Forensic and humanitarian frames: Mediating migration as crisis

This paper examines the visual culture of mediating migration as a “crisis,” arguing that responses to the movement of peoples (especially into the Global North) is animated by two frames: the forensic and the humanitarian. While these appear to be contradictory image regimes—one relying on data, maps and metrics, the other on iconic portraits of human suffering—the paper argues that it is the vacillation between these two poles that creates the dynamic force of the surge of images of “migrant crises.” Using the image of the thaumatrope – a visual tool for tricking the eye into seeing two images at once – this paper explores how processes of mediation train viewers to see images as data and data as images, and thus to be caught within an ideological framework of crisis. It seeks also to provide examples for intervening in the vacillation between humanitarianism and forensics through activist appropriations of migration data.