What is the image of refugees in Central European media?

Introduction

For the past 5 years, the national as well as the international politics of the countries situated in the Central European region have been significantly shaped by the issue of migration. Since 2015, a common feature of Central European politics has become the refusal to accept high numbers of migrants coming to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea or escaping Syria from the East. ¹ Even though it is possible to distinguish nuances in this common attitude of refusal in Central European countries, the collective position of these four countries, also known as the constitutive members of the Visegrad Group political platform, can be called anti-immigrant. In particular, they consistently refuse to accept the quotas set by the European Union (EU), and in this way, they represent a strong opposition towards the pro-immigration political vision of the EU and its leading countries, mainly Germany and France. ²

This article analyses this collective negative migration politics through an examination of the visual representations of refugees. It scrutinises the photographs taken by professional photojournalists which were frequently displayed in the mainstream Czech, Slovak, Polish and Hungarian online media during the 1-year period from April 2015 until April 2016. Specifically, it focuses on three particular stages in which the most important political milestones of the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ ³ occurred:

On the most abstract level, this study poses the question of whether there is a common ‘visual politics of migration’ (Sacco and Gorin, 2018: 4) that can be observed in Central European countries and that would correspond to their anti-immigrant politics. Its goal is to look for common visual patterns of communication in all four countries and to compare them with the international media coverage of the events. Therefore, I conduct a detailed examination of the local sphere of visual communication, which has thus far remained overlooked in the international research.

Theoretically, the research draws upon the growing academic interest in the diverse visual analysis of pictorial media representations of refugees. The analysis of media content contributes to our complex knowledge of this representation, because ‘(m)edia representations predominate in determining how we see refugees. While there is a marked tendency to categorise migrants as human types, the selective nature of the visual image frequently objectifies them, dismissing their historical, cultural and political circumstances’ (Wright, 2002: 64). Through its complex research design, the study aims to contribute to the establishment of refugee photography as a more serious source of research material, which until now ‘has remained at the periphery of qualitative refugee research as a mere artistic add-on’ (Lenette, 2016). In parts of the discussion and conclusion, the article employs the notion of the transnational imagination of refugees. As an outcome of the analysis, I describe how processes involved in the collective imagination of refugees work, and I place these findings on the region of Central Europe into the context of the international research on the visual representations of refugees.

The power to re-present

The latest migration movement has been intensely present in the Central European press since spring 2015. The media have thus produced and circulated hundreds of photographs displaying many well-known stereotypical representations of refugees, for example, suffering children or silent masses of people. Some of the pictures have achieved significant visibility and iconic status on the international level – such as the photograph of a 3-year-old boy, Alan Kurdi, which was taken by Nilufer Demir in September 2015. However, one can assume that other photographs, despite their lower visibility, have also had a profound impact on how Central Europeans imagine refugees. The article aims to explore and describe them.

The photographs of refugees provided by the media are very often the only communication channel through which refugees are able to speak to the public. It is obvious that groups of refugees have no power to control their mediated image. They do not interact directly with ‘the power to represent someone or something in a certain way’ (Hall, 1997: 249). This power belongs, in the case of refugees’ pictures, to international press agencies and large publishing houses, and so they have little chance of changing the overall regime of representation of refugees in mainstream media.

Here, in the realm of the production of representations of refugees, their one very important feature is immediately palpable: the asymmetry in terms of the capacity to re-present (Kedra and Sommier, 2018: 41). None of the photos published in the examined Central European media were taken by a refugee, which results in the repetition of visual stereotypes constructed through the gaze of the outsider. The final catalogue of these visual clichés is then imbued with the ‘symbolic instability of the refugee, swiftly shifting between speechless victim and evil-doing terrorist, (that) lies at the heart of critical scholarship on refugee visualities’ (Chouliaraki and Stolić, 2017: 6). Therefore, the figure of a refugee in a photograph can easily be perceived either as ‘a sentimentalised, composite figure – at once feminine and maternal, childlike and innocent’ (Malkki, 1996: 388), or – on the contrary – as the physical mass of anonymous bodies, which triggers a fear of the unknown (Fürsich, 2010). In both cases, we experience an encounter with archetypal visual representations, which can be found so deeply in the past that they even represent a constitutive element of religious iconography (Wright, 2002). They encounter the viewer’s preconceptions about what refugees (should) look like (Szörenyi, 2006), they strengthen the processes of the de-politicisation and de-historicisation of refugees and, in this way, they ultimately contribute to the dominance of the Western-oriented image of refugees (Rajaram, 2002).

