Alan Kurdi Propaganda

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University of WestminsterMA Documentary Photography and Photojournalism (MADPP)

MODULE : (2015) 2PJN7H9.1 History and Theory of the Published PageSTUDENT : Amir Makar / W15100876

Alan Kurdi: Between Reportage and Propaganda

“The only true shock photos… should be the news-agency photographs, where the

fact, surprised, explodes in all its stubbornness, its literality, in the very

obviousness of its obtuse nature” (Barthes, 1979).

1.

Introduction

In discussion, photography is often accompanied by a popular adage that “a photograph can

tell a thousand words.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with such a postulation, photographs can be

and have been published to carry that statement forward in certain usages, such as influencing public

opinion through shock value. When the image of the drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi was first

published, it caught the world by storm, and was called by Time Magazine as “the most heartbreaking

photo of 2015” (Walsh, 2015). It flooded global media and prompted harsh reactions from supporters

of refugees and critics of policies regarding the migrant crisis that had been occupying Europe

especially during the summer of 2015, including those who argued that ‘migrants’ were carelessly

exposing their own children to needless danger (Chorley, 2015) and those others who argued to lobby

for better welfare and hospitality for refugees (Gallagher, 2015). The photographs were also

subsequently used for different political purposes, such as promoting negative perceptions regarding

the Syrian conflict and warning other populaces of the conflict’s spillover and potential dangers.

In each of those instances, the photographs of Kurdi were used—or at least referred to—in an

effort to influence public perception towards promoting and advancing a certain discourse,

demonstrating the versatility of the single image in this regard and continuing a repeated cycle of

similar historical practices. This paper discusses these instances of usage: their contexts, rationale,

ethics, and impact.


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2.

Boy on the beach: The photographs of Alan Kurdi

On 2 September 2015, Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir was on a beach at 0600 (local

time) in southwestern Turkey when she came across “bodies of migrants washed ashore… after two

inflatable boats sank.” In the course of her assignment documenting deaths of migrants who have been

using the location as a transit point during the past 15 years, Demir took a series of pictures that flooded

global media that day: snaps of the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy of Syrian Kurdish

descent who drowned with his brother and mother. Remarking upon her pictures in an interview with

Turkish Do!an News Agency, Demir said that she was “petrified” upon seeing the body (Do!an Haber

Ajansi, 2015). “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 in

her interview.

The cover of The Independent

newspaper on 3 September

2015, the day following the

drowning of three-year-old Alan

Kurdi.


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The photographs of Kurdi first appeared on the wire agencies and in the global press, causing

an uproar and exemplifying a trend that had been ongoing throughout the summer of 2015 during the

refugee crisis. According to BBC Monitoring, two days after the first images of Kurdi were released,

European press “continued to echo the shockwave of emotion prompted by [the] photograph” with

some commentators suggesting it could prompt European countries into action (BBC Monitoring,

2015). BBC Monitoring quoted a French commentator as saying that “the influx of refugees [had]

become ‘so great that it [could] neither be stopped [nor] ignored,” while another Serbian newspaper

“defended its decision to publish [Kurdi’s] photo by insisting this was a true instance of a ‘picture

telling more than a thousand words’” (BBC Monitoring, 2015).

Covers of papers from the European press on 3 September 2015 showing the various images of Alan Kurdi.


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3.

Reality curation and the watershed moment

The situation can arguably be said to be a pivotal instance similar to the wave caused by Steve

McCurry’s portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic magazine’s June 1985

edition. Just as Afghan Girl came after a long series of images from the war in Afghanistan (Edwards,

2007), the images of Kurdi came after an entire summer of countless photographs of refugees doing

the impossible to enter Europe, leaving overstuffed camps, coming off barely-floating boats on

beaches, and crossing fences and barbed wire. A few days before the photographs of Kurdi were taken,

another story was reported of a lorry found near the Austrian border filled with the rotting bodies of

71 migrants “described as ‘decomposing’” (Marszal et al., 2015). Yet, it was the image of Kurdi that

stuck, and in a similar fashion as the Afghan Girl “[had] become a virtual icon in a visually saturated

society” as Holly Edwards argues in her essay Cover to Cover (Edwards, 2007).

