For my first DIY Project for ASCJ200, I decided to manipulate the meaning of the iconic image of a dead syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, taken by Nilüfer Demir in 2015 on the Mediterrean coast of Turkey. As part of my effort to manipulate the meaning of the image, I decided to crop the body of Kurdi from the image and imposed it in an image of the wall at the Southern border of the United States. I wanted to draw an emotive parallel between the past horrors of the Syrian refugee crisis to the current happenings at the US-Mexico border due to Trump administration’s anti-immigration and family separation policy.
By placing the kid’s dead body next to a border patrol officer guarding the wall, the image makes a statement about the sheer inhumane treatment of refugees and asylum seekers who are fleeing the sociopolitical carnage and pillage in their own home countries. The kid was strategically placed further away from the wall and the guard to make the corpse a normative feature of the arid depersonalised imagery of the border. The insertion of common anti-immigration slogans and posters on the border wall and their intentional proximity to the patrol agent is to paint the heavily polarised discourse on immigration and the shameless complicity of the state machinery in streamlining the mistreatment of refugees coming to America. I used the transform tools (Scale, rotate, Distort, Skew) to position and assimilate the plethora of posters into the primary image. In order to make them thematically blend in with the background, I adjusted the brightness and contrast of the different layers of the image and also slightly blurred them to provide the viewer with a sense of depth and distance.
Though we shift context of Alan Kurdi’s death in the final image, it amplifies the universal nature of the suffering and pain that refugees across the world endure. By taking an iconic image from a separate geopolitical setting and reincarnating into a meaningful message for folks back home in America, the image shines a light on the real grassroots impact of policies birthed in closed-door conference rooms in Washington.
Secondary Images:
Donald Trump Support Rally in San Diego, CA
Refugees are Not Welcome Poster
Atharva Tewari 