Asymmetry as the logic of refugee photography

When photographs are used for the purpose of documenting important historical and political events, as the ‘refugee crisis’ is without a doubt, they ‘are markers of both truth-value and symbolism’ (Zelizer, 1998: 9). Refugee photography can therefore be perceived both as a record of the event, due to its indexicality (Levinson, 1997), and a construct of the event, due to its social dimension (e.g. the photographer’s political opinions), its technological dimension (e.g. the use of a particular camera) and the dimension of spectatorship (e.g. who is looking at a picture, in what context and from what source) (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt, 2001: 5; Rose, 2012: 28–31).

The symbolic capacity of photography is given by its metaphorical ability to abstract. It is able to transform particular information into a notion, when the picture ‘has condensed numerous speeches. It has surpassed the individual circumstance that produced it; it no longer speaks of the single character or of those characters, but expresses concepts’ (Eco, in Williams, 2007: 54). This abstraction that the medium of photography involves does not derive from what or who can be seen in the photograph, but from how photography represents the visible. Barthes (1977[1970c]: 54) calls this ‘how’ of photography the third meaning (or the obtuse meaning) of a picture that cannot be captured by means of the previously proposed semiotic analysis of an image (1977[1970a]: 34), because of its transgressive nature. Zelizer (2002) describes this ‘how’ of photography as a subjunctive voice that ‘is extended here to refer to the relationship developed between the spectator and the image – involving state of mind, temporal and sequential positioning – and those aspects of the image that help the spectator develop the relationship’ (p. 162). Despite its iconic (depictive) and indexical (truth-value) character, the photograph is endowed with the unique ability to accommodate more stories (symbols) than the one it actually captures. So, again, we are facing the issue of asymmetry, this time one that lies at the core of the medium of photography. While our eyes observe the particular shapes, colours, objects and figures, while we treat the photograph as a document of a particular situation, our deeper understanding of it is conceptual and abstract. This is also why ‘how we remember through images remains powerfully different from how we might remember the same event where images were not involved’ (Zelizer, 2000: 161).

In the genre of refugee photography genre, the asymmetry of visual representations of refugees, which results from the way journalistic photos are produced and circulated, encounters the asymmetry of the medium of photography, which originates from its metaphorical disposition. Refugee photography, then, can be interpreted as working according to the logic of asymmetry. However, these two asymmetries are of a different kind and can even work against each other. The voice of refugee photography, which belongs to mainstream producers, violates the subjunctive voice of photography. It minimises the occurrence of a ‘What if?’ moment in which spectators begin to ask not ‘What are we looking at?’ but ‘What does this remind us of?’ and ‘What possibilities does this raise?’ (Zelizer, 2000: 163). The other aspect muting the subjunctive voice of refugee photography is the frequently mentioned issue of compassion fatigue (Moeller, 1999). This suggests that when the audience is continually exposed to an overwhelming number of refugee photos, which are coming from the media as well as from humanitarian campaigns, it loses its motivation and energy to ask ‘What if?’. A final source of weakening of this subjunctive voice can be found in the discontinuity of photographs of suffering in comparison with our own lives, which results in the feeling of moral inadequacy (Berger, 2013[1972]).

