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Minting Xenophobia: What We Can Learn From the AP’s NFT Error
The AP thought it was a good idea to sell NFTs, but then they tried to sell one with migrants in the image
In 2015, photographer Massimo Sestini documented refugees leaving their homelands for safety as they crossed the Mediterranean, hoping to seek asylum in Europe. Sestini’s photographs were well praised and won several awards, but Sestini, as well as many others, recognized that the images do not properly recognize the personhood of the migrants on board the ships. Sestini’s most famous photo, taken from above, shows hundreds of people tightly packed on a shallow hull boat; many are children and few are wearing life-jackets. The image reduces the individual into a collection, negating their personal experience. This reflection inspired Sestini to start his “Where are you?” project to identify the humans aboard the ship.
On February 24, 2022, the same day Putin began a brutal invasion of Ukraine, the Associated Press tweeted a short video by photographer Felipe Dana that resembled Sestini’s image. The video footage was a short clip of migrants on an overcrowded boat on their way to Spain in hope of asylum. The AP was set to “drop” the clip as an NFT for purchase the following day on their new NFT marketplace. Following an incredible amount of vocal outcry, the AP deleted the tweet and apologized.
Aside from the gratuitous commodification of human pain using the crypto market, the image perpetuates the negative depiction of refugees through the mediation of migration. This ongoing debate about how we see the migrant in media can be considered again through the AP’s mistake.
In her book, Mediating Migration, Radha Hegde writes that the immigrant body is “disciplined, racialized, and surveilled,” and the body is often all the immigrant has when they “navigate spaces of uncertainty and risk.” The migrant or refugee is not often seen as a human person in media representations, but rather as a state of temporary…