In an essay on the ethics of migration and caring, Ann Gallagher questioned why the picture of

Kurdi spurred action whereas the picture of the lorry containing migrant bodies failed to do so. One

answer might come from Roland Barthes in his essay Shock-Photos, where he writes that such images

“[introduce] to the scandal of horror, not to the horror itself” (Barthes, 1979) and prompting the

spectator to self reflection and “violent interrogation, commits him to a judgement which he must

elaborate himself without being encumbered by the demiurgic presence of the photographer.”

Another answer could come from the logic of how the news media curates itself and how

realities are synthesised. According to Julianne Newton, “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” (Newton, 2001). By applying this theory to photojournalism, Newton

gives the example of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s memorial which was constructed to

resemble his most recent public image. The final product was an edited and curated image of Roosevelt

without his wheelchair, intended to project power. This was “until citizens in wheelchairs complained

that the image control excluded a significant part of Roosevelt’s life” (Newton, 2001).


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In his book Photojournalism and Today’s News, Loup Langton makes a similar argument by

offering the testimony of 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” Essick is quoted to have said by Langton. He adds that “Essick questions the absolutist

concept of truth and instead suggests that historical and social/cultural values contribute to a particular

society’s ‘truth/knowledge’” (Langton, 2008). Thus, “news products” framed by the media socially

construct a reality affected not only by what the consumers deem as important (such as humanitarian

values in Europe), but also by the hierarchical decisions of editors—who themselves are not quite

diverse and often reflect their personal preconceptions.

In this instance, the ‘migrant’ crisis had been creating a steady buzz in the European news and

in turn the “‘reality’ of consumers was already partially constructed by the way in which the news

media [had] framed information” (Langton, 2008)—by reportage throughout the summer. Thus news

reporting frameworks had become entrenched by both the media and the audience, with this structure

“contribut[ing] to a social construction of reality” (Langton, 2008).

In her essay, 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 between the United States

and the Soviet Union (Edwards, 2007). By the same logic, it can be inferred that the photographs of

Kurdi were also a pivotal moment in the refugee crisis and the woes of the Syrian conflict. In the same

vein, the photographs are also another case of “beautiful suffering,” just as McCurry’s photograph of

Sharbat Gula evoked exotic orientalist sentiments due to her “appealing appearance”, Demir’s pictures

of a ‘well-clothed’ and seemingly-sleeping infant in the sand also prompt sympathetic sentiments that

the child is also “being victimised by the viewer’s gaze.” Just as there is a case for ‘beauty’ in the case

of the Afghan Girl according to Edwards, another case could perhaps be made for the ‘lost innocence’

of Kurdi.


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4.

Beyond the beach: The children on the billboard

In mid-December 2015, a photograph surfaced in Egyptian social media circles showing two

images juxtaposed together on a billboard, which was reported to have been displayed on one of the

Egyptian state-owned and army-managed highways running between the capital Cairo and the second-

largest-city Alexandria (Adly, 2014). On the left, the reported billboard showed the image of Kurdi on

the beach, with a caption in Arabic saying: “a boy who has lost his army.” On the right, the second

image was that of a young pre-teen child dressed in army camouflage fatigues accompanying the

Egyptian President Abdelfattah al-Sisi in a major state celebration that occurred in the late summer of

2015, taken as a still-shot from footage that aired live on national state-television. The second image

was also captioned in Arabic “a boy who has his army.” Despite claims on social media questioning

the veracity of the billboard, the shared image nevertheless sparked an outcry in social and traditional

media inspiring many spoofs and parodies and prompted many to express their rejection of propaganda

(Al-Yawm al-Sabi', 2015).

This billboard came at a time when Sisi’s Egypt is undergoing a crackdown on dissent, which

began since before his election to power in June 2014 (Financial Times, 2015), and the overthrow of

his predecessor, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 (BBC News, 2014). Throughout his various

speeches as president, Sisi had maintained that the country was fighting a “ferocious war,” with Middle

East countries needing to “cooperate to defeat a worsening terrorist threat… [which] created the danger

of some countries ‘sliding into failure’” (Lederer & Daniszewski, 2015). The Egyptian media, private

and state-owned, has been described by commentators as being a “mouthpiece for the military state”

(Youssef, 2015), with one of the prominent anchors on privately-owned TV saying he would “say

anything the military tells [him] to say out of duty and respect for the institution.” “Jubilant headlines

about the ‘New Suez Canal’” even dominated “Egyptian state and privately-owned media in the run

up to the official inauguration on 6 August” (Makar et al., 2015), a project that Sisi himself advanced

just a year. During Sisi’s tenure as defence minister before becoming president, “the military was also


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given the concession to collect toll revenue on some key highways, including… the Cairo–Alexandria

desert road, the busiest in Egypt, for fifty years” (Adly, 2014).