In reference to this logic of asymmetry of refugee photography, which in our case is driven by the power of mainstream media and the outsider’s gaze, my main interest lies in finding the recurring visual stereotypes produced and circulated in Central European media in relation to the ‘refugee crisis’. I explore their sequencing in order to decode hidden visual narratives and I examine the influence of the geographical factor on how the local politics is articulated through visual representations (Wright et al., 2014; Chavez, 2001). In other words, in this research, I aim to reveal the presence of a specific inter-national filter (Krzyzanowski and Wodak, 2006) through which the region of Central Europe saw and interpreted the migration as it arose. In order to meet these goals, the following two research questions, guiding the visual analysis described in next section, are as follows: (1) Which visual figures have dominated the genre of refugee photography in the countries of the Visegrad Group from April 2015 until April 2016? and (2) What kind of visual narratives were involved in how the media depicted the ‘refugee crisis’ during this time period?

Methodology

A total data set of 556 photographs was collected from the three examined periods: 1 April–30 April 2015, 13 November–13 December 2015 and 20 March–20 April 2016. Two online daily newspapers were chosen from each Visegrad Group country. Three criteria were applied in the process of selecting these online sources: (1) diversity of newspapers (one newspaper of record and one tabloid paper were chosen from each country) (Standaert and Derèze, 2018: 63–64), (2) large readership (the statistics published by the National Statistical Offices were used) and (3) online accessibility (the content of the examined newspapers was offered for free on the website). The final list of online media sources from which the photographs was taken included: Lidové noviny (CZ) and Blesk (CZ); SME (SK) and Cas (SK); Gazeta Wyborcza (PL) and Fakt (PL) and Magyar Nemzet (HU) and Blikk (HU).

The notion of a visual figure of memory from Hirsch (2000) was employed as the main methodological conceptual tool for the analysis. The repetitively displayed refugee photographs, when approached as visual figures of memory, fit the concept ‘not for what they reveal but for how they reveal it, or fail to do so: thus, they can be seen as figures for memory and forgetting’ (p. 222). Hirsch’s concept allows us to think of the specific intensity that is part of the viewer’s perception and memories of the influx of refugee photographs. With regard to the field of visual analysis of representations of refugees, we also have to point out the term visual trope, which is understood as a set of conventions which transcend cultural and national borders while having a strong impact on the audience in terms of emotional affect (Kedra and Sommier, 2018; Zarzycka and Kleppe, 2013). Although this definition of the visual trope is also productive and suitable for this research, Hirsch’s initial conception of the visual figure is chosen due to its stronger connection with the theoretical interpretation of refugee photography provided above.

In the second round of the process of selection, the refugee photographs that were published more than once (2+ repetitions) in different countries were marked to trace the transnational aspect of visual communication and a second data set, consisting of 96 photographs, was created. In analytical Tables 1 to 3, I call this second visual corpus the ‘international data set’. Then, four visual figures were chosen for each of the three examined stages based on two criteria: (1) the highest statistical occurrence of a photo within the international visual set from each particular period, and (2) the manifestation of the key motifs, which were coded as the most significant signs visible on the repeatedly displayed photographs from each period. The selected visual figures were, therefore, both the most visible photographs from each period within the region and the most representative examples from each period in terms of narrativity. The key motifs defining the visual rhetoric of each stage of the ‘crisis’ are presented in Table 1 (April 2015), Table 2 (13 November–13 December 2015) and Table 3 (20 March–20 April 2016). They are accompanied by the statistical information on their occurrence in the international corpus. They represent the findings of the visual content analysis that was applied to the second data set (Bell, 2001; Rose, 2012). The content analysis employed the values of technical quality of photography, exposition, displayed surroundings, gender of subject(s), age of subject(s), main depicted activity and key object(s) visible in a photograph.

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Table 1.

Key visual motifs of the photographs: April 2015.

Examined value	Key motif and its frequency in an international data set
Technical quality of photography	Professional documentation with the occasional exception of low-quality amateur photos 75%
Exposition	Medium long shot 65%
Surroundings	Sea 88%
Gender of subject(s)	Mostly male
Age of subject(s)	Adults Adult men visible in 45%
Depicted activity	Rescue 65%
Key object(s)	Boat 80%

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Table 2.

Key visual motifs of the photographs: 13 November–13 December 2015.

