Sontag says: exotics

Generally, the grievously injured bodies shown in published photographs are from Asia or Africa. This journalistic custom inherits the centuries-old practice of exhibiting exotic – that is, colonized – human beings: Africans and denizens of remote Asian countries were displayed like zoo animals in ethnological exhbitions mounted in London, Paris, and other European capitals from the sixteenth until the early twentieth century. The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues… oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence; for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees.

– Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others