This article explores the images of starving children through a case study, the annual World Press Photo competition. The figure of a child in need is familiar from humanitarian discourses, but despite its familiar trope, it bears powerful affective meanings, especially in relation to the notions of innocence, vulnerability and futurity. In this study, the notions are discussed in the framework of five photographs of child malnutrition that were selected as the World Press Photo of the year in 1974, 1980, 1992, 2001, and 2005. The aim of this article is to discuss the complex and disturbing ways these photographs affect the viewer. While they invite the viewer to take part in a global project of constructing a better world, they also may hide difficult questions of global inequality and structural violence behind a series of individual events about personal suffering and loss.
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