Alan Kurdi in Art: 22 Responses to the 2015 Photograph

Photograph by Nilüfer Demir, Bodrum, 2 September 2015 (via Reuters).

On 2 September 2015 a small inflatable boat carrying sixteen people capsized minutes after leaving Bodrum, Turkey, for the Greek island of Kos, about 4 kilometres away. Among the dead were a Syrian Kurdish boy, Alan Kurdi, aged two, his five-year-old brother Galib and their mother Rehana. Only their father, Abdullah, survived. Early reports gave the boy's name as Aylan and his age as three; both details were later corrected.

The Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir photographed Alan's body lying face down in the surf, and a police officer carrying him away. Within hours the images had spread around the world. They became the defining picture of the refugee crisis of 2015, and cartoonists, illustrators and painters answered with their own images: some grieving, some imagining a gentler ending, many furious at leaders and border systems.

This collection gathers 22 of those responses. Each is listed under the title it was shared with, together with a short note on what the artist shows and why it struck a chord. Where the artist's name is known from the work or the original posts, it is credited.

The crossing and the photograph

The family had fled the war in Syria, and was trying to reach Europe by the shortest sea route. The boat they boarded was built for about eight people but carried twice that number. Alan's aunt, Tima Kurdi, who lived in Vancouver, had been trying to bring relatives to Canada, and the case became a major issue in that autumn's Canadian federal election.

The photograph changed the tone of public debate across Europe. British Prime Minister David Cameron said he was deeply moved, and the charity Migrant Offshore Aid Station reported a fifteen-fold increase in donations within 24 hours of publication. In March 2016 a Turkish court found a smuggler guilty of people smuggling and sentenced him to four years and two months.

Images that accuse the powerful

Do You See It Now?

This photomontage places the small body at the centre of a vast diplomatic chamber, ringed by delegates and screens. The question in the title is aimed at the people in those seats: governments that debated the war for years while families kept fleeing it.

The Leaders Watching

In a black-and-white crowd of men in suits and traditional Gulf dress, only the boy is in colour, lying in a freshly dug grave. The spades at the edge make the point bluntly: the onlookers are the gravediggers. The image echoes widespread criticism in 2015 that wealthy Gulf states offered few formal resettlement places to Syrian refugees.

Moment of Shame for Arab Countries, by Bilal Chopra

Moment Of Shame For Arab Countries: Bilal Chopra

Bilal Chopra contrasts the drowned child with a man lounging in a giant cocktail glass, cigarette in hand. The caption, written on the image, spells out his target. Like several works here, it turns grief into a charge of indifference against neighbouring governments.

Cartoon by Rafat Al-khateeb

Rafat Al-khateeb draws a "New World Map" sliced by a barbed-wire fence, with the boy lying across it. The message is that borders, not geography, decided his fate. Wire fences were going up along Europe's south-eastern borders that same year.

I Hope Humanity Finds a Cure for Visas, by Khalid Albaih

The Sudanese-born cartoonist Khalid Albaih, known for his political "Khartoon!" drawings, shows a great white angel lifting the child away while a uniformed officer stands below. The handwritten line beside the figure became one of the most shared captions of the week. Its target is the visa system that leaves dangerous sea crossings as the only route for many refugees.

The New Face of Humanity

A holidaymaker on a sunlounger scrolls past a news story marked "Tragic" while the boy lies on the same beach behind her. The words "The World Today" frame it as a comment on how easily images of suffering become one more item in a feed.

Imagining a different ending

How His Story Should Have Ended...

The artist moves the boy, in the same red T-shirt and blue shorts, from the shoreline into a cosy bed under a mobile of stars and moon, with a glass of water on the bedside table. It is one of the most widely shared responses because it asks for so little: a safe night's sleep at home.

God Be With You, Little Angel, by Gunduz Aghayev

God Be With You, Little Angel. The Death Of Tragic Syrian Toddler Aylan By Gunduz Aghayev

Gunduz Aghayev's boy kneels on a sunny beach with a bucket and spade, building a sandcastle beside a sand figure shaped like his own body. Childhood play and the fatal scene sit side by side in one bright, painful picture.

The Dreamer

A delicate pen sketch shows the boy crouched at the water's edge, building a sandcastle as the tide comes in. It is signed by the artist with the social-media handle glennellul. The light, unfinished lines suggest a life that was only just beginning.

