Aylan Kurdi: A Picture Worth a Thousand Words
Trying to start a new chapter of your life is something many people strive to achieve. I am a result of two immigrant parents coming to Canada to create a new chapter in their lives; my mom coming from St. Lucia and my dad from Nigeria. My parents always tell their immigration process stories, how much they struggled to be here, and how thankful they are to be Canadian citizens today. Although many people get to experience the happy moment of immigrating to another country to start a better life, others have never gotten the chance. In the case of Aylan Kurdi and his family, they never got to live out their happy ending.
Aylan Kurdi and his family were looking to start a new life and escape the war in Syria. Unfortunately, three of the four family members never got to experience their new life away from destruction. On September 2, 2015, Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir took the iconic photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body lying on the shore of the Aegean Sea (Durham, 2018). Abdullah Kurdi, the only surviving family member, holds the pain of losing his entire family while trying to escape safely. The death of Aylan Kurdi and the heart-wrenching photo that spread across the world sparked the largest displacement among people (Raghavan & Tharoor, 2015). Is Demir wrong for taking the photo of Aylan Kurdi? Was it ethically wrong for the image to be published and shared across the internet and print?
I think that Demir taking the photo of Aylan’s body on the beach and the editors choosing to publish the image shows a degree of care for what happened to Kurdi and many other refugees seeking asylum in other countries. The photo, although hard to look at, acts as a symbol for humanity. The image of Kurdi’s body surfacing the media forced people to see the trauma of what refugees go through and make people start to care about the other problems that are going on in the world. Refugees are not seeking asylum just because they want to leave their home country; they leave because they can no longer stay there. Everyone deserves to have a happy ending but unfortunately, Aylan, his mother, and 5-year-old brother never got that chance.
If I were an editor, I would have chosen to publish the picture of Aylan’s body. I understand that the image at first glance is hard to view. Nobody would willingly want to see a child’s lifeless body lying on the beach in their morning paper or Twitter feed, but that particular image holds more meaning than just a dead child. It displays the grim realities of war. Demir taking the photo and choosing to share the image was her “giving voice to the voiceless” (Durham, 2018). Demir told CNN that when she first took the picture, she was motivated to share the image to alert the world of the tragedy stating, “This is the only way I can express the scream of his silent body” (Durham, 2018). The photograph gave refugees a new voice, a voice that the world needs to change and, by doing so, hopefully, provides thousands of refugees a chance to seek asylum and start a new chapter in their life.
#CommEthicsWeek4
References
Durham, M. G. (2018). Resignifying Alan Kurdi: News photographs, memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35(3), 240–258, DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2017.1408958
Raghavan, S., & Tharoor, I. (2015, September 3). The saga of the Syrian family, whose 3-year-old turned up dead on a Turkish beach. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-saga-of-the-syrian-family-whose-3-year-old-turned-up-dead-on-a-turkish-beach/2015/09/03/4a82ed56-5251-11e5-b225-90edbd49f362_story.html