As seen on the Facebook page of Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Yawm al-Sabi’ on 14 December 2015: The juxtaposedmontage of images of Alan Kurdi and an Egyptian pre-teen who accompanied the Egyptian President in “New Suez

Canal Celebrations” on 6 August 2015, as they appeared on a reported billboard on a desert highway linking Cairo

and Alexandria.

(Title reads: “Billboard of #BoyWithHisArmy and Boy who lost his army on the #DesertRoadTollgates are the most

disseminated throughout social media”)

In her work On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that “reality has always been interpreted

through the reports given by images” (Sontag, 1979). She further 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 “become indispensable to the health

of the economy, the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness” (Sontag, 1979). One

can say that such meaning might have been the aim to be extracted from the image on the 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 who was standing supposedly-‘proud’


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(in the eyes of the image’s curator) next to his president and commander-in-chief in a moment of

national celebration.

Upon reviewing the other official photographs that were taken that day during the “New Suez

Canal” inauguration celebrations on 6 August 2015 in Egypt, one can barely miss the obvious

similarities in the seemingly-propagandistic poses taken by the photographer to those taken during the

Third Reich period in Germany. The two leaders are essentially sharing the same poses: fully clad in

uniforms and waving national symbols next to children wearing matching militaristic outfits and

posting for the cameras. The same confident pose of stability, good governance, and strong leadership

is being projected (and a step beyond Nazi Germany: televised live) before a populace.

Left:

Egyptian President Abdelfattah al-Sisi smiles at a boy

dressed in a military uniform at the Suez Canal extension

ceremony in Ismailia. (AP Photo)

Right:

Adolf Hitler poses with a young member of the

Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). (Uncredited Photo)


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That the image juxtaposition on the billboard is a form of propaganda is evident, fitting the

definition as “the systematic dissemination of information, especially in a biased or misleading way,

in order to promote a political cause or point of view” (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.). The billboard

also serves as another demonstration of the construction of a reality that has been prevalent in Egypt

since the start of Sisi’s tenure. On the topic of semiotics and codings in images, Langton enumerates

three main points which hinge his discourse:

1. Both the producer and the audience know the learned relationship between the symbols used and

the concept, together making up the image;

2.

Both the producer and the audience are familiar with the conventions of the medium and the

relationship between the image and the subject;

3. The audience is not consciously aware of the rules and codes and cannot articulate them though

they do respond to them.

In this regard, the billboard passes almost unnoticed to the general Egyptian populace, which

is familiar with the context of the Syrian conflict due to the continued attention and scapegoating by

the local Egyptian media in Egypt. The audience itself is receptive to the projection by juxtaposition,

as a warning against potential instability in the absence of strong rule, and that the image of the

uniform-clad president and child standing side by side promotes confidence in the army (which has

been promoted as the backbone of stability within Egypt since 2011 and indeed since the mid-20th

century), which maintains this strong rule.

In Ideology and the Image, Bill Nichols argues that the juxtaposition of images together works

to liven up the still image which would otherwise be “a remarkably mute object” (Nichols, 1981). The

juxtaposition, he argues, produces results similar to a moving film shots or images accompanied by

music, speech, or written text, though without the impression of movement. “In most instances image-

image and images-written-word combinations have the greatest importance. These combinations can

be regarded as relationships of context/text or syntagmatic aspects of a text, depending on your point


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of view and the specifics of the situation” (Nichols, 1981). Nichols stresses the importance of “the

function of words in relation to images” as being singled out as “a factor of singular importance in

holding meaning in check” (Nichols, 1981), in this instance, being the importance of stability. In

addition, the quality of the text also serves to clarify the purpose and reduce ambiguity, such as play

on words and similar phrases—a boy with his army, a boy without his army.

5.

