humanitarian imagery. The coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 marked a turning point as journalists, unable to report directly from the ground, relied heavily on weblogs, forums, and other tools to gather and share news.9 This broad decentralization has become the norm today, at least in conflicts that attract global interest. A further evolution of this has recently emerged. In 2024, a computer-generated image, All Eyes on Rafah, was re-shared more than fifty million times through social media. On the one hand, it amplified global attention to these narratives, drawing viewers closer to an anticipated escalation of the crisis. On the other hand, the visualization of a standardized and abstracted refugee camp obscured the impressive number of testimonies shared by on-site Palestinians.10 Other conflicts that have yet to attract significant attention can further assess the effects of globalized proximity enabled by social media and the participatory phase of humanitarian imagery.
Local Geographies, Global Posts
The humanitarian crises analyzed below were selected for their diversity in both geographic and societal terms, as well as for their entanglement with a range of political, economic, and ecological issues. These include natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti in 2010 and 2017; resistance movements against human rights violations, particularly those affecting women in Afghanistan and Iran; and armed conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion or the evolution of the Israel–Lebanon conflict since October 2023. In addition, they include internal displacements in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan, along with transnational migrations spanning geographies as diverse as the Western Sahel or the Darién Gap on the border between Colombia and Panama, which is complemented by a comparative study of refugee camps with global significance, from Moria and Mavrovouni in Greece, to Dadaab in Kenya, to Kutupalong in Bangladesh.
Methodologically, the most active accounts producing humanitarian content were analyzed according to geographic area and platform. Most of the profiles come from Instagram, although in certain regions other platforms such as Facebook, X, TikTok, or YouTube predominate. Using material available up to October 2024, all visual humanitarian-related content was collected from each profile. In total, more than 7,000 images were gathered, corresponding to twelve different crises and originating from more than two hundred accounts, ranging from large organizations and government entities to anonymous civilians or influencers dedicated to sharing humanitarian content. All this material was analyzed and classified according to criteria linked to media construction, including spatial dynamics (indoors/outdoors), subject representation (individual/group), point of view (aerial/eye-level), and circadian rhythm (day/night). The accounts were also analyzed comparing content per publisher type—posted by local organizations and users (often victims) versus international institutions and individuals (often celebrities).
This categorization explores whether global social media posts uniformize the perception of humanitarian emergencies by following the same codes dictated by organizations, or whether the content created by individuals results in a more local, nuanced, and sensitive portrayal of each situation. The initial quantitative analysis is subtle, showing a certain uniformization of the images published when considering most content. Analyzing the images per publisher type, it becomes clear that the presence of the human body is the most unifying aspect of humanitarian images (individual: 22 percent; group: 43 percent; cumulative: 65 percent), with only 35 percent being bodyless, in pictures that typically reinforce either architectural ruins or aerial views. Whether it is locals reporting first-hand testimonies from specific sites or politicians speaking from international political arenas, portraits are used as a mechanism for constructing mediated trust, whereas selfies often confront viewers with images of suffering, denunciation, or resilience, where the human is depicted to convey embodied messages. Meanwhile, group pictures regularly emphasize processes of displacement, construction, eating, or military resistance, in which focus is on the action.
The subjectivities theoretically mobilized in social media are apparently very much standardized. If we reconstruct the “average humanitarian picture,” it is in color (97 percent), taken from an eye-level point of view (83 percent), and shared by a local (organization: 35 percent; individual: 33 percent; cumulative: 68 percent). Additionally, the most typical humanitarian image regularly features a group of people in an exterior space (67 percent) during daytime (93 percent).11 However, such an exact average combination is rare, with only a limited proportion of the total sample matching this set of criteria. This production of humanitarian imagery en masse on-site by local entities also offers the potential of alternative narratives. At a more granular level, different crises diverge from the average image in particular ways, and for specific reasons relating to the particularity of each crisis.
While humanitarian crises mostly attract attention with group pictures in external public spaces, Iran’s case, on the contrary, mobilizes interior space as a decorum where a single human body stands for resistance. What might typically occur in public space—which is neither inclusive nor safe enough for political action in Iran—moves to the ubiquitous private rooms of buildings, which act as shelter for freedom of speech. In this context, anonymous users or activists often address their audiences in portrait format, directly in front of their smartphones, a framing that underscores both the immediacy of testimony and the solitude of dissent.
