Alan Kurdi: Between reportage and propaganda
 
 

When the image of drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi was published it caught the world by storm. Time magazine called it “the most heartbreaking photo of 2015.” It was used both by those arguing that “migrants” were exposing their children to needless danger and by others lobbying for better welfare and hospitality for refugees. It was also used for different political purposes, such as warning other populaces of the Syrian conflict’s spillover and potential dangers.

The photo was referred to in multiple efforts to influence public perception toward various discourses, demonstrating the versatility of the single image.

Boy on the beach

On September 2, 2015, Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir was on a beach at 6 am in southwestern Turkey when she came across “bodies of migrants washed ashore… after two inflatable boats sank.” She had been documenting deaths of undocumented migrants using the location as a transit point for 15 years, but that day she took a series of pictures that flooded global media: snaps of the body of a three-year-old boy of Syrian Kurdish descent who drowned with his brother and mother. In an interview, Demir said she was “petrified” upon seeing the body. “The only thing I could do was to make his outcry heard. At that moment, I believed I would be able to achieve this by clicking the shutter of my camera and took his picture,” she said.

According to BBC Monitoring, the European press “continued to echo the shockwave of emotion [it] prompted” two days after the image was released, with some commentators suggesting it could prompt European countries to deal with the refugees. It quoted a French commentator saying “the influx of refugees has become ‘so great that it can neither be stopped or ignored’,” while a Serbian newspaper “defended its decision to publish Alan’s photo by insisting this was a true instance of a ‘picture telling more than a thousand words’.”

Reality curation and the watershed moment

Just as Steve McCurry’s famous portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic’s June 1985 issue came after a long series of images from the war in Afghanistan, the images of Kurdi came after a summer of countless photographs of refugees seeming to achieve impossible feats to enter Europe. A few days before, a lorry was found near the Austrian border filled with the rotting bodies of 71 migrants. But it was the image of Kurdi that stuck, just as the Afghan Girl became “a virtual icon in a visually saturated society” as Holly Edwards argues in her essay Cover to Cover.

In an essay on the ethics of migration and caring, Ann Gallagher asks why the picture of Kurdi spurred action whereas pictures of the lorry containing bodies failed to. One answer might come from Roland Barthes’ 1979 essay Shock-Photos: such images introduce us “to the scandal of horror, not to the horror itself” and prompt the spectator to a “violent interrogation, commits him to a judgment which he must elaborate himself without being encumbered by the demiurgic presence of the photographer.”

Another answer could come from the logic of how news media curates itself and how realities are synthesized. According to Julianne Newton’s 2001 book The Burden of Visual Truth: The Role of Photojournalism in Mediating Reality, the “social construction of reality theory maintains that we produce our own universes — and they in turn produce us — in a perpetual dialectic of experience and knowing.” For photojournalism, Newton gives the example of the memorial to disabled US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington DC, which was constructed to resemble the public image he projected. The result was an image of Roosevelt with no wheelchair, but “citizens in wheelchairs complained that the image control excluded a significant part of Roosevelt’s life.”

In his book Photojournalism and Today’s News (2008), Loup Langton quotes photographer Peter Essick, who worked for New York’s City Sun newspaper: “I’ve always felt that my editors see things as right and wrong, and they’ve tried to get me to think in the same way.” Langton adds: “Essick questions the absolutist concept of truth and instead suggests that historical and social/cultural values contribute to a particular society’s ‘truth/knowledge’.” Thus, “news products” socially construct a reality affected not only by what consumers deem important (such as humanitarian values in Europe), but also by the hierarchical decisions of editors — who are not a hugely diverse demographic and often reflect their personal preconceptions.

In this instance, the “migrant” crisis had been creating a steady buzz in the European news and the “‘reality’ of consumers was already partially constructed by the way in which the news media [had] framed information” by reportage throughout the summer.

Edwards proposed that the Afghan Girl photograph’s fame was “part of a larger picture, in which Afghanistan served as a strategic proxy” in the Cold War. The photographs of Kurdi were arguably also a pivotal moment changing attitudes towards refugees and instigating political change, such as its use by opponents of Canada’s ruling Conservative Party prior to the election that voted it out and brought Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to power. Both photographs are also a case of “beautiful suffering.” McCurry’s photograph of Sharbat Gula evoked exotic, orientalist sentiments due to her “appealing appearance.” Demir’s pictures of a “well-clothed,” seemingly sleeping infant in the sand also prompt sympathetic feelings that the child is also “being victimized by the viewer’s gaze.”

