Photography is undoubtedly a powerful medium: it immediately expresses and communicates ideas, it summarises long stories in just one shot, and can be used for persuasion and propaganda as well. The fascinating history of photography includes historical images, dramatic shoots and iconic stylish portraits, at times embedded in our memories even when we may not remember the name of the photographer who took them.
Yet, last week, the ghost of a well-known photojournalist suddenly re-emerged from history to haunt many of us. Part of the so called "Bang-Bang Club" together with colleagues Greg Marinovich and Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, worked for the Johannesburg Star. In March 1993, he went to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan and saw a young girl trying to make her way to the feeding centre. He crouched to photograph her as a vulture landed near her, but did not disturb the bird, taking the best possible image. He then chased the bird away and watched as the girl resumed her struggle. Bought and printed by the New York Times the picture won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, generating more interest in raising money to stop hunger in Africa. The power of the image haunted Carter, though, who, plagued with the moral dilemma the image had caused him – when do you stop taking photographs and start helping? – committed suicide.
As we all know, there is a huge emergency at the moment in Europe as Syrian people are escaping the war in their country. This is the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War. In the last few years, Italy has been at the forefront of huge and dramatic migrations, seeing constant flows of refugees arriving from Africa and Syria crossing the Mediterranean on dinghies and other unseaworthy vessels that often capsized, but other European countries are realising only now the extent of the drama, as people are arriving from alternative routes such as Greece, to continue their journey via Macedonia and Serbia to reach Hungary, Austria and Germany.
As political leaders didn't seem to know what to do, one tragic image last week caused public outrage and convinced a few of them to change their hard line: the image showed the body of a drowned Syrian child, three-year old Aylan Kurdi, washed ashore and lying face down on a Turkish beach near the resort of Bodrum. His family was trying to flee from Kobani to Europe, but, while they were attempting to reach Greece, he drowned together with his mother and his five-year-old brother.
Taken by Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir, the powerful picture had a tragic Kevin Carter quality about it, and, while the horror behind it is great, you also know that the only way to stop it is to show the world what's going on.
On Friday last week, though, Le Monde published the picture of the drowned boy on the main page, then managed to create an uncanny parallelism by choosing to print on page 5 a Gucci advert with a model who looks as if she was washed ashore clutching onto a purse.
Now we all know that Gucci didn't shoot the advert (by photographer Glen Luchford and with the artistic direction of Chris Simmonds) last week and that fashion has a morbid fascination with the death of beautiful women (the main fascination being that, after the shoot, the "dead" model always rises again and walks away…) and with death on a beach (remember Marc Jacobs' Spring/Summer 2014 advertising campaign featuring Miley Cyrus with a young and pretty woman lying stiff next to her on a beach?), but the cynically positioned image showed a terrible bad taste.
Quite a few people tweeted about the unfortunate layout: though advert spaces are bought and allocated way before the articles are written, it seemed incredible that Le Monde did not to reconsider the publication of the image and decided to postpone it.
The undeniable bad taste generated by the placement of the two photographs and by the connection between them ended up showing the cynicism of the luxury industry and our collective indifference that allows us to accept tragedy and luxury, the most dramatic reality and the most warped vision of reality, neatly packaged together.
The parallelism turned into a perfect metaphor for the society we are living in, revealing the distorted cult of wealth that permeates our lives in all its inglorious and shameless decadence: in this global world we have been led to think that economical and financial growth guarantees peace, inclusion and prosperity for everybody. Yet this is not true and, even when drama unfolds in front of our eyes, we increasingly find ourselves unable to feel compassion, anesthetised by the culture of wealth that reminds us we don't have the latest smartphone yet or that it's about time we got the Autumn It bag.
Some people may find it hard to link Kevin Carter to all this, yet the photojournalist couldn't find an answer to a moral question that he himself had generated in his mind through his own powerful image, Le Monde instead didn't even stop to wonder about the consequences of the links and connections between the two images.
Since it happened Le Monde issued an apology, explaining that they hadn't noticed the positioning and taking full responsibility for what happened. No voices were raised from the fashion industry and it's actually unlikely that anybody in the fashion industry will commit suicide because they haven't found an answer to a moral question (and anyway, suicide sells pretty well in fashion as McQueen's proved…).
You can bet the day will come when some kind of vapid blogger or street photographer will take pictures of migrants and refugees boarding trains and buses, or walking on the highways, highlighting the beautiful examples of mix and mash style they are wearing (well, in August 2009 The Sartorialist took a picture of a homeless man highlighting how the fact that he had co-ordinated the colours of his boots, socks, gloves and glasses, showed how he hadn't give in or given up View this photo; in terrible "Derelicte" out of Zoolander style, Vogue Italia featured in its September 2009 issue a shoot by Steven Meisel inspired by homeless people View this photo, while bag ladies resurfaced on the pages of Vogue Germany in October 2012 View this photo…so just give them time and they will eventually get to "refugee chic"…).
While ordinary people are volunteering to help the refugees, bringing them food and clothes, don't expect big companies linked to the fashion industry will ever offer them anything, from cheap clothes to food or money donations. What did you say? They are too busy to do so as the fashion weeks are coming? Oh, yes, you're right, but it looks like fashion weeks have never been less relevant than they are now, in this precise and rather complex historical moment.
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