Examined value	Key motif and its frequency in an international data set
Technical quality of photography	Exclusively professional documentation 95%
Exposition	Medium long shot 65%
Surroundings	Refugee camp 50%
Gender of subject(s)	Men and women equally
Age of subject(s)	Adults and children equally 50% of the mix of gender and age
Depicted activity	Protests and violent confrontations 40%
Key object(s)	Fence 30%

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Table 3.

Key visual motifs of the photographs: 20 March–20 April 2016.

Examined value	Key motif and its frequency in an international data set
Technical quality of photography	Exclusively professional documentation100%
Exposition	Medium long shot 88%
Surroundings	Refugee camp 45%
Gender of subject(s)	Mostly men
Age of subject(s)	Young adults and children 45% of young men and children
Depicted activity	Non-violent protests and waiting 45%
Key object(s)	Organised groups of people 30%

In the last step, a modified version of iconographic-iconological analysis of refugee photographs (Lenette, 2016; Panofski, 1955) was used in order to enhance our deeper understanding of the final 12 visual figures. However, the model for the interpretation of the visual rhetoric of journalistic photographs was considered too (Kedra and Sommier, 2018: 45). The four basic steps of this method were slightly modified in comparison with its original structure (Lenette, 2016: 8). The changes apply to the iconic interpretation when formal qualities of photography are not examined, since they are covered by the visual content analysis, and the intertextual analysis was added in order to study historical parallels and the process of remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 1999). The version of the analysis used in this research consists of

The proposed mixed-method approach to the visual analysis of refugee photography helps the researcher detect both the common features of an international visual collection (visual content analysis) and enables the understanding of the essence of this collection that represents the core of the regional transnational imagination, by close examination of its most representative, or unique, examples (iconographic-iconological analysis). The method also articulates a clear process for selection of the visual sub-sets.

The visual rhetoric of three stages of the ‘European refugee crisis’

Intro: unknown threatening masses and female victims

Based on the application of visual content analysis, seven key motifs representing the core of the visual rhetoric of the first stage of the ‘crisis’, dated from 1 April until 30 April 2015, were found.

In the first stage of the ‘crisis’, published photographs were mostly taken by professionals with the occasional exceptions of low-quality pictures which manifest features of amateur photography. There are no non-professional photographs present in the following examined phases. The occurrence of amateur photographs might suggest that April 2015 was still the very beginning of the ‘crisis’, when the theme of migration was new to the media, and therefore some amateur photographs were published due to a lack of journalistic documentation of events.

In the media, dramatic scenes of migrants being rescued from the sea can be seen. Those who are successfully saved are usually women, whereas we mostly observe male rescuers. Even though one female rescuer is captured, she is assigned the role of caregiver (Figure 1). Two types of male figure are shown: either they represent rescuers, who are displayed as individuals with recognisable European-like faces, or we observe larger groups of men whose facial expressions cannot be read and who are represented more as being part of an anonymous collective formed by unfamiliar-looking bodies.

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Figure 1.

15 April 2015, Fakt (PL).

The overall image of refugees provided in April 2015 mixes the elements of helplessness and strangeness, therefore displaying the internal contradiction so fundamental to how refugees are imagined. Their dual image, as victims as well as representatives of otherness (Standaert and Derèze, 2018: 60), is readily perceptible. The visual figures of the first stage significantly correspond to some of the essential stereotypes of refugees. Here, we find the figure of the helpless female refugee that positions the woman in the role of exhausted victim (Johnson, 2011). The religious echo of the ‘Madonna and child’ is also present in the photograph of a female rescuer as a caring protector. In contrast to the recent description of the figure of the migrant father (Kedra and Sommier, 2018: 46), ⁴ men are only rarely displayed in the role of fathers. The photograph of a large, anonymous male group enables the perception of refugees as a ‘threat the “natives” need protecting from’ (Rasinger, 2010: 1028). The picture of an unknown group heading by boat for the continent corresponds to the notion of anonymous corporeality (Feldman, 1994: 407) when a viewer faces a ‘vast and throbbing mass’ (Warrick, 1994) of people who have lost the features of individual human beings and are perceived more as if they were part of some dangerous natural force. Most of the first-stage photographs, which show men of non-European origin, are framed by the discourse of crisis and danger that is disrupted by the presence of the stereotypically depicted female figures, whose representations situate them in the roles of victims and mothers and seem to function as the triggers of sentiments and emotions (Wilson and Brown, 2008).

