This year has seen the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. More than 920,000 migrants are estimated to have travelled to Europe by sea alone in 2015 (according to the International Organization for Migration), making their way through Turkey, across the Mediterranean to Greece, Italy and the Balkans, and on, into the heart of the European Union.

Our response, in Britain and across the EU, was split. Should we welcome these refugees, or turn them back? Could we provide for them? Were they a threat, or a boon? Would they enrich us, or leech away our identity?

Then, amidst the noise, a photograph made everyone stop. Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Kurdish-Syrian boy, lay facedown in the wet sand, in T-shirt, shorts and a pair of trainers that could sit in the palm of one’s hand.

The photograph of his lifeless body would define and transcend our age, just as Nick Ut’s image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, naked and screaming after a napalm attack, captured the Vietnam war and the eternities of civilian suffering, just as Jeff Widener’s unknown Tank Man defined not just the Tiananmen Square uprising, but the individual’s power against authority.

In the early hours of 2 September, Kurdi and his family boarded an inflatable boat on Turgutreis Beach near Bodrum, Southern Turkey. Sixteen people boarded a boat designed for eight, trying to reach the Greek island of Kos, about 2.5 miles across the Mediterranean ocean. The boat left in the dead of night, in an attempt to evade coastguards, and capsized about five minutes after casting off. Kurdi, his brother Galib and mother Rehana all drowned. His father survived.