A Sensible Politics. Image Operations of Europe’s Refugee Crisis

Abstract

Refugee image cultures are the dangerous supplement to refugee crises. As such, they invite critical opprobrium, sometimes for the unethical sensationalism of particular images and sometimes for the desensitizing effects of image overloads. At first glance, the steady stream of images serves only to numb rather than to incite real-time responsibility toward the migrant waves that seek passage into new territorial enclosures. Or the deluge of images invokes withdrawal and aggression, once host polities confront the thorny questions of resource distribution. Or indeed, especially sensational images are considered unethical in the extraction of surplus value from subaltern tribu-lations. Such allegations are well-founded, but they obscure the complex politics of the images that find unanticipated distributions across media forms and platforms. My essay tracks the trajectories of one iconic image that became an instant cultural mnemonic for the highly mediated European refugee crisis, ongoing since 2015. The poetic and circulatory effects of the image are exemplary instances of the problems that accompany the image production / distribution of the refugee crisis. The image of a two-year old Syrian boy found dead upon the beach of a fancy resort in Turkey became a social media event within hours of its first distribution as a news photo. The “event” inheres in the proliferation of a single image, its accumulating mediatic traces turning it into a media phenomenon. I focus on the Twitter storm ensuing from passing on the image — retweeting, liking, and sharing it — which further ricocheted between media platforms. This media explosion preceded deliberations on what the image meant or what was to be done.