Middle: terrorists and children behind a fence

In comparison with April 2015, no amateur photographs were published during the middle period. This change can be understood as a sign of a transformation of the ‘crisis’ into a well-established public topic. The pictures relocate the viewer from the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea to the areas designated as refugee camps. Again, the medium-long-shot composition dominates the pictures, allowing for the perception of a more dynamic scene in which individual subjects can be recognised, so the observer can place a particular human story into a specific context.

The visual figures published just after the terrorist attacks in Paris work extensively with the visual symbolism of violence and thus are mostly framed by the discourse of danger and threat. There is a recurring male figure of a refugee who is seen with his mouth sewn shut demonstrating his determined opposition to the treatment of migrants. There are men standing in the centre of this violence. If he is European, he is depicted as a representative of the police or military forces who is in conflict with migrants. This depiction confirms the earlier observation that male migrants were frequently linked with terrorism after the Paris attacks (Armillei, 2017; De Genova, 2018), so it is possible to speak of the existence of the migrant–terrorist figure. At the end of 2015, female figures are less often represented as helpless victims. However, their motherhood is highly emphasised through the Madonna and child figure (Figure 2). In contrast to the previous period, there are now children of pre-school and early school age depicted standing behind a fence (the figure of ‘imprisoned’ children). This fence functions as an emphatic threshold of segregation, the border dividing the free land from the refugee camp and the line being drawn between ‘us’ (local, familiar, European) and ‘them’ (foreign, feared, non-European). The figures of children take over the role of helpless women here and even deepen the potential for the viewer’s emotional response.

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Figure 2.

14 November 2015, Lidové noviny (CZ).

Whereas the photographs from refugee camps are dominant in the Czech, Slovak and Hungarian media, they are less present in Poland. Polish news depicts the procession of an anonymous group travelling through the landscape. It is particularly interesting to link this photograph with Wright’s application of religious iconography (2002) to visual representations of refugees. From this perspective, we can see the visual pattern of the religious procession, which has a long tradition in highly orthodox and Catholic Poland. This difference, which may be linked to the strong presence of religiosity in Polish society, is also obvious in the last stage of the ‘crisis’. On 24 March 2016 (Holy Thursday), Pope Francis washed the feet of Muslim migrants to demonstrate his solidarity with the difficult situation of migrants. The photograph was very prominent in the Polish media and it was also displayed in Slovakia and Hungary, which are countries with deeper religious roots. In contrast, the Czech media only informed the public of the Pope’s act in passing, so one can assume that this lack of interest might reflect the secular majority in the Czech Republic.

Outro: making peace and envisioning a common future

The final period only shows photographs taken by professionals, so the importance and the continuity of the ‘crisis’ are confirmed. The medium-long shots still convey scenes in which individual elements can be seen in a wider context. The viewer is again confronted with the surroundings of a refugee camp, with the continuing exception of the photographs of walking processions published in the Polish media. Children of pre-school and early school age are also shown. However, this time they are not standing behind a fence. They are looking directly into the camera; there is no barrier disrupting the communication between them and the viewer. On a symbolic level, the disappearance of the fence suggests the opening of European society towards the representatives of the unknown, foreign and feared, although in the case of pictures of children, the fear is dispelled more easily and quickly than in the case of adult men.

