On 18 December 2025, This is Gender delivered a live virtual keynote and discussion, hosted by the Royal Society of Arts, examining how images shape power, policy, and public understanding within global development.

Titled Reimagining the Development Frame: Gender, Power & Visual Justice, the session brought This is Gender into dialogue with an international audience spanning policy, advocacy, culture, journalism, and development-related practice.

The Keynote

Delivered by founder and curator Imogen Bakelmun, the session examined how dominant visual narratives within development continue to reproduce colonial, ableist, heteronormative, and patriarchal legacies — shaping whose lives become recognisable, whose suffering is rendered legible, and how institutions define problems, evidence, and solutions.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s provocation that “we cannot easily recognise life outside of the frames in which it is given,” the talk explored how visual frames do not simply reflect reality, but actively organise its moral and political boundaries.

Using work from the This is Gender collection, Imogen traced how developing new visual vocabularies can unsettle inherited ways of seeing — expanding what counts as evidence and opening space for more just, accountable, and plural understandings of gendered realities within development.

Points of Tension

The keynote was followed by a lively and engaged discussion, where participants grappled with pressing ethical tensions shaping visual practice in development today.

Debate centred on long-standing questions within photography and humanitarian communications: whether repeated exposure to suffering mobilises care or risks producing spectacle, desensitisation, and harm. Participants also reflected on the persistence of “white saviour” imagery, and how even well-intentioned practices can reproduce colonial power relations when histories of representation go unexamined.

Participants considered the responsibilities of photographers, editors, and organisations as image-makers and image-sharers — questioning how visual choices are tested, challenged, and revised in practice, particularly when images are mobilised in reports, campaigns, and institutional narratives.

Shifting the Frame

Throughout the exchange, This is Gender functioned as a shared reference point — not as a set of answers, but as a space for questioning.

The discussion returned repeatedly to the need to move away from singular, authoritative images toward more relational, accountable ways of seeing — images that acknowledge power, context, and responsibility, and resist closure in favour of ongoing interpretation.

Reflections

Situating This is Gender within the RSA underscored its role as a site of dialogue as much as display. Positioned within a forum bringing together members of the public alongside professionals working in development, communications, and policy, the session created space for honest debate — allowing assumptions to be questioned, approaches to be challenged, and shared responsibility to be foregrounded.

These conversations reflected the value of engaging critically with how images are produced and mobilised in real-world contexts, and of working collectively toward more ethical, reflective, and just visual practices.

Each activation begins with the collection. Explore hundreds of works from across the This is Gender archive — tracing how artists around the world are reimagining gender, power, and justice through image.

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Learn more about the curatorial vision, partnerships, and global mission behind This is Gender — and how visual storytelling is being mobilised in the service of gender justice.

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