The (In)Visibility of Migrants

Abstract

Bruno Catalano’s sculpture Voyageurs brilliantly catches an impalpable, yet pervasive, feature of refugees’ representation: their invisibility. This may seem an oxymoron but throughout my visual analysis, and while looking for what was represented in the images studied, I have been struck by what is not there. Susan Sontag has defined photography as “grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing!” (Sontag 1973, 1). If Sontag is right when she affirms that photography makes things represented worth being seen, we may be led to think that, on the contrary, what is not photographed is not worth seeing. On this arbitrary decision over presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, hinges a very important dimension of the power of photography.