While most humanitarian images are often divided between interior and exterior spaces, the jungle on the border between Colombia and Panama constitutes a different form of open-air interiority. Despite its recognized degree of peril, the Darién Gap has been crossed by over 700,000 people since early 2023.12 This is reflected in humanitarian imagery in two ways. First, pictures are mainly taken within a landscape context (49 percent). Second, a significant amount of data comes from international individuals, mostly influencers, who document this problematic journey.13 This migration crisis was also the one the most identified on YouTube, suggesting that the defined nature of the migrant’s journey through the jungle matches the vlogging format.
Humanitarian narratives are mainly constructed from eye level, the most repeated viewpoint across all accounts, comprising 87 percent of the total. This reinforces the sense of visual empathy, putting both communicators and viewers literally on the same level, with pictures often taken from smartphones. As an exception, much social media imagery from Ukraine reflects the recent use of first-person-view drones in warfare. Pictures captured with a bird’s-eye perspective (21 percent) document Russia’s numerous invasions in Ukraine and relate to the aesthetic of drone snapshots. In those cases, passive viewers scrolling through their device screens follow the active position of the drones on the battlefield.
Finally, the humanitarian image is mainly diurnal, with most locations showing nocturnal imagery below 10 percent of the total. This is related to the difficulty of accessing certain areas at night, such as refugee camps, which might also create legal invisibilities. The absence of nocturnal representation in the humanitarian image is perpetuated or even reinforced in social media. As an exception, Israeli attacks over Lebanon are depicted primarily through ruins and explosions registered during nighttime (22 percent) and without a human figure (69 percent). This not only reflects the time of the bombings that the country faced, but also highlights the urbicidal nature of the conflict. The shift from micro to macro scales of destruction highlights a transition from personal to collective narratives, illustrating different levels of engagement with the war and making visible the night as a time of legal obscurity.
Mediated Constructions: Architecture as Situated Asymmetry
If social media can flatten the perception of humanitarian crises worldwide, architecture becomes a mediated territory that situates the asymmetries of space, its tectonics, and its politics. Across Afghanistan, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the West Sahel, social media visualizes the gendered use of space, exposing deeply entrenched patriarchal norms within these humanitarian crises. Humanitarian imagery reveals how interior and exterior spaces are utilized to reinforce societal power structures and how visual representations of these spaces become political statements in themselves.
In Afghanistan, the divide between men’s dominance of open, prestigious public spaces and women’s confinement to interior settings like homes or hospitals highlights cultural and religious restrictions. Women’s visibility is largely confined to domestic or controlled spaces, while men occupy scenes of authority in exteriors, such as conference rooms or sports fields, underscoring a social structure that prioritizes male freedom and female seclusion. This situated dynamic reflects how space reinforces authority, confining women’s identities and movements under the strictures of Sharia law.
In Iran, similar gendered divisions manifest, especially through social media images from protests following Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022, where women harnessed public spaces as sites of defiance. By exposing their hair or using elevated urban props like cars and platforms, women transformed exterior spaces into powerful arenas of resistance against state-imposed morality laws, contrasting sharply with controlled indoor spaces used to display memorials or portraits of detained individuals. These visual expressions politicized exteriors as zones of collective defiance, while interiors reflect, still today, restrained forms of remembrance, directing attention toward global audiences as a more confined means of protest.
In the DRC and West Sahel regions, architecture is gendered not only by the interior/exterior divide but also by the tectonics of public and private spaces, with public buildings typically constructed from solid materials like concrete and brick, and private, domestic settings often built from informal, tent-like materials whose physical lightness reflects the legal and material fragility of their inhabitants. In the DRC’s Goma region, men are often depicted in concrete buildings associated with diplomacy or healthcare, while women and children appear in ephemeral, tent-like shelters, which underscores their precarious existence amid resource conflicts. Here, men’s occupancy of stable structures reinforces perceptions of authority, whereas women are visualized in makeshift settings, symbolizing instability and ongoing struggles for basic security.
In humanitarian imagery from the West Sahel, women are typically shown indoors with children and depicted through carefully styled representations of suffering and resilience. Men, conversely, appear predominantly outdoors in scenes that convey action and authority, whether in roles of protection or combat, aligning with societal norms that position them as protectors and women as vulnerable. Interiors in the Sahel appear as spaces of emotional depth, where women are relegated to symbols of endurance amid displacement, while men’s portrayal in exterior settings suggests agency and control. Across these regions, the visual framing of architecture on social media perpetuates stereotyped gender roles, using interior and exterior spaces to portray power, vulnerability, resistance, and restriction, ultimately either reinforcing societal norms or, occasionally, using these portrayals as a medium for political messaging.
