The Flood: Refugees and Representation

by Joanna Lehan

Here’s an image: Hundreds of orange life jackets on a grey beach, mounded high and entangled obscenely, like holocaust corpses. Here’s another: a wall of distraught faces arrayed behind a fence; the hands of a child grasp the chain-link while she meets our gaze plaintively.

These descriptions, however recognizable, don’t refer to specific photographs, rather, there are thousands of recent photographs these words might describe. And there are other images with which we have the horror of becoming just as familiar, those of people packed on inflatable boats in the Mediterranean, or worse, those of their drowned corpses. “In an era of information overload,” writes Susan Sontag, “the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.” [1] This from Regarding the Pain of Others, which was written in 2003, before the advent of Twitter or Facebook.  We are living through a time of humanitarian crises for which there is now an unprecedented visual record—millions of these “proverbs” regarding refugees. We encounter them photo by photo, often unlinked from corresponding facts or contexts, all at the speed of the internet.

Citing various visual tropes this text module will consider recent photojournalistic s images of refugees and migrants as they relocate to Europe, and the traces they leave, in terms both ideological and practical. Some of the thinking herein was distilled into an exhibition I curated at the International Center of Photography, entitled “The Flood: Refugees and Representation,” which was on view from January – May of 2017. My work was one module in a six-section exhibition called “Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change,” which considered the unique role of the networked image in both reflecting and participating in social change. [2]

INUNDATION

What one finds immediately upon delving into contemporary news stories and NGO reports on the “European refugee crises” is that the language surrounding the issue is a subtly politicized minefield. The word “refugee” itself is a fraught term, as those that are refugees are often also referred to as “migrants” in headlines, photo captions, and other media, even though the terms cannot accurately be conflated. Refugees, as defined and protected under international law, are those that cannot safely return to their country of origin due to “well-founded fear” of persecution “for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” [3]  Migrants are those that leave their country of origin for work, or reasons of family reunification, but could return to their own country and expect to be protected under its laws. People fleeing the war in Syria comprised the biggest percentage of those who arrived on European shores in 2015, but there are hundreds of thousands of others fleeing Islamic extremism in the Middle Eastern countries of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and those from sub Saharan countries of Nigeria, Eritrea, South Sudan and elsewhere for whom it is currently more difficult to obtain asylum on political grounds.

In regard to the “European refugee crises,” even the situation itself is difficult to name without crossing one of these minefields. This is the most common shorthand in press accounts for the mass migration, but this terminology accentuates the challenges to Europe when, in fact, a greater percentage of refugees are hosted in the countries of Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon than in all of Europe combined.[4]

This Eurocentric framing of the crises is frequently invoked in a metaphor of inundation. We read accounts of “floods,” “tides,” and “waves” of migrants. The inundation metaphor imbues the crises with fear, a sense of inevitability, and loss of control. As this terminology circulates at the same time as a rise of xenophobic sentiment in major democracies, and as the inadequacy and politicization of language extends to visual language, I have chosen some examples through which to unpack the meanings and functions of our photographic views of refugees.

The Flood included images made by photojournalists, who often render the refugee as an icon of suffering. Such depictions carry through from photographs of the great human displacement following World War II, with which the present situation in Europe is constantly compared. The specter of refugees walking with their belongings along a road in Europe inevitably evokes World War II, and thus contemporary image makers are able to avail themselves of this sense of historic relevancy in their compositions.

 Robert Capa, Refugees walking on the road from Barcelona at the French border, Spain, January, 1939.

Collection of the International Center of Photography

                                Sergey Ponomarev

A group of four New York Times photographers won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for their coverage of the refugee crises, and several of their photographs make good case studies in looking at the ways these images function. That they are sanctioned and promoted by the Times, and have been awarded one the highest honors of the field sealed their vaulted status in the image economy of refugee representation. In addition, the images have been circulated widely, and with differing levels of information.

The image above was made by one of those Pulitzer winners, photographer Sergey Ponomarev, along the Balkan route to the economically stable countries of Austria and Germany. Specifically, it was in Slovenia in October of 2015, just after neighboring Hungary closed its border to Serbia. That fall in Serbia 17,000 people waited at the border to Slovenia with no food, and Slovenia’s response was to let people pass on to Austria via a guarded corridor. This dense column of people captured by Ponomarov creates a dramatic visual, a river of people flowing right toward the viewer.  The image also provides an example of the political relevance of captions. It appears on the Times online “Lens” blog in a portfolio announcing the prize[5], with the caption that follows, but without the additional information about the circumstances that would inform the viewer about the militarized column. Thus it provides a possible reading of the photo as one that depicts a self-organizing mass, marching over borders, as opposed to a group whose movement is being carefully controlled by the state. The caption also takes the perspective of the problems the refugees provide to Slovenia, as opposed to their plight:

“Migrants walking past a church, escorted by Slovenian riot police to a registration camp outside Dobova, Slovenia. The small Balkan nations along the path of the human migration through Europe have seen record numbers of refugees cross their borders, and have been overwhelmed in their ability to manage the human flow.”[6]

Ponomarov is particularly adept at deploying the allegorical in his news photos. In this image the church in the background may have multiple associations for different audiences, but one can fairly argue that aside from the quaint pictorial context it provides, it evokes a moral universe where we feel Christian charity toward these unlucky souls (and one, incidentally differentiated from an Islamic sense of charity.)  A man near the center of the frame looks back at the photographer under his hooded jacket, bundled, like the others, against the grey October day; babies are held in arms and women are among the men.