Focusing on the category of adult men, we are no longer witnessing scenes of violence. Young men are depicted getting involved in peaceful demonstrations of solidarity with the difficult situation of European residents, as the banner on Figure 3 demonstrates: ‘ISIS is criminal, we love Belgium!’ There are also scenarios of the common future imagined in some of the pictures. We can see a photograph capturing a group of young men, whose appearance suggests their diverse cultural roots. The men are touching each other’s shoulders in a gesture demonstrating their connection. They are smiling and looking directly into the camera, which is positioned above their heads, as if they are not facing the apparatus, but rather, heading towards an optimistic future. A very different picture is offered by the photographs of middle-aged and older men. They are captured as lonely figures in devastated surroundings. This visual figure of the lonely adult male migrant suggests that a brighter and multicultural future belongs only to the younger generation (children and youngsters in the figure of the young future), whose process of acculturation will happen more easily. Overall, also considering the photo of Pope Francis, the photographs of the last stage of the ‘crisis’ are mostly framed by a humanitarian discourse, and they therefore stand in significant contrast to both previous periods, especially when considering the pictures of young men.

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Figure 3.

25 March 2016, Gazeta Wyborcza (PL).

Discussion

Narrating the story of the ‘refugee crisis’ through pictures

Table 4 answers the first research question: Which visual figures dominated the genre of refugee photography in the countries of the Visegrad Group from April 2015 until April 2016? and Tables 1 to 3 list their visual symptoms and inform about their visibility in the region. These findings also help answer the second research question: What kind of visual narratives were involved in how the media depicted the ‘refugee crisis’ chronologically during this time? In order to describe the visual narratives in detail, first, the perspective of the theory of photography developed based on photographs of suffering and violence is employed. Second, they are analysed using a constructivist approach to the issue of representation.

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Table 4.

Summary of the visual figures: April 2015 to April 2016.

Examined period	Visual figure
April 2015	Helpless female victim
April 2015	‘Madonna and child’
April 2015	Anonymous mass
13 November–13 December 2015	Representatives of police and the military
13 November–13 December 2015	Migrant-terrorist
13 November–13 December 2015	‘Imprisoned’ children
13 November–13 December 2015	Procession of people
13 November–13 December 2015	‘Madonna and child’
20 March–20 April 2016	Lonely adult male migrant
20 March–20 April 2016	Young future

The first stage of the story takes place on the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea. It stresses the male power to save lives (the European rescuers) or to destroy them (the anonymous groups of non-European men on boats). The otherness has no face here. The male migrants are expressionless, and therefore silenced in terms of social communication. The viewer cannot see their faces or experience eye contact; therefore, the migrants as well as the spectators are left with no tools for reaching mutual understanding. The theory of the ‘depersonalisation’ of refugees through photography articulates this situation well:

These (photographs) are spectacles of ‘raw’, ‘bare’ humanity. . . . No names, no funny faces, no distinguishing marks, no esoteric details of personal styles enter, as a rule, into the frame of pictures of refugees when they are being imagined as a sea of humanity.

The only call for creating a personal bond, for empathy or projection, is made through representations of women and babies within a similar context, turning them into passive objects.

The ‘after Paris’ period takes the previously anonymous male faces and superimposes on them the masks of potential terrorists, or at least of serious troublemakers whose main mode of communication lies in violence. The photographs give us glimpses of the raw brutality experienced not only by adult men, who are represented as bearers of this violence (either as migrant-terrorists or as representatives of the police and the military), but also by women and children as well. The theory of ‘shock photography’ (Barthes, 1977[1970b]) reflecting on the journalistic documentation of the horrors of war and suffering seems to be the most suitable frame here. Barthes finds these kind of photographs too literal in the way they represent the situation captured, so the unique feature he ascribes to the medium of photography, its transgressive third meaning (see above), cannot be present in them. Their subjunctive voice (Zelizer, 2002, see above) cannot be heard. The journalistic photographs of the second stage do not invite participation. They are pornographically descriptive, closing the door on the beholder’s imagination. Early Sontag (1977) blames the photographs of horror and suffering on the elimination of any political drive that journalistic pictures might contain. She removes them from the sphere of politics and transfers them into the realm of aesthetics, so they offer more of a spectacle and less of a political message.

