Bodies of evidence

Images as evidence

When trust in institutions weakens, the ways inequality is seen take on renewed political importance. Visual culture sits at the centre of this process, shaping the stories societies tell about themselves, and hardening those stories into worldviews. Images are mobilised to affirm or to attack, to simplify or to stereotype.

Development and humanitarian sectors have long relied on photography as evidence. Images have been used to signal urgency, legitimise interventions and make distant lives more real to funders, policymakers and the public. To see was to know.

But that certainty has frayed. AI-generated images, filters and deepfakes have made audiences more sceptical. What once appeared neutral now reveals itself as a series of decisions – about framing, proximity, access and authority. In turn, contemporary scepticism exposes what was always embedded in the image: power.

Outdated frames

We encountered this in our work at G5050. As a data-driven think tank focused on gender justice, we struggled to find images that reflected the realities our research showed: relational, contextual accounts of realities shaped by power, risk, access and care. The absence itself became evidence. The sector’s visual tools were out of step with the lives they claimed to reach.

The visual language of development was built within narrow systems of seeing. Colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative and ableist frameworks determined which bodies were seen and which stories were told. Over time, this hardened into familiar tropes: women and girls portrayed primarily as victims or symbols of uplift; poverty reduced to spectacle; ‘empowerment’ flattened into a slogan.

Even as technology changes, these habits persist. Today, AI-generated humanitarian scenes circulate widely – entirely fabricated yet presented as evidence. The tools are new, but the ‘colonial’ logic remains – extractive and distancing.

In part, this persistence reflects who has historically held the camera – and who continues to do so. Today, only 15–20% of photojournalists are women, and photographers from low- and middle-income countries remain underrepresented. Development imagery is still overwhelmingly shaped by white, male perspectives from Europe and the US. The result is a field narrowed by distance, privilege and exclusion.

Seeing differently

This is Gender, our visual storytelling initiative, emerges in response. Through it, we work with photographers whose practices alter the conditions under which evidence is produced. Authorship shifts. Distance collapses. Ethical responsibility moves to the foreground.

In Acompañamiento y Cariño (Mexico City, 2025), disability activist and photographer Jenny Bautista Media shows an elderly couple – both disabled, both each other’s carers – held in intimate domestic embrace. Her lens refuses to frame disability and ageing as dependency, rather casting intimacy and mutual care as a social and political relation rather than a private burden.

This is Gender photographers draw on queer ancestral histories, challenge able-bodied assumptions, or use performance rather than documentary realism to communicate lived experience.

In In Glitter, Mayowa Oyewale pushes back against the expectation to ‘document’ queer life. Using performance and symbolism, the image presents the queer body not as something to be recorded, but as a site where law, memory, and survival intersect. In places where queer lives are criminalised or erased, performance offers a way to show both violence and resistance without having to offer ‘proof’.