These details create an interesting contrast to another photo taken a day later in the same situation in Slovenia, that of Getty photographer Jeff Mitchell. Mitchell’s photo shows the same dense column, but without evocative background details, and without the inclusion of a subject who meets the camera’s eye. Though women and children obviously passed through Slovenia during this orchestrated migration, as evidenced by Ponomarov’s photo, Mitchell chose to make his photo when a group of men filled his viewfinder. This choice evades the sympathetic specter of families, and carries the potential of feeding fears of those inclined to them, that the influx of refugees consists primarily of young men (those that may be radicalized, those that will take the jobs of European men, to spell out the xenophobic fears).  

While Ponomarev’s photo was celebrated, Mitchell’s enjoyed another kind of “success.” It was licensed by Getty to Britain’s Ukip party, and used in pro-Brexit ads that were plastered to moving billboards and rolled through London in the run-up to the Brexit vote.  In an unusually frank show of ignorance of the potency of his composition, Mitchell told the Guardian, “I knew exactly what lens I was going to use to compress the group, to show how many people were there. I could have walked with them the whole length, photographing how people were struggling, but you can sum it all up in one picture.”[7]  Mitchell here illustrates how small aesthetic decisions, like collapsing the depth of field, can change a picture from one of a group of individuals to one that can easily be used as a literal poster-image for separatism.

Ukip ad, using photo by Jeff Mitchell

ICONICITY

Turning back to the award-winning Ponomarev for another example of some tropes of refugee representation, we can consider his startling photograph of Syrian refugees arriving on the shores of the Greek Island of Lesbos, a standout among many thousands of photos of this circumstance. This group arrives on a wooden fishing boat, not an uncommon phenomenon, but one that lends the scene a sense of timelessness relative to the scores of images of the crises in which people arrive in inflatable rubber rafts. The frame is filled expertly. The boat tips, its right side touches the horizon line precisely; its left side dips as two men push it to shore from the bow. In the center, crouched at the stern, a man reaches for a rope pulled by another who is in the water to his torso and regards the camera with an expression of effort and consternation. On the left, a slender, shirtless boy hoists a bundle or jacket aloft.

Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa immediately comes to mind.

Aside from the rhyming composition, which is remarkable, it so happens that this particular historical painting has a further resonate relationship with the photograph. The Medusa was a French frigate bound for colonial Senegal that ran aground due to the incompetency of a captain appointed through nepotism. A famous scandal of barbarity and even cannibalism took place on the life raft, and this evocation of the depths of human horror and death caused by political failure reverberate on the Syrians, who having fled a brutal war, have just escaped being among those whose bodies have washed up on Mediterranean shores. Of course, Ponomarov, standing knee deep in the sea and nabbing this photo in an instant would be unlikely to make the reference consciously. In fact, he’s said “I don’t have time to think about comparisons with art, but I think in the unconscious part of mind there is a collection of images that I saw and I can use those composition types in my work.”[8]

Photos of mothers and child refugees, too, often trade on the power of iconic evocations, like that of the Pietà. Consider this example from Italian photographer Alessandro Penso, of an Afghani mother enrobed in an emergency blanket.

This is the way that news photographers employ iconicity: unconsciously, and habitually. While it’s a successful aesthetic habit, it has the tendency to flatten subjects into pleasing or arresting compositions and relate them to fine art without giving them opportunity to be truly seen. 

Networks and Self Representation

These examples happened to have been made for print publications, but that doesn’t mean, of course, that they don’t traverse the internet. Each has travelled Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, as well as appeared on the photographers’ own websites, often with different captions, or no caption at all, inviting the viewer to respond solely to the strong aesthetic factors, and propagating on the network in large part on the basis of this power.

Thair Orfahli (second from left).

If networks do provide a complicated framework for images that sometimes harmfully divorce the image from crucial information or trades on iconic depictions, they also provide a platform for self-determined representation. The present refugee crises is the first of its scale in which participants of the crises are able to broadcast their own representation with apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp. “The selfie,” says Nicholas Mirzoeff, “is a fusion of the self-image, the self-portrait of the artist as a hero and the machine image of modern art that works as a digital performance.”[9]

Among thousands of examples are the selfies of Thair Orfahli, a former law student from Damascus who travelled on a smuggler’s boat from Egypt to Italy, and made several cheerful and triumphant selfies and videos of his trip, as well as his journey upon reaching Europe until his eventual asylum in Berlin. Several of Orfahli selfies were used in a Twitter campaign by OCHA, to raise awareness of the crises.[10]

While those who are not digital natives often regard the selfie as a callow and narcissistic form, in the context of the refugee crises, these broadcasts provide an alternative view of refugees as individuals who, just like their millennial counterparts the world over, communicate their own attractiveness and success. In the case of refugees, these images also provide a powerful and life-affirming testament to the joy of survival.

