“The larger political event has made visible, like a prism, a number of smaller constituent questions” says Teju Cole. What smaller, constituent questions does the “migration/refugee crisis” make visible? In what ways does the migration crisis make visible questions of loss and exile, of homeland and belonging, of identity and citizenship, of rights and responsibilities, and also, questions of governance and governmentality, of processes of control and securitization, and of neocolonial and neoliberal practices ? How do various mediating practices and representational modalities constitute the migration “crisis” as an object of (social, political, cultural, economic) struggle and a site of affective investments, through which these smaller questions are refracted? More specifically, what is the role played by images in the articulation of the contemporary migration “crisis” as a socio-political event? Visual culture is not restricted to the image in its exact sense. Rather, as media scholar Krista Lynes argues, a focus on images in contemporary media analysis entails studying texts across genre, form, media and audience – from news reportage, films, museum arts, to tweeting, blogging, journaling and performative activist actions, to academic scholarship even – as “significant sites for the articulation of a social event” which constitute the visual regime as an “interlocking and uneven image field.” In this paper, I engage with a selection of images – across genre, media, form and audience – that are part of the visual field framing the mass displacement of Syrians post-2011, with the aim to investigate the role they play in the constitution and articulation of this phenomenon as a crisis – a site of political, social and cultural struggle – and in making it visible and memorable in the global mediascape. The Syrian refugee crisis, referred to as “the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time,” has generated (and continues to generate) an abundance of images, and has produced an expansive and dynamic visual field, which has become the object of political contention, has galvanized intense affect, and catalyzed social change. The images that I engage with constitute significant sites for the articulation of the Syrian refugee crisis, and thus provide a sketch of the highly politicized visual field framing the mass displacement of Syrians post-2011 (and contemporary transnational human migration more generally), as well as an entry point to critically understanding how this field is mobilized both as a mode of governance and as political praxis.