After being presented at the Museum from November 2021 to April 2022, the exhibition “To Heal a World” can be visited at the House of Photography in Olten from 7 February to 4 May 2025.
Humanitarian images entered people’s daily lives over a century ago and are now a fixture in today’s news. Such images often convey a sense of immediacy and certainty, setting a scene that allows for only one interpretation. Viewers think they fully understand the event in question without considering what lies just outside the frame. But the reality on the ground is always more complex than its representation, which is by nature merely a fragment. “To Heal a World” presents, in a variety of ways, more than 600 images dating from 1850 to the present. They include both public images used to communicate about humanitarian crises and more confidential ones, once reserved for internal use.
The works were carefully selected over the course of two years from a highly diverse yet little-known corpus of photos: the collections of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
Head of project: Pascal Hufschmid, Executive Director at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum
Curator: Nathalie Herschdorfer