Sleep My Child

Published under the Zero Cartoons logo, this drawing shows a giant hand formed from seawater carrying the boy away from a blood-red background toward a green garden marked with the Arabic word for paradise. It is a lullaby in image form, offering comfort through faith.

Grief on the shoreline

We Are Losing Ourselves as Humans, and the People Will Die Around the Borders

Sea creatures, a whale, an octopus, a turtle and fish, gather in the shallows and weep, while a uniformed officer calmly takes notes. The animals mourn; the human official records. The reversal is the artist's way of asking who still behaves humanely.

Hell Is the Reality We Living In

Drawn with loose, almost childlike lines, the boy lies on a green-yellow shore with small angel wings on his back and a single red rose by his hand. The tender style softens the scene without hiding what it shows.

Just Sleeping

A row of cartoon children lies along the tide line, eyes closed and smiling, as if they had simply fallen asleep on the sand. The gentle drawing becomes harder to look at the longer you study it, since it reminds viewers that Alan was one of many children who drowned that year.

Humanity Washed Ashore, by Murat Sayın

Cartoonist Murat Sayın sets the boy on the sand beneath a pale sun, with a paper boat floating behind him. The paper boat, a child's toy, is a recurring symbol in these responses: a vessel far too fragile for the journey the family attempted.

Humanity Washed Ashore (balloon)

This second work with the same title borrows Banksy's famous "Girl with Balloon" stencil and places it on a grey beach beside the drowned boy, the red heart floating just out of reach. Banksy's image is usually read as being about loss and hope; here the hope is drifting away.

Humanity Slipping Away..., by Helen Savva

Illustrator Helen Savva paints a pair of large hands cupping the child, while dark colour drips through the fingers like ink or blood. It suggests a world that tried to hold him and could not.

Good Bye

This painted collage reworks the original photograph, adding a crying eye in the sky and the word "Bye" traced into the wet sand. It stays closest to Demir's image and turns it into a farewell.

Faith in Humanity - Lost

A soft night-sky illustration shows the boy with a halo and wings asleep on a cloud, while two teddy bears sit on a crescent moon. The text reads "I see humans but no humanity", a line often attributed to various authors online and widely shared in 2015.

Compassion and indifference

Still the Same, by Dev Sarma

Dev Sarma's watercolour sets two scenes side by side: "Sudan 1993", recalling Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a starving child watched by a vulture, and "Syria 2015". Below, two children meet in the clouds and ask each other whether anything has changed. The work questions whether famous photographs truly change policy.

Don't Let Compassion Drown

A notebook sketch dated 3 September 2015, the day after the deaths, shows a lifebuoy shaped like a heart beside the hand-lettered title. Simple and direct, it turns grief into an appeal for action rather than despair.

Oh, Look a Dolphin, by Rob Bouwman

In this Dutch cartoon by Rob Bouwman, a beachgoer fusses over a stranded dolphin and exclaims "oooh een dolfijn" ("oh, a dolphin"), while the child lies unnoticed further along the beach. It is a sharp comment on how selective our attention and sympathy can be.

Foundling Child!, by Ali Miraee

Cartoonist Ali Miraee shows the boy left at the gates of heaven, a paper boat beside him, while a figure with the Earth for a head runs away guiltily. The planet itself is cast as the parent who abandoned him.

What the image changed, and what it did not

In the weeks after the photograph appeared, several European governments announced plans to take in more refugees, and public donations to rescue and aid groups rose sharply. Yet the crossings continued, and many more people drowned in the Mediterranean in the years that followed. Editors also debated whether repeatedly publishing the photograph was respectful; on 8 September 2015 the German tabloid Bild removed all photos of the boy from its print and online editions.

Alan's name lives on in other ways. In 2019 the German rescue ship Professor Albrecht Penck was renamed Alan Kurdi, and his aunt Tima Kurdi published a memoir, The Boy on the Beach. Artists such as Ai Weiwei also returned to the image, which is why this collection belongs to a wider history of how pictures shape conscience. For another example of photographs that preserved a hidden truth, see Henryk Ross's Łódź Ghetto photographs.

The artworks above do not all agree on who is to blame. Together, they insist that a child who died at sea should be remembered by name, not only as a symbol.

Sources: Wikipedia: Death of Alan Kurdi; Reuters, 2 September 2015 (photograph by Nilüfer Demir). Artworks by the artists credited above, as collected by Bored Panda and shared via Idealist Revolution.

Related:

Header$type=social_icons