Postscript: “Concern?”

It was 1966 when Hungarian émigré Cornell Capa founded the International Fund for Concerned Photography to honor the memory of his famed photojournalist brother, Robert Capa, who died on assignment in Indochina in 1954, as well as that of colleague David Seymour (Chim), killed while photographing the Suez War in 1956. The Fund later became embodied in 1974, with the opening of the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. With this new museum and school Capa wanted to promote and celebrate photography that is “concerned,” by which he meant, according to ICP’s website: “… the creation of socially and politically minded images that have the potential to educate and change the world.” Capa himself said, “The Concerned Photographer produces images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism.” This is a quote I can never quite square with the commercial practice of photojournalism. While the photographs of someone like Sergey Ponomarev are unquestionable formal, are they disinterested or cynical? Does the disinterest and cynicism lie only with the beholder?, I ask myself with some degree of guilt.

Can ICP’s “Perpetual Revolution,” I wonder, be fairly considered a reflection of the evolution of these values? “Concerned photography,” after all, is a phrase that might sound nearly quaint if not outright misguided to anyone familiar with the critical discourse on documentary practice which arose in the ‘70s with artists such as Martha Rosler and Alan Sekula, and continues with scholars such as John Tagg. Yet, the critiques notwithstanding, an image economy and a need ˆyet exists to document global events with photographs. (Would we prefer not to see the lifejackets, the women and children, the crowded boats landing on the beaches?)

Over the course of the several months that I actively subsumed myself into this archive of images coming out of the crises and read accounts and data from news and humanitarian organizations of staggering numbers of people drowning, trapped at borders, under-served in every way—suffering— I grew angry at photography. Social media postings by photographers of especially tragic images are not infrequently captioned with pointed implications and entreaties not to ignore the crises, as if sharing the photo more emphatically will summon the collective will and power to change policies of various states to end the war in Syria, to stop end the reign of ISIS, of Boko Haram, of the Taliban. The viewing of this photo on my phone, the posters must reason, will remind me that I haven’t done enough, that I’m unaware of this crises, that while I was busy scrolling through cat memes, I didn’t throw a life jacket to this drowning family. In imaginary responses I posted: “Maybe it’s your medium! Maybe your ‘concern’ is inadequate, and in some cases feeds the imaginations of those that are against more humane refugee policies.”

And yet, there were several instances where heads of state specifically referred to photographs to cite the need for a change in refugee policy. The viral photo of Aylan Kurdi is one that makes a case for the power of bearing photographic witness. The body of Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian, was photographed on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey in 2015. That image, made by photojournalist Nilüfer Demir, appeared on the screens of almost 20 million people within 12 hours, waking many in the world to the plight of Syrians, and triggering responses from the governments of Canada, Germany, England, and elsewhere. [11]

It’s notable that in the works of successful influence I’ve cited, those of refugee selfies, and of this wildly viral photograph, it is the function of the network in particular combination with the image, that equates with its successful aim to finally recognize and respond to our shared humanity. It’s a combination that goes wrong, and it goes right, but it flows fast, and there’s no staunching the flood.

[1] Sontag, 22

[2] https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/perpetual-revolution-the-image-and-social-change

[3] UNHCR publication, “Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees,” Article 1

[4] This data is widely reported by humanitarian organizations and press accounts including,  http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/ten-countries-host-world-refugees-report-161004042014076.html ); https://www.iom.int/europe-and-central-asia; and the Amnesty International report “Tackling the Global Refugee Crises: From Shirking to Sharing Responsibility.” October, 18 2016.

[5] This particular photo appears to be otherwise unused by the paper, though another shot from this same day and place appears in a story about the closing of Balkan borders.

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/04/18/blogs/photography-pulitzer-for-coverage-of-refugee-crisis/s/18-lens-refugees-slide-8AS8.html Accessed May 26, 2017

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/22/jeff-mitchells-best-shot-the-column-of-marching-refugees-used-in-ukips-brexit-campaign. Accessed May 26, 2017

[8] Email conversation with the author, 12/15/16

[9] How to See the World, 2015. Penguin, London, 2015. (33)

[10] See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/cody-simpson-donates-his-twitter-account-to-a-syrian-refugee-10455260.html A short film of Orfahli selfies, which recreated his journey, was also produced for the exhibition The Flood.

[11] Vis, F., & Goriunova, O. (Eds.). (2015). The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi