BackIn 2015, photographer Massimo Sestini documented refugees leaving their homelands for safety as they crossed the Mediterranean, hoping to seek asylum in Europe. Sestini’s photographs were well praised and won several awards, but Sestini, as well as many others, recognized that the images do not properly recognize the personhood of the migrants on board the ships. Sestini’s most famous photo, taken from above, shows hundreds of people tightly packed on a shallow hull boat; many are children and few are wearing life-jackets.
The image reduces the individual into a collection, negating their personal experience. This reflection inspired Sestini to start his “Where are you?” project to identify the humans aboard the ship.
Aside from the gratuitous commodification of human pain using the crypto market, the image perpetuates the negative depiction of refugees through the mediation of migration. This ongoing debate about how we see the migrant in media can be considered again through the AP’s mistake.
AIn her book, Mediating Migration, Radha Hegde writes that the immigrant body is “disciplined, racialized, and surveilled” and the body is often all the immigrant has when they “navigate spaces of uncertainty and risk.” The migrant and refugee are not often seen as a human person in media representations, but rather as a state of temporary being, one who
is seen in transit, but rarely in a settled destination.
“As Dr. Ayo Sogunro tweeted in response to the absorption of the Ukrainian migrants, “Europe never had a migrant crisis. It has a racism crisis.”
AIn her book, Mediating Migration, Radha Hegde writes that the immigrant body is “disciplined, racialized, and surveilled” and the body is often all the immigrant has when they “navigate spaces of uncertainty and risk.
AIn her book, Mediating Migration, Radha Hegde writes that the immigrant body is “disciplined, racialized, and surveilled” and the body is often all the immigrant has when they “navigate spaces of uncertainty and risk.” The migrant and refugee are not often seen as a human person in media representations, but rather as a state of temporary being, one who
is seen in transit, but rarely in a settled destination.
