The genre of refugee photographs shares with other photographs of tragedies the ability to alert audiences to the distant suffering of others. Refugee photographs constitute their own genre of photographs, one that exists on a line between informing and objectifying.332 At times it can be difficult to understand the magnitude of an atrocity on the other side of the world, and it can be difficult for a photograph to accurately represent the horrors of such atrocities. When looking at a photograph of refugees, we are reminded of, or in many cases, informed about, persecution that we could not see or understand otherwise. For Anthony Downey, refugee photographs rely on a paradoxical visible invisibility – one that alerts us to a moment that lives on only as trauma but that can be represented visually.333 Photographs of many different refugee groups have been credited with stirring compassion and acting as an impetus for international involvement in refugee issues. Or, as Liisa Malkki argues, “Pictures of refugees are now a key vehicle in the elaboration of a transnational social imagination of refugeeness.”334 Refugee photographs index violence and persecution for people in all parts of the world and contribute to a constructed refugeeness in the social imaginary.
In this process of representing refugees through photographs, certain patterns emerge that obscure the agency of photographed subjects in ways different than do other human rights images. Liisa Malkki, for example, harbors concern for the inability of refugee photographs to humanize individual struggles, and for the tropes that most commonly appear in photographs of
332 For example, Anna Szörényi analyzes coffee table books of refugee photographs and considers the
ways in which dimensions of privilege shape the relationship between the spectators and subjects of these photographs. Anna Szörényi, “The Images Speak for Themselves? Reading Refugee Coffee-Table Books,” Visual Studies 21, no. 1 (2006): 28.
333 Downey, “Thresholds of a Coming Community,” 40-41.
334 Liisa H. Malkki, “Emissaries: Refugee, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,” Cultural
refugees. She claims that most photographs of refugees fit in one of two categories: those depicting refugees “as a miserable ‘sea of humanity,’” or those that focus primarily on women and children.335 These types of photographs, Malkki argues, create a false understanding of a supposedly ideal refugee whose struggle is “pure,” and who is most visibly in need of rescue; helplessness becomes the most important feature of a photographed refugee. Or, as Lynda Mannik explains, “Refugees are observed. Their agency as observers is rarely recognized,” and the effect of this genre of photography is one that ultimately silences refugees and erases the necessary contingency for compassionate human rights action. 336 Mannik is further concerned with the problematic nature of the phrase “refugee crisis” because it implies that refugees themselves constitute the crisis, and this implication is exacerbated by the lack of narratives and testimonies of individual refugees in news media. She notes, “Visual images of refugees also devalue their suffering by hiding, commodifying and sensationalizing individualized and actual experiences of suffering. Invisibility is damning, but misrepresentation can be just as
damning.”337 The term “refugee” itself implies a lack of safety or shelter, or as Louisa Edgerly found in her analysis of Hurricane Katrina discourse, the term “refugee” carries a connotative meaning that people under that label are somehow not full citizens in the United States.338 To be a refugee, one must be in need, and while this construction of refugees might seem to indicate that they are passive, it is a necessary part of the asylum process. If one proves that they are unable to live in their home nation due to fear of violence or persecution, they may gain access to
335 Malkki, “Emissaries,” 388.
336 Lynda Mannik, Photography, Memory, and Refugee Identity: The Voyage of the SS Walnut, 1948
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 42.
337 Lynda Mannik, “Public and Private Photographs of Refugees: The Problem of Representation” Visual
Studies 27, no. 3 (2012):264.
338 Louisa Edgerly, “Difference and Political Legitimacy: Speakers’ Construction of ‘Citizen’ and
‘Refugee’ Personae in Talk about Hurricane Katrina,” Western Journal of Communication, 75, no. 3 (2011): 305.
asylum in the United States. However, in gaining acceptance as a refugee, they may be seen as subordinate to birthright citizens. For Alice Szczepanikova, there is essentialism in depictions of refugees as “objects of assistance” who are utterly without agency. And, for Anna Szörényi, that essentialism exists in the construction of refugeeness as “an intrinsic state of being, rather than the effect of particular and changeable historical and political process.”339 Given Szörényi’s perspective, we must also consider how humanity and individual agency could be restored through a different type of photography and a different type of journalism.
Beyond their indexical characteristics, refugee photographs ask for more than our recognition: they ask us to make space in our own nations and communities for those who are displaced.340 Where photographs of other natural and man-made disasters might serve a similar indexical function, and they may be used to solicit donations or other support for people
affected, refugee photographs signify a change to our own lives. They remind us about the temporariness of our own living situations and the necessity of caring for others.341 In a 2009 essay, art theorist Anthony Downey stated that photographs of refugees remind us that they “…are not liminal figures that exist in a hinterland of invisibility; on the contrary, they are symbols of a ‘coming community’ that is based on exclusion.”342 Downey finds refugee photographs to be especially powerful because they alert us as viewers to the potential for any
339 Alice Szczepanikova, “Performing Refugeeness in the Czech Republic: Gendered Depoliticisation
through NGO Assistance,” Gender, Place, and Culture 17, no. 4 (2010): 461; Anna Szörényi, “Reading Refugee Coffee-Table Books,” 28.
340 For example, in 2015 there were multiple news articles that displayed photographs of Syrian refugees
and noted that these images revealed the need for Western countries to take in those refugees. Titles included “Look at these Photos Before You Say We Can’t Take in Syrian Refugees” (Huffington Post), “We Can, and Should, Do More to Help Syrian Refugees” (Other Worlds), and “Heartbreaking Photo of a Drowned Toddler Embodies the World’s Failure in Syria” (Business Insider), and “Syria’s Refugees are Human Beings: Why the U.S. Has a Moral Duty to Help Them” (Salon).
341 Anthony Downey, “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the ‘Politics of
Aesthetics” Third Text 23, no. 2 (2009): 123.
342 Anthony Downey, “Thresholds of a Coming Community: Photography and Human Rights,” Aperture
of us to belong to the same, transitional community. They both alert us to the changes in our own community, as people who will live among newly resettled refugees, and they remind us of the fallibility of the seemingly sovereign nations we inhabit. Refugee photographs are important because they capture something provisional – they tend to reveal the liminality of refugee status and can even make plain human rights violations. Any new community of refugees and citizens exists because of an earlier, potentially violent exclusion that we did not witness but now know exists.