Los controvertidos límites de la visibilidad: el caso Aylan

The article explores the controversy surrounding the photographic image of the small Aylan, Syrian boy dead at sea in September 2015, which has been the subject of countless reproductions and remediation, to become viral on the Internet and social media. It is a metarepresentational controversy, in which media debated the very forms of their discursivity, in particular on the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the use of certain images in the media discourse. The authors consider that there are decidedly semiotic reasons, related to the formal structural characteristics specific to that image, that explain its impact and its success. But that picture raises a more general problem. It renews a debate that has ethical, aesthetic and pragmatic implications, which promotes considerations about the effectiveness of images and of their role, but also, more generally, about the very role of the media in our dramatic contemporaneity.