This article examines a Canadian transnational solidarity activist's efforts to
publicize human suffering through visual documentation. The objectives are to
examine some of the ways activists negotiate ethical dilemmas about spectatorship
and a white/Western gaze, and to consider the potential of the uses of visual
documentation as a tool/tactic for subverting global white hegemony. The analysis
focuses an one activists' attempts to capture and narrate experiences of suffering
in the light of racialized relations of domination and subordination. The article
argues that the strategies used to document and display photographs constituted the
photographer and the viewers' understandings of themselves in ways that reinforce
rather than subvert power. The article concludes by considering the implications of
white/Westerners as mediators of the Other's suffering.
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