In other locations, social media exposes the evolving nature of camps, transitioning from provisional to semi-permanent settlements that, paradoxically, become permanent places of transience. If, as suggested by Andrew Herscher, the “refugee camp is the normative form of humanitarian architecture,” then social media platforms allow us to examine and question its constructed normalization, both as physical and temporal ethos.14 Online content reveals the temporary nature of spaces and architectural constraints within the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, the Moria and Mavrovouni camps in Lesvos, Greece, the Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh, and in the context of the Sudanese civil war.
Images found on Instagram captured by international organizations, photographers, and journalists of the Dadaab camp document the overcrowded, structurally inadequate shelters initially built as temporary housing. Individuals’ accounts reveal lightweight constructions like wood-frame and fabric tents, which persist as primary dwellings despite Dadaab’s prolonged existence. Although some structures are built with brick and concrete, which house public facilities like schools and administrative offices, such distinctions highlight the disparity in living conditions within the camp’s physical hierarchy, underscoring the stark difference between refugee accommodations and institutional spaces.
On the Greek island of Lesvos, documentation on Instagram presents a sequence beginning with the Moria camp, destroyed by fire in September 2020 and permanently closed, and continuing with the forced relocation of the population to Mavrovouni, conceived as a temporary facility that remains in operation today. The images reveal a progression from improvised tents to more stable shelters with metal structures, simultaneously expressing both institutional efforts to stabilize conditions and the inherent temporariness of the camp’s logic. The abundance of records in open spaces and the predominance of documentation during daytime emphasizes the limited visibility of private and enclosed areas, underscoring both the exposure and vulnerability of residents and the infrastructural constraints.
Similarly, the humanitarian crises in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh and in the Sudanese civil war shed light on the role of architecture in contexts of precarity and displacement. In the Kutupalong camp, home to more than 600,000 Rohingya, content analyzed on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and X predominantly features eye-level photographs, aiming to emphasize personal connections and the human experience of the camp. This perspective invites viewers to engage with narratives of resilience and adaptation, highlighting the multifunctionality of improvised structures and open-air environments, which often serve as spaces for education, cooking, and community hygiene. For instance, plastic coverings not only provide shelter but also function as surfaces for drying food (fish and vegetables), collecting rainwater for showers, and other uses, reflecting a fragile resilience.
In contrast, visual documentation of the Sudanese conflict—particularly on Instagram—presents a raw depiction of daily life amid turmoil. Outdoor environments illustrate the programmatic reality of conflict, with activities ranging from protest demonstrations to the search for and distribution of water. Displacement and flight from violence appear as recurring themes, and in moments of pause, trees emerge as a distinct local motif within the conflict. The practice of gathering under a tree—representing 10 percent of the total analyzed content—takes shape as a public space transformed into a community hub for rest and food preparation, as well as a political act of socialization and online communication.
While camps and temporary settlements traverse contemporary humanitarian crises, a different, complementary narrative emerges in contexts where the city is transformed into a battlefield and its ruins are mediatized as stages of suffering and resistance. The difference between the portrayal of ruins in the Ukrainian war and the Israel–Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon illustrates the complex interplay between social media platforms and the narratives that emerge from warfare. In Ukraine, platforms such as Instagram, X, and Telegram facilitate a multifaceted portrayal of buildings. On social media, 35 percent of private buildings shown in Ukraine have been destroyed, while public structures have suffered less, indicating a stark dichotomy in vulnerability based on ownership and usage. Most pictures focus on exteriors of both public and private buildings. Public interiors are seen mostly intact, which might have to do with the fact that most pictures depict meetings and greetings of the president with other important politicians. In contrast, pictures of private interiors account for less than 10 percent, which can be attributed to the extensive bombing of some buildings. The focus on exteriors reflects a narrative that prioritizes public resilience over the intimate suffering of individuals, thereby shaping public perception of the conflict.
In Lebanon, from September until mid-October 2024, when Israel launched a new offensive against Hezbollah, the representation of ruins on social media platforms such as X, YouTube, and Twitch emphasized architectural destruction through hashtags like #destroyed and #bombing. Approximately 60 percent of images analyzed fall under these tags, revealing a communicative emphasis both on denunciation and on the dramaturgy of war. Their lack of human presence (80 percent) underscores a tendency to abstract the ruins from their socio-cultural contexts, producing a generalized image of devastation that prioritizes visibility over depth of understanding. Lebanon also illustrates how asymmetries reflect platform-specific focuses, audience dynamics and technological affordances. Platforms like YouTube and Twitch, for instance, feature continuous landscape footage along the Lebanon–Israel border. By contrast, Instagram and X emphasize war-focused information sharing, with local accounts editing content more heavily than broader, international ones.
