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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the outsourced global health image as the stabilized product of 'text-to-image' paradigm: When freelance photographers and generative AI systems are systemically tasked to turn the pre-written text into recognizable, iconic imagery commodified by organizations.

Paper long abstract

Images are central to the functioning of the neoliberal global health (GH) industry: they raise public awareness, educate communities, and secure funding for interventions. Yet, only a few wealthy GH organizations maintain photographers on long-term contracts. Instead, most GH imagery is outsourced to precarious freelancers, hired on short-term assignments to rapidly reproduce the recognizable global health visual canon.

Central to this outsourcing are ‘briefs’--prescriptive bullet points drafted by communications departments (typically in the Global North) and passed to photographers (increasingly in the Global South). However, briefs are no longer the only way text is converted into imagery; GH organizations are increasingly adopting AI-generated visuals created through textual ‘prompts’.

Drawing on interviews with GH photographers and communications experts, this paper argues that global health visual culture has been modulated by a ‘text-to-image’ paradigm of outsourcing. In this model, both human photographers and generative algorithms translate external text--briefs and prompts--into highly controlled visual output. By examining the role of GH organizations in shaping this process, I argue that briefs essentially function as proto-prompts, and that photographers, acting as algorithmic agents, together with generative models, have been trained to replicate the established iconicity and stabilize visual stereotypes.

Finally, this paper interrogates the common justifications for this outsourcing such as the uncritical fetishization of ‘local photographers’ as decolonial agents or the framing of synthetic imagery as a ‘green’ and ‘identity protecting’ solution--to reveal the pragmatic, economy-driven underpinnings serving the interests of institutions and their broader political economies.