Images of Mediterranean Crossing

Abstract

Abstract What do photographs of small boats crossing the Mediterranean construct as they circulate as privileged signifiers of the 2015 “migrant crisis”? While it is sometimes assumed that these images mobilize sympathy and, perhaps, intervention, this article queries how one such image has circulated and constructed notions of crisis in ways that center Europe and Europeans while passing over migrants. The analysis is grounded in a close engagement with Massimo Sestini's widely reproduced photograph Rescue Operation, selected for its status as a privileged signifier of this crisis. The article first examines how the photograph circulated in the mainstream press, showing how the image is made to stand for general conditions, while those who appear in the image are displaced from the stories the photograph is used to tell. It then shows how contextual and representational choices that shaped the image, and what was obscured from it, are structural to how it comes to depict “rescue” as a limited frame centering European intervention. The article argues that this photograph and its receptions work to reduce images of migrants to evidence for tales of European response and rescue.