Image of dead child on beach haunts and frustrates the world

The photo of the dead three-year-old Syrian boy on a Turkish beach is haunting. It captures everything we don’t want to see when we tap our phones or open our newspapers: a vicious civil war, a surge of refugees, the death of an innocent. The image of little Aylan Kurdi is hammering home the Syrian migrant crisis to the world, largely through social media. Aylan died along with his five-year-old brother and their mother when their small rubber boat capsized as it headed for Greece. The photos were from the Turkish news agency DHA.

It is a very painful picture to view. It had me in tears when it first showed up on my mobile phone. I had to think hard whether to share this.

Peter Bouckaert, director of emergencies at Human Rights Watch.

Will the disturbing image galvanize people into action? Will it be like other seared-in-our-memory photographs — a vulture hovering over starving child in Sudan, a girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam, the child in a firefighter’s arms after the Oklahoma City bombing? Or will it become just another of the many images on social media, lost amid the din? Kathleen Fetters-Iossi, a 47-year-old fiction writer from Wisconsin, said she hopes people share the images to create awareness, then go beyond that to try to help in some way. But she has her doubts any concrete action will come of it.

Regardless of the technology, a singular iconic image can still touch us in ways.

Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a center for media studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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