Beyond the beach: The child on the billboard

In December 2015, a photograph surfaced in Egyptian social media circles showing two images juxtaposed on a billboard, which was reported to have been displayed on a state-owned and army-managed highway between Cairo and Alexandria. On the left appeared the image of Kurdi, with a caption in Arabic reading: “A boy who has lost his army.” On the right, an image showed a child dressed in army camouflage accompanying President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at a major state celebration in late summer of 2015, a still from footage that aired live on national television. This image was also captioned: “A boy who has his army.” Despite people on social media questioning the billboard’s existence, the shared image sparked an outcry, inspiring parodies and prompting many to express their rejection of propaganda.

Kurdi Sisi.png

Kurdi Sisi

In her 1979 work On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that “reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images.” She quotes 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach as observing that ‘modernist society’ is characterised by images having “extraordinary powers to determine demands upon reality” and becoming “indispensable to the health of the economy, the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness.” One can say that this might have been the aim of this (perhaps non-existent) billboard: evoking classical themes of propaganda, those of stability versus instability. A boy who had “lost his army” (and in turn, his state and country), as opposed to a boy standing supposedly “proud” next to his president and commander-in-chief in a moment of national celebration.

Reviewing the other official photographs taken during the “New Suez Canal” inauguration celebrations on 6 August 2015, one can barely miss the obvious similarities in the propagandistic poses taken by the photographer to those taken during the Third Reich in Germany – as pointed out by Egyptian social media users. The two leaders, both in full uniform, pose next to children wearing matching militaristic outfits.

sisi child.png

sisi child

In Ideology and the Image (1981), Bill Nichols argues that juxtaposition produces results similar to film or images accompanied by music, speech, or written text, though without the impression of movement. Nichols also stresses the importance of “the function of words in relation to images” as “a factor of singular importance in holding meaning in check.” In this instance, wordplay also serves to reduce ambiguity — a boy with his army, a boy without his army.

The usage of shock imagery: ethics and purpose

Using a montage to foment public opinion has happened before on numerous occasions. Not only by state actors, prominently in the early 20th century by the governments of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States, but also by individuals. One instance is in the aftermath of World War I by German pacifist Ernst Friedrich, who in 1924 published his book Krieg dem Kriege (War Against War), which featured what Sontag called “photography as shock therapy.” His book, as described by Sontag, was “an album of more than one hundred and eighty photographs mostly drawn from German military and medical archives, many of which were deemed unpunishable by government censors while the war was on.” The idea was repeated by Bertholt Brecht in 1955 in his Kriegsfibel (War Primer), which juxtaposed clippings from German print media gathered in the 1940s with his own poems that were fiercely critical of fascism, the Third Reich, and war in general.

Friedrich and Brecht’s efforts were propagandistic despite noble intentions. Whether they actually benefitted the causes they wished to promote is another question. In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Sontag responds to Virginia Woolf’s 1938 book Three Guineas by questioning her thesis that shock photographs can deter war. Sontag argues that Woolf’s point is valid but one-dimensional, as shock photos can also be used “to foster greater militancy.”

Likewise, the billboard montage can prompt unpatriotic feelings and negative thoughts about the current state. As Sontag writes:

There are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.

Young activists, for example, would immediately recognize the billboard’s propaganda and slam it along with the regime.

As for the original publication of the images of Kurdi in September 2015, some argue that they were indeed effective at highlighting the plight of refugees, in addition to being ethical. Perhaps this is easier as the purpose here seems more altruistic and humanitarian. According to Washington D.C.’s Newseum director Patty Rhule, “it’s not usual at all for newspaper front pages to depict a dead body.” Rhule says the decision to show the photos made it more difficult to look away “without having to pause and to think and reflect about how this policy issue is affecting human beings.” Although “the image wasn’t particularly graphic… it was certainly powerful and very disturbing,” she adds. Within days of the photos’ release, the boy’s own father, Abdullah Kurdi, condoned them in a telephone interview with privately-owned Egyptian TV channel DreamTV. Kurdi said that despite how painful they were, he hoped they would be a cause to change the status quo, “that my children would be the reason to save thousands of families… to end brokering and the trade of death.”

Afterword

Alan Kurdi’s pictures and their contexts show how images accompanied by text can communicate better than text on its own. But as much as they demonstrate how images can champion a worthy cause, they also show how they can be manipulated for questionable purposes, such as in the picture of the billboard.

Indeed, independent of the child’s tragic plight, they have acquired a life of their own. Are they ethical in one context (on a newspaper’s front page) and unethical in another (on a billboard)? Is their message effective in one context (because it is humanitarian) and not effective in another (because it is propaganda)? Sontag writes:

The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.

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