Banksy's Steve Jobs Mural in the Calais Jungle, Explained

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Banksy's Steve Jobs Mural at Calais in 2015

In December 2015 the street artist Banksy painted Steve Jobs on a concrete wall in the "Jungle", the makeshift migrant camp on the edge of Calais in northern France. The work, now known as The Son of a Migrant from Syria, shows the Apple co-founder as a traveller with a bag over his shoulder. Its point was simple: Jobs's biological father came from Syria, and Banksy wanted people arguing about refugees to remember that.

Jobs himself was never a refugee. He was born in San Francisco and adopted as a baby. The mural makes an argument about ancestry and opportunity, and it drew both praise and pointed criticism. Here is what it showed, the family story behind it, and what happened to the camp and the painting.

What the mural shows

Banksy revealed the piece on 11 December 2015. Jobs appears life-size in his trademark black polo neck and round glasses, a black bin bag slung over one shoulder and an original Macintosh computer held in the other hand. The pose is based on a well-known 2006 portrait of Jobs by photographer Albert Watson, the image later used on the cover of Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography.

The painting sat on one of the concrete pillars of a bridge inside the camp, among tents and other graffiti. The journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News was among the first to share it.

Banksy rarely comments on his work, but this time he issued a statement. He argued that migration is often presented as a drain on resources, yet Apple, then the world's most profitable company and, by his account, a payer of more than $7bn a year in tax, existed only "because they allowed in a young man from Homs."

Steve Jobs's Syrian father

The young man from Homs was Abdulfattah "John" Jandali. Born into a well-off Muslim family in Syria, the youngest of nine children, he studied at the American University of Beirut and then moved to the United States, where he earned a PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin.

There he met Joanne Schieble, an American student from a Catholic family of Swiss-German descent. Her father opposed the relationship because Jandali was Muslim. When she became pregnant, she travelled to San Francisco, where Steve was born on 24 February 1955, and arranged a closed adoption. The baby was raised by Paul and Clara Jobs, who promised Schieble they would pay for his university education.

Jobs did not grow up with Jandali, and he later made clear that he regarded Paul and Clara as his parents. That detail matters, because it is one of the reasons some critics felt the mural stretched the story.

Life in the Calais "Jungle"

The camp, officially the Camp de la Lande, existed from January 2015 to October 2016. People gathered there in the hope of crossing the Channel to Britain, often by hiding in lorries or on trains. Estimates in late 2015 put the number of migrants in Calais at about 6,000; a census just before the final clearance in 2016 counted more than 8,100 residents.

Most early arrivals came from Eritrea, Somalia and Syria, and during 2015 more people arrived from Afghanistan, Sudan's Darfur region and Iraq. Conditions were harsh: flimsy tents, mud, limited sanitation and frequent clashes with police.

Banksy's involvement went beyond paint. After his satirical "bemusement park" Dismaland closed in Weston-super-Mare in September 2015, timber and fixtures from it were sent to Calais to help build shelters.

Other works Banksy left in Calais

The Jobs portrait was one of several pieces Banksy painted around Calais that December. The best known reworks Théodore Géricault's 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa, a scene of shipwreck survivors, so that the people on the raft are waving desperately towards a luxury yacht on the horizon.

Photos on the artist's website showed the Jobs mural beside tents and near another slogan painted on the wall, which read "Nobody deserves to live this way!"

Banksy's Steve Jobs Mural at Calais in 2015

Together the works pointed at the gap between Europe's comfort and the conditions a few kilometres from its ferry ports.

Banksy has returned to this theme repeatedly. Readers interested in another of his political projects can see our piece on Banksy's Walled Off Hotel beside the Bethlehem barrier.

Praise and criticism

Reaction split along predictable but interesting lines. Esquire's Matt Miller called the piece a powerful statement. Others liked the art but questioned the argument.

Writing in Wired, Issie Lapowsky called the mural poignant but warned against the logic of defending refugees by pointing to famous success stories. Among the tens of millions of displaced people, she argued, most will never become a Steve Jobs or an Albert Einstein, and they deserve help anyway. The Independent's Memphis Barker made a similar case, while The Verge noted that Jobs himself had distanced himself from his birth parents beyond the biological link.

That criticism is worth keeping in mind. The mural is effective because it upsets a lazy assumption about who migrants are. It is weaker if read as saying people are worth welcoming only when they might be exceptional.

What happened to the mural and the camp

Calais authorities, who had often clashed with the camp's supporters, decided to protect the Banksy works. Mayor Natacha Bouchart said the murals were very good and carried a message, and protective glass was installed over the Jobs portrait and nearby pieces. In January 2016 vandals smashed the glass and sprayed graffiti over the painting.

The camp itself was cleared in late October 2016, with the eviction starting on 24 October and the last stages completed in early November. Its residents were dispersed to reception centres around France, though people continued to gather near Calais in smaller, informal camps.

The wider picture has grown. When the mural appeared, about 60 million people worldwide had been forced from their homes. The UN Refugee Agency counted 117.3 million forcibly displaced people at the end of 2023 and estimated that the figure had passed 120 million by spring 2024.

Sources: The Son of a Migrant from Syria (Wikipedia); Calais Jungle (Wikipedia); Steve Jobs (Wikipedia); UNHCR Global Trends; Issie Lapowsky in Wired, December 2015. Mural and statement by Banksy; tweet by Krishnan Guru-Murthy. The story was first shared here via Quartz.

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