Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
The Galicia Museum, Kraków (permanent exhibition)
Over the last couple of years, we have devoted considerable attention to the merits and liabilities of aftermath photography.
In several publications, we criticized conventional aftermath photography for its tendency to create visual memory bubbles – images revolving around and referring back to the original event without offering escape strategies, thus failing to make the step from aftermath to peace.¹
Antologia spojrzeń: GETTO WARSZAWSKIE – fotografia i filmy
Anthology of Glances: THE WARSAW GHETTO: Photographs and Films
By Anna Duńczyk-Szulc and Agniezka Kajczyk
Frank Möller, “Peace Photography and the Temporality of the Aftermath,” pp. 47–61 in Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding, edited by Tom Allbeson, Pippa Oldfield and Jolyon Mitchell
We are happy to introduce Annamaria Palsi-Ikonen, a photographer and visual storyteller residing in Tampere. Annamaria’s work received multiple awards from organizations such as the Federation of European Professional Photographers (FEP) and the Finnish Photo Awards. For example, Annamaria was named to the FEP All-Time Top 25 Gallery, which acknowledges significant contributions to visual art. She represents Team Finland in the WorldPhotographic Cup— an experience that, as she told us, “continues to inspire me as an artist and visual storyteller.”
Photographic portraits, the late Alex Danchev suggests in On Art and War and Terror (published in 2009), “are not merely illustrations of what was already known. They are new knowledge” (p. 36) and a fiction may be “a type of truth” (p. 148), requiring new thinking and writing techniques to grasp what is normally considered intangible, ephemeral, even – from the point of view of most scholarship – irrelevant. This book shows that it is not irrelevant: “art articulates a vision of the world that is insightful and consequential; and the vision and the insight can be analysed” (p. 4).
Frank Möller and David Shim, “Digital Images in Peacebuilding,” pp. 127–147 in Social Media and Peacebuilding: How Digital Spaces Shape Conflict and Peace, edited by Anna Reuss and Stephan Stetter
People on the Move is one of the most pressing and one of the most visualized issues of our time. While human mobility has been the subject of a huge amount of academic research, we still do not know enough about the main questions that the conference Pragmatics of Peace on the Move: Challenging Perspectives on Mobility-related Conflictivity at Bielefeld University’s prestigious Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) addressed: how do “the peace perspectives held by individuals” relate to “forced mobility” and in what ways are these perspectives enacted?
From October to December 2024, Rune Saugmann (Tampere University) and Frank once again introduced the students of Tampere University to a new, interactive mode of instruction, combining visual research and peace education, in a course titled Interactive Peace Imagery: Eastern Europe in Camera.
At the end of the year, reflections on The End of the World – Alfredo Jaar’s new engagement with the capitalist-militarist exploitation of minerals. This exploitation is indispensable to digitisation, the data-based society, energy transition and ostensibly green economies. Combining private capital with state security interests, it results in intensified, ruthless violence exerted on both human beings and the natural environment, turning Earth into waste and treating human beings as dispensable, sacrificed for the pursuit of profit and national security.
In a cooperation with Tiffany Fairey, we have contributed the chapter “Peace Photography, Visual Peacebuilding and Participatory Peace Photography” to The Routledge Handbook of Conflict and Peacebuilding Communication, edited by Stacey Connaughton and Stefanie Pukallus (chapter 36). The handbook was published online on 29 October 2024.