16 millennium , where The Guardian reported , it was these ‘ pictures [ which ] came to encapsulate
the horrific toll of Syria ’ s civil war ’ 11 . The journalist who took the image , Nilüfer Demir , said she felt ‘ paralysed ’ ( Vice , 2018 ) upon seeing the corpse of the child . Demir discussed how she took the picture in the moment by way of documenting her feelings , that what she had witnessed was horrific and unacceptable in a ‘ so-called ’ civilised society . Therefore , the image documented the victimisation of an innocent child and that this particular image has the potential to incite empathy for the refugees and outrage at the crisis .
In the ruminations of human suffering as seen in the image of Alan Kurdi , academic Susan Sontag argues how it is ‘ the gruesome [ which ] invites us to be either spectators or cowards , unable to look . Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorised by many glorious depictions of suffering ’ 12 . The lexical selection of ‘ authorised ’ attributes power to the image , and what the image elects to disseminate to its audience . Sontag is saying that there is a history of depictions of suffering that makes suffering seem heroic or glorious ( especially in something like war ), and therefore make suffering something that we can ethically consume in images . She is of course criticising this , saying that suffering is not glorious , and consuming it uncritically as spectacle is obscene and makes us voyeurs . Both the Alan Kurdi and the ‘ Leninfall ’ case study demonstrate the idea of an image having sole governance in approving who gazes at its subject , and what it determines its subject to be . This evidences how the discourse individuals are fed can be guided by still images , ultimately attesting ‘ actor-network theory ’ as a genuine consideration with regards to images being a sincere voice in the understanding of conflicts . Nonetheless , Sontag did not go further to discuss what happens when images of conflict , like ‘ Leninfall ’, do not measure up to the scale of ‘ gruesomeness ’ ( in contrast image of Alan Kurdi ), as it is impossible for any two persons to define ‘ gruesome ’ in the same way . Likewise , the categories of ‘ spectator ’ or ‘ coward ’, rather limits the number of people able to look at an image ( figure 3 ) in the first place , for if there are only two categories , this allows very little perspective from other agencies .
A symbiotic cycle was formed where individuals were reliant on a picture to ignite something within them to determine change , which is what happened in the aftermath of the release of Kurdi ’ s image , as the picture seemingly shifted an understanding within the political
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12
S Sontag , Regarding the pain of others ( London : Penguin Books : 2005 ), p . 38 .