Attention is the start of empathy. You really have to look at the world. Physical details matter, context matters. The meaning you make from those things is only as sound as your observation of them.
When photojournalist Nilufer Demir photographed a dead baby on a beach in Turkey, she could not have known that the images would rocket around the world and significantly impact global attitudes, both public and official, towards the Syrian refugee crisis. In one image, a tall Turkish official stands near the small body, making it look smaller still. In another, the officer is carrying him away in his arms. He was later quoted as saying that that body, light as a feather, was the heaviest burden he'd ever carried.
Speaking to Turkey's Dogan news agency, Mehmet Ciplak recounted how he prayed the little boy was still alive as he walked towards him and scooped him up from the water's edge (AFP PHOTO / DOGAN NEWS AGENCY)
But perhaps the most arresting image is a close-up of the baby, photographed from behind and low down. It captures the sweetness of babyhood-his rounded head, his plump little bottom, his tiny shoes. He could be any baby napping, except that he's lying in the surf.
That image of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi became the defining image of the Syrian refugee crisis in Internet Standard Time, which is to say, no time at all. It forced people to confront a statistical abstraction at a personal, emotional level. What does it mean to be a refugee, fleeing war and oppression for a precarious future? It means risking everything. It means heart-breaking, desperately unjust vulnerability. It means that dead babies wash up with the tide. Suddenly, the whole world empathized with a conflict that had long ago fallen off the front pages.
But, also in no time at all, those images were subjected to a kind of maudlin fakery that is somehow worse than frankly not giving a toss. They were manipulated in any number of ways. One illustrator represented an image in cartoon or graphic form; someone added angel wings to the boy's back and a rose to his hand; someone had a bunch of cartoon squids and whales sticking out of the waves, weeping over his body. Someone placed his body in the same attitude but sleeping safe in a bed.
These memes come, no doubt, from a good place. But it's a place of empty platitudes. They try to make palatable what is not palatable. They sanitize the scene, appealing to sentimentality rather than speechless pain, skipping the horror and going straight to "a better place". They vandalize the original image by not paying attention. Because that child was not holding black balloons, he was not flying up to heaven; he was face down in the surf, nostrils filled with wet sand, his body already decomposing.
Is that offensive? Yes. It should offend us that a child is dead. But we can only be truly offended if we are very clear on what it means to be dead, and we can only be very clear if we look at the reality with attention.
The world endlessly debates the ethics of shocking visuals. Those debates at least partly elide the fact that we would rather not be forced out of our comfort zones, would rather not be invited to examine our responsibility. I cannot see how shielding a viewer from disturbing truths is more important than drawing attention to those truths so that the world might be moved to act on them.
Aylan Kurdi's image in death was widely published and broadcast as media companies correctly determined that doing so served the larger good, and it did. The images galvanized global attention around the Syrian refugee crisis that has thus far largely been missing, and spurred many private citizens as well as governments to action. They might increase the world's investment in resolving the horror that is Syria. Germans have cheered and applauded Syrians in welcome; the UK has been shamed, including by its own citizens, into reconsidering how many refugees it can take; Hungary has gotten bad press for its hardline anti-refugee attitude.
And the images come out of the fact that Syrians can no longer wait to be noticed. They have stormed the barricades of the world's complacency, metaphorically and literally - as refugees and sufferers of conflict everywhere are trying to. The tragedy on the beach in Turkey is only one of innumerable tragedies that have taken place in that attempt.
And that's the other half of the arc of attention that these images command. The death of a child always seems particularly heartbreaking. But Aylan Kurdi wasn't just a baby: he was a Syrian person, one of millions of Syrian people, who bear the cost of a war not of their making, either by staying or by fleeing. All of those people are going through hell. The empathy we feel for Aylan Kurdi should extend to all of them: they are all innocents.
Images of tragedy and violence should offend only our sense of natural justice. We live in a country where words like "ass" and "bastard" are muted in television sitcoms to protect our sensibilities, while we walk blithely by hordes of destitute people suffering and dying on our own streets. There's something terribly wrong with what we choose to look at and what we find offensive. Our greatest failing is our inability to pay attention to reality.
(Mitali Saran is a freelance writer and columnist based in New Delhi.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.