Abstract
Once every few years, a photograph shocks the world. The image of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy washed ashore in 2015; the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004; the vulture and the little girl in Sudan in 1993. These moments underscore photography’s unique power to visualize war, atrocity and suffering to spark humanitarian action. While this has garnered significant scholarly attention, the edited volume Picturing Peace explores an equally relevant yet less explored dimension: the complex relationship between photography and peace. Co-edited by Tom Allbeson, Pippa Oldfield and Joylon Mitchell – scholars based in the UK – the collection features contributions from Rwanda, Iran, Finland, Italy, Belgium, France, Australia, Canada and the US. Its 15 chapters, carefully divided into four parts, weave together historical and contemporary case studies to explore varied themes, including activism, humanitarianism, gender, postcolonialism, trauma, witnessing and memory. By addressing photography’s role in ‘constructing the foundations of sustainable, just and everyday peace’ in post-conflict contexts (p. 11), the book contributes to showcasing the challenges and tensions of advancing peace through images.
The first part of the book, ‘Genealogies’, lays the foundation for defining and characterizing peace photography – understood as visual practices that promote the nonviolent and peaceful transformation of conflict. As Emma Hutchinson and Roland Bleiker argue in chapter one, peace photography moves beyond the ‘spectacular events’ of war to highlight ‘everyday social and cultural processes’ fostering sustainable change (pp. 24–25). However, defining peace photography broadly as any image without violence risks making it ‘a largely meaningless concept’ (p. 25). In this vein, Heide Fehrenbach discusses the specific characteristics of peace photography in chapter two. Atrocity and humanitarian photography centre on the experiences of the wronged but often unintentionally reinforce the very power inequalities they seek to challenge through victimizing tropes. In contrast, photographers like James Rodríguez ‘emphasise the worth and dignity of the dead and surviving loved ones’ by shielding bodies from view and providing detailed captions (p. 44). Chapter three extends this discussion, exploring the balancing act of aftermath photography in acknowledging ‘violence without reproducing it’ and linking suffering to pathways of peace (p. 59). In turn, chapter four unpacks the function of bearing witness through Western tragedy traditions and argues that, despite its tensions, it remains vital.
Part two – ‘Whose Photography, Whose Peace?’ – examines photography’s role in ‘addressing audiences and shaping active participation’ while tackling questions of gaze, agency and decolonial approaches (p. 12). In chapter five, Astrid Jamar and François Makanga critique the ‘racist depictions of white saviour narratives’ on the United Nations peacekeeping website and highlight works by Léonard Pongo and Lina Iris Viktor that avoid the white gaze (p. 80). Further, Tiffany Fairey discusses participatory projects in Peru and Colombia to illustrate that the value of peace photography lies not just in the images but also on the image-making and sharing processes that further ‘encounters, dialogues and critical reflection’ (p. 125). Two conversation-based chapters with Italian photographer Martina Bacigalupo and Iranian artist Newsha Tavakolian tackle discussions on how positionality and identity can shape photographer–subject relationships. Overall, this section unpacks persistent and racialized tensions in peace photography, and offers successful counterexamples, still acknowledging no universal solutions exist.
Subsequently, part three, ‘From the Archives’, analyses major 20th-century case studies, including photographs from the Treaty of Versailles, photobooks from the Weimar Republic and the Vietnam War, and photography during the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. In so doing, the section illustrates how contemporary understandings of photography’s role in constructing events and taking on advocacy and campaigning roles rather than just documenting, are anchored in these pivotal historical events.
The final part, ‘Aftermaths and Futures’, engages with contemporary peace photography initiatives. For starters, Wendy Kozol questions whether photography can ‘avoid perpetuating harm’ when documenting ‘survivors of wartime sexual assault’, analysing Elizabeth Herman’s project ‘A Woman’s War’ (p. 223). By emphasizing temporality and drawing attention to contradictions, silences and other destabilizing elements, the author advocates shifting from ‘a critique of (past) victimization to a progressive narrative about present (or future) empowerment’ (p. 238). Thereafter, a photo elicitation interview with Rwandan photographer Jacques Nkinzingabo explores the power of memory and how certain images define us, while the concluding chapter centres on Roger Mac Ginty’s concept of everyday peace. Here, photographers focus on human interactions to illustrate how ‘so-called ordinary people’ can ‘disrupt violent conflict and forge pro-social relationships’ in conflict-affected societies (p. 254).
The diversity of contributors, topics, styles, approaches, temporalities and case studies is one of Picturing Peace’s greatest strengths. Yet, amid these differences, the volume offers a clear through line of overarching themes spanning its over 300 pages. In unison, the chapters illustrate and unpack the complexities of defining what peace photography truly means and entails. As seminal scholar Frank Möller explains, peace photography is ‘derivative and illustrative of pre-existing notions of peace . . . it is also constitutive of peace’ by shaping how viewers perceive it, and ‘it is proactive in that it actively contributes to peace’ (p. 48]). As such, the practices and characterizations of peace photography remain ambiguous and far from clear-cut.
Notably, three key challenges of peace photography stand out in this book. First is temporality: while war is an ‘event’ that ‘breaks out’, peace is a process that unfolds in a time often seen as ‘uneventful or humanly uninteresting’ (p. 178). Yet photography ‘operates according to the logic of spectacle’, making it easier to depict war than to represent peace (p. 178). Second are the tensions of witnessing and gaze. Capturing victims, survivors, or perpetrators walks a delicate line between visualizing atrocity as part of the peace process and causing harm – whether by reinforcing trauma or perpetuating colonial and gendered stereotypes and tropes. Lastly, photography’s peacebuilding value lies not only in the visuals but more in the accompanying text, the context in which the images are taken, and their impact on subjects and those involved in their creation and circulation.
Building on this, Picturing Peace argues that peace photographies are ‘best understood not in terms of specific actions, events or images, but as an open-ended process’ of ‘mediation, encounter, and negotiation of identity’ to contribute to a more peaceful world (p. 12). The volume underscores peace photography as a distinct research field, sharing overlaps with war, humanitarian, atrocity, aftermath and participatory photography, yet marking out unique concerns that merit further investigation. Not least, it also calls for more ‘flexible definitions of “conflict” and “peace”’ (p. 227). In the end, one is left wanting to hear more from photographers and subjects, and how they perceive and navigate the challenges and tensions outlined in the book. Nonetheless, this is an engaging and thought-provoking read for scholars in peace and conflict studies, photography, media, journalism, and the visual arts, while also offering a valuable critique for practitioners and photographers in peace, conflict and humanitarian work by questioning entrenched norms and assumptions.
