The picture of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015, was lauded as iconic after it went viral. Within hours, Aylan was a symbol, a hashtag and a meme. This project analyzes funerary Aylan memes to understand their meanings and functions as they proliferated in cyberspace. Through iconographic tracking and visual rhetorical analysis, the project expands the functions of memes from visual jokes and social and political commentary to tools of grieving and atonement. The study demonstrates how memes are deployed to subvert and renegotiate reality, in this case to create a ‘better ending’ for the child and seek reparations for his death. The project also suggests that the rhetorical powers of iconic images may be eroding in remix culture due to their digital appropriations.
ApelL (2005) Torture culture: Lynching photographs and the images from Abu Ghraib. Art Journal64(2): 88–100.
2.
BarnardAShoumaliK (2015) Image of drowned Syrian, Aylan Kurdi, 3, brings migrant crisis into focus. The New York Times, 3September.
3.
BirdsellDGroarkeL (2007) Outlines of a theory of visual argument. Argumentation & Advocacy43, Winter & Spring: 103–113.
4.
BouckaertP (2015) Dispatches: Why I Shared a Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child. Human Rights Watch website, 2September.
5.
BramanJDudleyAVincentiG (2011) Death, social networks and virtual worlds: A look into the digital afterlife. Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications.
6.
BrubakerJHayesGDourishP (2013) Beyond the grave: Facebook as a site for the expansion of death and mourning. The Information Society29: 152–163.
7.
BurgessJ (2006) Hearing ordinary voices: Cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies20(2): 201–214.
8.
BurgessJ (2008) ‘All your chocolate rain are belong to us’? Viral video, YouTube and the dynamics of participatory culture. In: LovinkGNiedererS (eds) Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube. Reader #4, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Institute of Network Culture.
9.
ButlerJ (2005) Photography, war, outrage. PMLA120(3): 822–827.
10.
CampbellD (2004) Horrific blindness: Images of death in contemporary media. Journal for Cultural Research8: 55–74.
11.
ChouliarakiL (2013) The humanity of war: Iconic photojournalism of the battlefield, 1914–2012. Visual Communication12(3): 315–340.
12.
ChristensenDGotvedS (2015) Online memorial culture: An introduction. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia21(1/2): 1–9.
13.
DahmenNSMillerA (2012) Redefining iconicity: A five-year study of visual themes of Hurricane Katrina. Visual Communication Quarterly19: 4–19.
14.
De-AndresSNos-AldasEGarcia-MatillaA (2016) The transformative image: The power of a photograph for social change: The death of Aylan. Comunicar Media Education Research Journal24: 29–37.
15.
DelehayeH (1961[1907]) Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography. New York, NY: Longmans, Green and Co.
16.
DeuzeM (2006) Participation, remediation, bricolage: Considering principal components of a digital culture. The Information Society22(2): 63–75.
17.
DevichandM (2016) Did Aylan Kurdi’s death change anything?BBC, 2September.
18.
DunleavyD (2015) A search of meaning in iconic news images of the Iraq war. Visual Communication Quarterly22(4): 197–205.
19.
EnsorJ (2016) ‘Photo of my dead son has changed nothing,’ says father of drowned Syrian refugee boy Alan Kurdi. The Telegraph, 3September.
20.
FehrenbachHRodognoD (2015) ‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child’: Humanitarian photography and NGO media strategies in historical perspective. International Review of the Red Cross97(900): 1121–1155.
21.
FossS (2005) Theory of visual rhetoric. In: SmithK, et al. (eds) Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
22.
GibbsM, et al. (2015) #Funeral and Instagram: Death, social media, and platform vernacular. Information, Communication & Society18(3): 255–268.
23.
GrahamCGibbsMAcetiL (2013) Introduction to the special issue on the death, afterlife, and immortality of bodies and data. The Information Society29: 133–141.
24.
GriesL (2013) Iconographic tracking: A digital research method for visual rhetoric and circulation studies. Computers and Composition30: 332–348.
25.
GriesL (2015) Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetoric. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
26.
GriffinM (2004) Picturing America’s ‘war on terrorism’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. Journalism5(4): 381–402.
IlanJ (2014) Intertextuality and news photography production: International making of a pictorial echo. International Journal of Communication8: 2879–2898.
37.
JunodT (2012) The falling man. In: BatchenG, et al. (eds) Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. London: Reaktion Books, 167–175.
38.