The usage of shock imagery: ethics and purpose

That such a montage is being used to foment public opinion is not new. This process has

happened over and over 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 even the United States,

but also by individuals. One instance is in the aftermath of the Great War by German pacifist Ernst

Friedrich, who in 1924 published his book Krieg dem Kriege (War Against War), which featured

“photography as shock therapy” (Sontag, 2003). 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”

(Sontag, 2003). The idea was repeated again by Bertholt Brecht in 1955 in his Kriegsfibel (War

Primer), where the author used clippings from German newspapers and magazines gathered in the

1940s and juxtaposed them with poems of his creation that were fiercely critical of fascism, the Third

Reich, and war in general (Brecht, 1998).

Whether such series’ of images constitute propaganda (or ‘counter-propaganda’ ) is debatable,

as one could argue that Friedrich and Brecht’s efforts are propagandistic despite the seemingly noble

intentions they wish to project, and the same can be said for the billboard montage (though it might be

easier to argue as unethical). However, whether they actually benefit the causes they wish to promote

or not is another question. In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag responds to Virginia

Woolf’s 1938 book Three Guineas, and questions her thesis that shock photographs can indeed deter

war. Sontag argues that Woolf’s point—despite being valid—is only one-dimensional, and that shock


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photos could also be used “to foster greater militancy” (Sontag, 2003). Likewise, in this context, one

can argue that the billboard montage as it stands—though meant to provoke patriotic sentiment and to

deter any negative thoughts against the current regime and the crackdown—in fact can spur the

opposite sentiment. 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 bemusedawareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things

happen” (Sontag, 2003).

Although as stated earlier, the intended audience is the everyday Egyptian layman that is

believed to be complacent with the montage, the billboard’s message falls short on the activist youth

who would immediately recognise the propaganda and would slam it along with the regime (The New

Arab, 2015), echoing Sontag’s views.

As for the original publication of the images of Kurdi on the newspapers in September 2015,

their proponents argue that the pictures were indeed effective at highlighting the refugee story that

capped the summer of 2015, in addition to being verified as 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” (Logan, 2015). Rhule

says that the decision to show the photo 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’”. Despite that “the

image wasn’t particularly graphic… it was certainly powerful and very disturbing,” she adds (Logan,

2015). Within days of the photos’ release, the boy’s own father Abdullah condoned them in a telephone

interview with privately-owned Egyptian TV channel DreamTV. Kurdi said that despite how painful

they were, but 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” (DreamTV, 2015).


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Another example can be found when The Virginian-Pilot newspaper ran the image of one of

the victims of the Virginia Tech University campus mass-shooting which left 32 dead. Defending the

choice of image on the cover, then editor Denis Finley wrote a letter the next day explaining why the

image was used. “We decided to publish this photo because it so perfectly captured the horror of the

event that unfolded just hours away from us” (Langton, 2008). Additionally, Finley argued that “there

are times when the circumstances trump any urge we have to protect our readers from the brutal

realities of life, and we are compelled to publish such realities. To do anything less would be to shirk

our responsibility to tell the truth” (Langton, 2008).

Cover of The Virginian-Pilot in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shooting.


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In effect, Finley echoes the same sentiments argued by Barthes in 1979: “deprived of both its

song and its explanation, the naturalness of these images compels the spectator to a violent

interrogation, commits him to a judgement which he must elaborate himself without being encumbered

by the demiurgic presence of the photographer” (Barthes, 1979).

6. Afterword

Alan Kurdi’s pictures and their contexts show how images accompanied by text can

communicate better than text does on its own, as evident from the comparison between Kurdi’s story

and the story of the 71 refugees in the truck the broke the week before his. But in as much as they

demonstrate how a worthy cause can be championed, they also demonstrate how powerful imagery

can be manipulated for questionable purposes and perhaps prone to abuse, such as in the picture of the

Egyptian highway billboard.

Indeed, independent of the child’s plight and tragedy, they have acquired a life of their own,

raising different questions where they are used. Are they ethical in one context (on newspaper front-

page) and unethical in another (on an advertising billboard)? Is their message effective in one context

(because it is humanitarian) and not effective in another (because it appears as a not-so-subtle form of

propaganda)? Although Demir would still champion her photographs, and Kurdi’s father in his tragedy

would say they advance a good cause, 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” (Sontag, 2003).

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Alan Kurdi Propaganda