The presence of the logic of asymmetry in the overall representation of reality is a significant feature of the first and the second period of the story. It establishes a negative visual discourse through which refugees are seen and – due to the non-negligible homogeneity of visual elements framing the ‘crisis’ in the Central European media (see Tables 1 to 3) – also collectively imagined. By applying a constructivist approach to the notion of representation (Hall, 1997: 26), and thus by focusing on symbolic practices through which meaning of visual figures is created, we can state that the logic of asymmetry is the main symbolic operation driving the transnational imagination of the first and second phase of the ‘crisis’. It constitutes the anti-immigrant gaze, that is, ‘a social product determined by power, and not a natural fact’ (Foster, 1988: xii). By referring to Hall (1997), the transnational imagination can be eventually defined as a mental system of media driven symbolic concepts, which are absorbed by the Central European readership and which provide no space for the utterances of refugees.

The third act of the ‘crisis’ takes a serious twist through the call for empathy and the imagined peaceful future. This turn can be reflected through the later writings of Sontag (2003), who focuses on the role of the spectator at the present moment. She calls for a contemplative approach to photography and stresses the ethical value of looking at pictures. Our understanding of the photos of the third stage, therefore, can be framed by the theory of engaging photography that approaches photography as a unique platform through which a special projection of the beholder into a depicted situation is enabled. The power of empathy overcomes the power of shock and trauma here and ‘has the ability to shape the person’s subjectivity and politics’ (Landsberg, 2004: 2). Photography, seen as an active source of social and political transformation, is clearly articulated in Azoulay’s notion of the photographic situation (2008). According to Azoulay, photography is involved in a larger social and technological network through which politics has been invented. Like the later Sontag, she also pays attention to the role of the viewer and proposes the practice of watching photography that develops the beholder’s civic skills. The examined story, therefore, ends within the humanitarian discourse. It emphasises the ethical dimension of the visible, but does not originate in the picture itself, but rather, in its beholder.

The third phase of the story seems to offer an interesting twist, when the logic of asymmetry as a dominant symbolic operation is replaced by the logic of empathy. The latter logic activates a humanitarian visual discourse, within which the figures of refugees reach a new symbolic dimension. They are imbued with the notions of multiculturalism, civic action, solidarity and hope for future generations.

Establishing a larger transnational imagination of refugees

In order to support the relevance of the research outcomes as well as to explore how the transnational imagination of refugees operates on a larger international level, the visual figures are contextualised through two research projects: the visual typology of European news about the ‘refugee crisis’ created by Chouliaraki and Stolić (2017), and the list of repetitive visual representations of refugees compiled by Lenette and Cleland (2016).

Chouliaraki and Stolic distinguish five categories of visibility. All of them can be found among the detected visual figures. Visibility as biological life (1) corresponds to the photographs from April 2015 in which the anonymous masses of people on boats are captured. The authors connect this category with monitoring actions. It is precisely exemplified by Figure 4, showing a motorboat with male rescuers, but seen through the technical interface of the camera. The visibility as empathy (2) that is associated with charitable actions can be linked with the third period’s pictures. The visibility as threat (3), connected with state security, corresponds to the photographs depicting non-European male migrants on boats heading towards the continental coastline, as well as with the pictures from the ‘after Paris’ period in which the violent resistance of male migrants towards the official forces is highlighted. There is only one example of visibility as hospitality (4), which is represented by the photograph of Pope Francis, which was more visible in more religious V4 countries (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary). The last category, visibility as self-reflexivity (5), which is associated with post-humanitarianism and engagement, is manifested by Figure 3, showing migrants holding banners which condemn terrorist actions and appropriate the perspective of Europeans.

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Figure 4.

