Circuits and iconic potencial: Aylan Kurdi case

Abstract

In September of 2015, the photograph of the corpse of the Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi by Nilüfer Demir caused a world commotion. The child was drowned in the Aegean Sea during an attempt to flee the civil war in Syria. His body was found on a tourist beach in Turkey. The present case study seeks to answer a question: why this and no other images of children in very similar situations, the closest example being that of his brother Galeb, killed in the same way and on the same beach have become a symbol of the tragedy that struck those who, between 2015 and 2016, moved towards Europe in search for survival
or a better life. For the answer, it will be necessary to identify the iconic potential of the image, to establish the relationships between photographic materiality and its index value, the power of agency and the new paths of the circulation that today the images have thanks to digital social networks. Without the ambition to be a historiographic contribution to better know the event, the article intends to contribute to a methodological discussion about the image in contemporary culture. And, to do so, it Aligns with the perspective of analysis carried out in 2002 by the historian Ulpiano Bezerra de Meneses on the photograph of Robert Capa, which records the moment of the death of the young militian Federico Borrell García, in September 1936, hit by a shot, being surprised by the Franco forces in the open fields of Cerro Muriano, near Cordoba. The aim is not a comparative study between Aylan and Borrell Garcia photographs, but the adoption of the methodological script proposed by Meneses, now applied to the photojournalistic image made by Demir, and with that to understand what new can be said about the circuit of type of images in digital networks.