KempM (2012) Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
39.
KennedyL (2008) Securing vision: Photography and US foreign policy. Media, Culture & Society30(3): 279–294.
40.
KhanA (2015) Alan Kurdi’s father on his family tragedy: ‘I should have died with them.’The Guardian, 22December.
41.
KienG (2013) Media memes and prosumerist ethics: Notes toward a theoretical examination of memetic audience behavior. Cultural Studies ←→ Cultural Methodologies13(6): 554–561.
42.
KingLJohnsonG (2015) Death of Syrian toddler throws global spotlight onto refugee crisis. The Los Angeles Times, 3September.
43.
KitchCHumeJ (2008) Journalism in a Culture of Grief. New York, NY: Routledge.
44.
KnobelMLankshearC (2007) Online memes, affinities, and cultural production. In: KnobelMLankshearC (eds) A New Literacy Sampler. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 199–227.
45.
Kübler-RossE (2014) Grief Cycle Model: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families. New York, NY: Scribner.
46.
KumarD (2006) Media, war, and propaganda: Strategies of information management during the 2003 Iraq war. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies3(1): 48–69.
47.
LessigL (2004) Free Culture: How Big Media Use Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York, NY: The Penguin Group.
48.
LessigL (2009) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York, NY: Penguin.
49.
LinfieldS (2010) The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
50.
LithwickD (2006) Photo finish: How the Abu Ghraib photos morphed from scandal to law. Slate, 28September.
51.
LouwPE (2003) The ‘war against terrorism.’ A public relations challenge for the Pentagon. Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies65(3): 211–230.
MilnerR (2013a) Pop polyvocality: Internet memes, public participation, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. International Journal of Communication7: 2357–2390.
54.
MilnerR (2013b) Media lingua franca: Fixity, novelty, and vernacular creativity in Internet memes. Selected Papers of Internet Research 14.0. Denver, CO.
55.
MilnerR (2016) The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
56.
MitchellWJT (2011) Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
57.
MorehouseKCrandallH (2014) Virtual grief. Communication Research Trends33(1): 26–28.
58.
MortensenM (2015) Journalism and Eyewitness Images: Digital Media, Participation, and Conflict. New York, NY: Routledge.
59.
MortensenM (2016) ‘The image speaks for itself’ – Or does it? Instance news icons, impromptu publics, and the 2015 European ‘refugee crisis’. Communication and the Public1(4): 408–422.
60.
NussenbaumAShifmanL (2017) Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of 4chan’s /b/ Board. New Media & Society19(4): 483–501.
61.
ParkinsonJCoshDG (2015) Image of drowned boy echoes around world. The Wall Street Journal, 3September.
62.
PerlmutterDD (1998) Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises. Westport, CT: Praeger.
63.
PerlmutterDD (2006) Hypericons: Famous news images in the Internet digital-satellite age. In: MessarisPHumphreysL (eds) Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 51–64.
64.
PerlmutterDDWagnerG (2004) The anatomy of a photojournalistic icon: Marginalization of dissent in the selection and framing of ‘a death in Genoa’. Visual Communication3(1): 91–107.
65.
ShifmanL (2014a) Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
66.
ShifmanL (2014b) The cultural logic of photo-based meme genres. Journal of visual culture13(3): 340–358.
67.
SpitzbergBH (2014) Toward a model of meme diffusion. Communication Theory24: 311–339.
68.
TrachtenbergA (1990) Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
69.
VisFGoriunovaO (2015) The iconic image on social media: A rapid research response to the death of Aylan Kurdi. Visual Social Media Lab.
70.
WalterT, et al. (2011) Does the internet change how we die and mourn? Overview and analysis. Omega64: 275–302.
71.
WarnerM (1995) The unbearable likeness of being. Tate: The Art Magazine6, Summer: 40–47.
72.
WigginsBBowersGB (2015) Memes as genre: A structurational analysis of the memescape. New Media & Society17(11): 1886–1906.
73.
WilsonS (2009) Remixing memory in digital media. In: Garde-HansenJ, et al. (eds) Save as… Digital Memories. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 184–197.
74.
WithnallA (2015) Aylan Kurdi’s story: How a small Syrian child came to be washed up on a beach in Turkey. The Independent, 3September.
75.
ZelizerB (2004) The voice of the visual in memory. In: PhillipsKR (ed.) Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 157–186.
76.
ZelizerB (2010) About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
