Rights against rights: broadening the view of actors engaged with images of violence

There is consensus in the human rights community that images documenting violence are important. However, there is less consensus on how to engage with them. Based on ethnographic and collaborative research with a wide range of image actors, in this article, I seek to qualify debates on the topic by broadening the field of relations we consider around images of violence. I establish six key image engagements, namely taking, storing, sharing, showing, viewing, and deleting and consider how these engagements form relations between a broad set of image actors, including victims, families and friends of victims, descendants of victims, potential victims, and communities of action. I argue that not only do the rights and obligations of different image actors often create unsolvable tensions and conflict but also that the rights and obligations of a single image actor might shift over time – or be inherently conflictual in the first place.