Platform-specific narratives is a phenomenon also observable in Haiti. In the case of earthquakes, the dataset covers events from the first quake in 2010 up to the present, allowing for an analysis of how humanitarian crisis coverage has evolved over time. During this period, Facebook became established as a key platform for both local and international actors in disseminating humanitarian content, focusing on group-based humanitarian work in facilities such as community centers, schools, and hospitals. In contrast, Twitter/X offered a more institutional representation, focusing on political figures, news, and diplomatic meetings. Meanwhile, Instagram presented a more visually artistic lens, blending humanitarian content with creative expressions to offer personalized and aestheticized portrayals of the crisis.
Finally, the Darién Gap stands out as a unique case, as migrants from South America, Europe, and Asia traverse this perilous jungle en route to the United States and Canada, documenting their journeys on social media. This content exposes a growing economy surrounding the route, with influencers offering varied portrayals. Images from across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube can therefore be categorized as commodified, decommodified, or infrastructure-absent. The emerging economy divides into formal infrastructures like monetized refuges and transport services, and informal ones such as makeshift shelters and improvised paths. Roughly half of the images showed unstructured areas where migrants seek to avoid authorities. A smaller share highlighted decommodified resources, such as free shelters, while a smaller, yet growing portion depicted commodified services, pointing to a growing market for essential goods. This raises questions about how social media amplifies commodification, influencing migrant experiences—simultaneously offering support and exposing them to exploitation.
Humanitarian Images and Architectural Narratives: Future Directions
The visualization of distant suffering—analyzing how emotions such as empathy or spectators’ consumption shape interaction on the other side of the screen—was described by intellectuals such as Susan Sontag or Luc Boltanski long before its institutionalization on the internet.15 However, the critical reevaluation of how crises are mediatized through images on social media highlights the interrelationship between spatial representation, digital circulation, and the affective economies of distant suffering. This demands a deeper inquiry into how architectural structures—relentlessly circulating across online platforms—become visual indicators of resilience, vulnerability, or political neglect.
These representations are not neutral: they reaffirm gender asymmetries, make material inequalities visible, and consolidate hierarchies of power inscribed in spaces. From the domestic interiors that circumscribe female presence in Afghanistan and Iran, to the ruins of Ukraine and Lebanon turned into emblems of resilience or collective devastation and the refugee camps of Dadaab or Kutupalong oscillating between temporariness and permanence, social media mediates a humanitarian cartography that moves between intimate suffering and macropolitical narratives. Architecture ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes an active agent in the visual construction of contemporary humanitarianism, where the ethics of framing and the politics of space are inseparable.
The ceaseless proliferation of images generated by millions of users is producing a new pictorial and spatial topology that iteratively reconstitutes humanitarian imagery of crisis zones through networked acts of framing and filming. In this scenario, and in those to come, the performative labor that victims and survivors carry out to manage their suffering as digital content calls for urgent critique. It raises questions about the ethics of testimony, the instrumentalization of authenticity, and the extent to which architecture, as a mediated artifact, participates in negotiating recognition, aid, affective investment, and political legibility within the global humanitarian landscape.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 40.
Harmeet Kaur, “Palestinians Are Documenting the War for Millions on Social Media. Their Followers Have Come to See Them as Family,” CNN, January 19, 2024, ➝.
Imago, “Imago was the ordinary Latin word used to signify the copy or likeness of anything (“Imago ab imitatione dicta,” Festus, 112); and, as applied to copies of nature, it includes pictures, statues, busts, or any mode of artistic representation,” in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith et al. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1890).
Chiara Bottici, “Imagination, Imaginary, Imaginal: Towards a New Social Ontology?” Social Epistemology 33, no. 5 (2019): 433–41.
Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 45.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 19.
Barbie Zelizer, “CNN, the Gulf War, and Journalistic Practice,” Journal of Communication 42, no. 1 (March 1, 1992): 72.
Concert for Bangladesh (1971), Live Aid (1985) and Live 8 were significantly impacting and led to a “post-humanitarian public-publics whose orientation towards vulnerable others is articulated through a technologized economy of pleasure oriented towards the self.” Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator, 134.
Jeff Jarvis, “How Katrina Humbled the American News Machine,” The Guardian, September 12, 2005, ➝.
The average is first calculated by category within each crisis. The total maximum deviation of the content classified by categories and crisis is 9 percent.
“Darién Gap: The Jungle Where Poor Migration Policies Meet,” Human Rights Watch, September 11, 2024, ➝.
See YouTube channels: @baldandbankrupt, @manuelmonterrosa, and @TimmyKarter.
Andrew Herscher, Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 6.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others; Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). First published in French in 1993.
