A Borderless Regime of Images

Over the last 25 years, Europe has been undergoing severe geopolitical, cultural, economic and socio-political transformations. Europe’s borders have been redrawn and the promise of a borderless Europe has shortly been replaced by a ‘Fortress Europe.’ The current migrant crisis with hundreds of thousands of people attempting to cross Europe’s borders, escaping conflict and war and searching for a better life has brought the complex notion of border to the centre of public attention. Photographs of people attempting to cross the Mediterranean sea, being stopped or confronted by the police in borders have bombarded the public domain, raising thorny questions about the role of photographs in constructing or reinforcing hegemonic narratives about migration.

Many of the photographs, which were reproduced in the mainstream press, overdramatized the human suffering of refugees and migrants evoking temporary public reaction. The endless reproduction of the photograph of the drowned toddler in coastal Turkey in the international mainstream press, re-opened longstanding questions about the ambivalent relationship between the act of photography and compassion, or even further, intervention and humanitarian aid. This project questions these ‘official’ representations of the migrant crisis in Europe, claiming that they perpetuate unequal power relations between the photographers and the migrants, arguably victimising the migrants through the act of photography. Given that these omnipresent photostories rely heavily on the ever-powerful Western structures, these of Western photojournalism, the question remains how we can confront these powerful structures and their modes of interpretation in search for alternative narratives about the refugee crisis. This question becomes more pertinent in an Internet age when more citizens from across the globe can share their visual stories on online platforms. The project, therefore, draws upon a big number of photographs taking by the refugees and migrants themselves with their mobile phones and circulated on social media with the proviso that the migrants’ mobile phones were not confiscated by border police. It examines the migrants’ everyday photographic production and photo-sharing on social media. The project asks: to what extent can these photographs tell us an alternative story to the one offered by the mainstream media? Can we read this photosharing as a social process of formulating and participating in an imaginary community? What methodologies do we need in order to read these photostreams as alternative narratives? Can the flow of images online constitute a borderless regime of images?