The media ensures that shock ricochets through the public by disseminating evidence of the deadly realities of undocumented migration as if it were something new. Julia Le Duc’s image, taken on the banks of the Río Grande, of a father and child who drowned whilst attempting to cross over from Mexico to the United States, has circulated widely in recent days as yet another reminder of the barbarity that hounds the undocumented. Some say the image is too painful to look at. It is, after all, at once a scene all too familiar and all too alien. Protective to the end, the father has bound his child to him with his T-shirt. In death, the child’s arm remains trustingly around his neck, as it must have so many times in life when he carried her. Face-down, though, they turn rapidly from individuals into icons, of the sort that conjure up a range of responses, from sorrow, to solidarity, to sordid sentimentality.
Le Duc’s image has been compared to that of Aylan Kurdi, as America’s version of the horrors lived in the Mediterranean in the wake of conflict in Syria. The photograph fits, in fact, into a longer line of imagery of migrant despair, such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, set in the Californian dust bowl at the time of the Depression. If destitution is a tragedy, then it gains eloquence when coloured with the despair of parents who cannot provide for their children. At least, the subjects of Lange’s image were alive. Not so in the case of little Valeria and her father from El Salvador. Like Aylan Krudi, like the unknown migrant in Javier Bauluz’s award-winning image of 2002, the subjects of Le Duc’s photograph join the numbers of those who die at borders.
There is little doubt that the media’s dissemination of, and responses to, Le Duc’s photograph have centred around a sense of shock. There has been great interest in this family’s story, in their identities, dreams and desires. Despite the fact that it is a very well documented fact that many current border policies, especially those of the US, set the scene for the unnecessary deaths of migrants in transit, the media’s response has been one of apparent public unpreparedness and unawareness that such horrors do happen. No doubt, the image arrests. However, there is the risk that responses that stop at shock act as allies to the very political contexts that led to the deaths of the subjects, because they form the political bedrock for the establishment of states of exception and are fundamental to processes of securitization, violence and control.
