More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015. The vast majority arrived by sea – yet, the number of people who did not make it is unknown. Images of destroyed boats and beaches littered with life jackets have helped to initiate and accelerate discussions and consolidate the politics of the movement in Europe, including humanitarian responses. How are images, discourses, and data involved in shaping the visions and experiences of migration in increasingly global contexts? We spoke to Professor Krista Lynes, Ian Alan Paul, and Tyler Morgenstern, editors of the volume Moving Images, about the connection between the political and the artistic, and the downsides of media coverage.
"Struggling to grapple with this relentless wave of images"
L.I.S.A.: Although you acknowledge the importance of images as “iconic representation of the events”, your recently published anthology “Moving Images. Mediating Migration as Crisis” does not reproduce the horrors at the sea visually. You also criticize the term “migration crisis”. Hence, one could argue, you have chosen a different approach. How is that?
Lynes: In many ways, Moving Images emerged out of a shared desire among the editors to create a different sort of space in which to think through questions of migration, representation, and politics. Like so many around the world, we found ourselves overwhelmed by the daily flood of harrowing images that issued from the Mediterranean region in the early weeks and months of the 2015-16 crisis. Yet with each passing day, a new set of images seemed to rise to the surface, displacing those that had come before, and forcing the publics confronting those images to forget what came before. Every new image of ruined life seemed to come with the promise that it, at last, would be the one to turn the tide, to galvanize a meaningful political response. And yet almost as quickly as they surged to the forefront of popular attention, they would drift from view. As colleagues who had, by this point, been writing together on issues of trespass and the mediation of transnational movement for some time, we found ourselves struggling to grapple with this relentless wave of images.
Increasingly, it became clear that the temporality of image-making and consumption was itself doing an important kind of political work, contributing to a larger political and affective structure — a "crisis" — through which the whole question of migration and refugeeism was being consumed and even legislated. Rather than train our efforts on the critical analysis of individual images, then, we increasingly shifted our attention to the social, cultural, political, and technical conditions under which image-making practices themselves were taking shape in this case. This meant attending to infrastructures and networks of circulation, to the political economy of news production, and most of all, to the longer histories of human movement, displacement, and struggle that the discourse and visual language of "crisis" put under erasure.
And so in one sense, our decision not to reproduce iconic images of suffering and loss was a direct result of our attempt to shift the focus away from the question of representation as such, and think in a more sustained manner about how it is that such images operate politically; how they are put into circulation and kept there, how they work to siphon and concentrate certain kinds of affective response, how they become incorporated into extant forms of political reason and legislative practice. It was a decision, in other words, that aimed to squarely confront the question of what these images of suffering, loss, and privation were actually doing, if not galvanizing the forms of political, humanitarian, and legislative response with which they were so often associated.
But in another, more immediate sense, our choice not to reproduce images of suffering and loss was an ethical one: amid the constant churn of images of migrant death, we wrestled seriously with the question of what, if anything, reproducing such images would do, other than contribute to the very spectacle we found so politically immobilizing, and perhaps even suggest (quite against our own analytic commitments) that analyzing these images as texts was a sufficient means of accounting for their complexity. Choosing not to reproduce the visual spectacle of migrant suffering and loss, then, was precisely about extending and deepening our critique of the whole framework of the "migrant crisis"; it was part and parcel of our refusal of "crisis" as the only possible framework through which to think seriously about the role of media texts, technologies, and practices in shaping the politics of migration in the contemporary moment.