20 April 2015, Blesk (CZ).

Lenette and Cleland have noticed the repetition of six visual stereotypes through which refugees are portrayed to the public. All of them are also present among the visual figures found. In 2015, there are women depicted as protective mothers. The authors refer to this visual figure as the ‘Madonna and Child’ pose (1) inspired by the work of Wright (2002) on Christian iconography. The recurring images of children, often with dirty or ripped clothing (2), have a very important place in the story in which they are present from November 2015. Both these stereotypes contribute significantly to the feminisation of the representation of refugees, who are seen as passive subjects (Hyndman and Giles, 2011). The repetitive scenes of unidentifiable masses or processions of people (3) correspond to the proposed findings as well. Masses are arriving in the southern-European countries in pictures from April 2015 and processions of people hold a unique position in the Polish media. Lenette and Cleland’s attribution of the subdued facial expressions (4) to images of refugees is confirmed by the visual figure of a lonely looking male adult migrant shown in spring 2016. The presence of military personnel and warfare equipment (5) is very visible, especially in the ‘after Paris’ pictures. The final stereotype, the desolate setting (6), corresponds to the camp as the main environment in which migrants are captured in the second and the third stages of the visual story.

Conclusion

The visual research has shown that the image of refugees in the region of Central Europe exists as a set of repetitively displayed visual figures, which are visible on a considerable level in all four countries. These figures are produced and spread by large publishing houses which constitute the dominant ways of seeing refugees. The media operate as a social agent that ascribes a symbolic function to each individual figure and who, in the upshot, draws the mental map of stereotypes through which the public is introduced to the ‘refugee crisis’. Moreover, the set of visual figures found here does not appear only in the Central European media. As the comparison above demonstrated, it is displayed in other European news as well. The repetitive photographs described can therefore be conceived not as paradigmatic visual signs lying at the core of the regional transnational imagination, but as meta-paradigmatic signs constituting a larger collective European imagination of refugees that should be further examined.

If the chronological aspect is taken into consideration, the detected visual figures tell the viewer a certain story of the ‘refugee crisis’ through the construction of different visual narratives. The first and the second phases of the story follow the logic of asymmetry. The photographs work in favour of the depersonalisation of refugees and use a spectacular pornographic depiction of violence. The third part presents a positive turn, wherein the logic of empathy appears and enables a politically engaged reading of the pictures. However, even a short look at that time and the current situation in Central Europe does not suggest that a humanitarian visual narrative would have had a real impact on local politics and everyday life. Up to now, the region remains very reluctant towards accepting quotas set by the EU and the anti-immigration rhetoric still holds a firm place in the public discussion. The real power of the humanitarian discourse can also be disputed by pointing out the lack of photographs taken by refugees themselves. The argument of compassion fatigue (see above) can also play an important role, leaving us passively looking at the struggles of others. Therefore, the criticism of humanitarian discourse in which refugees are shown through a trauma-centred discourse (Pupavac, 2008: 280) and humanitarian organisations frame the visual narratives by their own Western-oriented perspective (Rajaram, 2002) may be relevant here. The emergence of the logic of empathy in the examined visual communication is eventually seen more as a short break in the long-term anti-immigrant pictorial story than as a serious game-changer.

The research has drawn attention to the fact that the highly popular Central European online outlets have appropriated the orientalist discourse, which significantly contribute to the construction of refugees as ‘others’ and through which the line of division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has been drawn. It offers only a Western-oriented point of view that works as a normative set of concepts, which fully mutes the voice of refugees (Spivak, 2010[1988]). It has also revealed the use of the visual rhetoric of de-historicisation, through which the political, historical and personal contexts of individuals arriving on the continent are removed, and the employment of the strategy of the feminisation of refugees, where refugees are portrayed as victims, helpless and lost. The story of the ‘crisis’ is always depicted from the position of a male viewer (Mulvey, 1975), wherein only male figures have the capacity to act, and they are the ones driving the story through its three stages. Hence, if a photo is understood as a re-presentation, a mediated depiction of refugees constructing the reality of the ‘refugee crisis’, then the responsibility of media as producers of these pictures for how the ‘crisis’ has been depicted should be demanded.

The presented findings show how strongly gender-biased, Western-oriented and inequitable in terms of representational power the mental system of visual representations of refugees driven by the Central European mainstream media is. They question the reproduction of stereotypical visual figures of refugees, which are produced by both the online media and the humanitarian discourse, and bring to light a region that often remains overlooked, but works as an important node connecting the Western and the Eastern part of the continent, in which dangerous populistic and xenophobic politics is currently celebrating substantial victories, for which visual representations serve as powerful tool.