One year ago, we started our seasonal greetings by stating that “2020 has certainly been an exceptional year”. Now, a year later, we could very well start this email by saying the same thing. At the end of the previous year, we thought, with vaccination campaigns starting, the new year can only be better. Shortly after, we found ourselves in even stronger lockdown situations than before. After being a bit more relaxed over summer, we are now facing even more shocking news about intensive care units that are reaching the limits of their capacities. Therefore, we hope that you and your families and friends got through this intense period without having to cope with serious physical and mental harm.
Nonetheless, we would like to use this opportunity to emphasize a few delightful things that happened in the past year. We are proud that we managed to keep imageandpeace.com and our followers regularly updated with new content as regards publications, exhibitions, interesting projects and so on.
The highlight certainly was the publication of a new artwork, “Reimpressions,” by Ana Catarina Pinho. In her video installation and archival photograph, the artist “explores vernacular photographies and its potential towards reframing pre-established categories, knowledge regimes and discursive reconstructions”. Please take a quick moment of your time and enjoy Ana Catarina’s work; and do revisit the other artworks published on the website.
We are also grateful for Tiffany Fairey’s guest contribution to imageandpeace.com: “Participatory, Community and Citizen Photography as Peace Photography,” in which Tiffany introduces the 3-year Leverhulme research project, Imaging Peace, that she is currently leading. We hope that we can intensify the cooperation with Tiffany in 2022.
In September, a podcast was published in which Frank talks to Alice König and Nicholas Wiater, the principal investigators of the Visualizing War project at the University of St Andrews, about the constructive function of social conflict, the visibility of peace in a world seemingly dominated by violence, and the relationship between war photography and peace photography. We are grateful for this wonderful opportunity and hope to continue our conversation in 2022.
Finally, we would like to use the opportunity to do some self-promoting regarding two articles that will shortly be published:
• First, in the 50th anniversary issue of the Journal of the Finnish Association for Peace Research, Kosmopolis, we engage with the role of images in peace mediation and launch what we call applied visual peace research.
• Secondly, we are proud to announce that our long-standing collaboration with Rune Saugmann Andersen has led to an article in International Political Sociology where we establish visual appropriation as a research method for the study of the international.
And we are happy to announce that the journal Media, War, and Conflict has accepted for publication an article titled “Messiness in Photography, War, and Transitions to Peace – Revisiting Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace.” In this article we discuss Fred Ritchin and Gilles Peress’s interactive photojournalistic project Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace that was published in the New York Times in 1996. We identify this project as an important precursor to current war photography, acknowledging the messiness of violent conflict rather than reducing it to simple but misleading narratives. We are happy that this publication coincides with the 30-years commemoration, in 2022, of the siege of Sarajevo which started in 1992.
We hope that you like and benefit, in one way or another, from imageandpeace.com and we appreciate whenever you spread the word about it. We also invite you to get in touch with us directly and are grateful for emails.
For you as well as your family and friends, we wish you a pleasant turn of the year. Stay healthy!