Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
We receive much inspiration and many ideas for our work from encountering art, for we think that art and culture play a major role in our societies, heavily shaping all sorts of social interactions and performing a social function. Not surprisingly, we got very curious when we came across the edited volume Can Art Aid In Resolving Conflicts? The book features 103 individuals, most of them introduced as artists, others as curators, museum directors or researchers, for example.
Peace can be shown vicariously by documenting activities accompanying, reflecting and following from a given individual’s or group’s perception and experience of peace. Simply put, if a sense of peace prevails, individuals and groups of people tend to do things they would not do in the absence of a sense of peace. Such activities can be recorded visually.
When John Steinbeck visited the Soviet Union in 1947, he did so for the purpose of “honest reporting,” “neither critical nor favorable,” merely “set[ting] down what we saw and heard …” With him traveled Robert Capa, one of the most famous photographers of the time – a photographer usually designated a “war photographer.” Asked by the Soviet authorities why he wanted Capa to travel with him – after all, there were “lots of cameramen in the Soviet Union” – Steinbeck replied: “But you have no Capas.”
We are delighted to announce that imageandpeace.com has established a partnership with Archivo Platform.
Founded in 2012 by Ana Catarina Pinho, “Archivo is an independent research platform dedicated to reflecting on photography and visual culture through research, editorial and curatorial activities. Archivo defines itself through a series of annual projects developed through an interdisciplinary research network that contributes to traverse different disciplines and foster theoretical, practical and critical interventions, creating links between scholarship, artistic and cultural practices.”
War has different temporalities. There is the actual war – the execution of organized large-scale physical force – and there is its aftermath. Both temporalities are explored in photography in abundance, capturing visually what war looks like and what remains of it.
There is a third temporality, however, also a “signature of violence” (Manaugh 2020: 19), yet one that does not appear prominently in photography. This temporality references war’s preparations, its “spatial prerequisites” (Manaugh 2020: 11): the locations, buildings and sites where war is being prepared for, where armies train, where weapons systems are developed and constructed, and where the effects of warfare are researched. Without this dimension, the visualization of war remains incomplete.
2020 is coming to an end. This has certainly been an exceptional year. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, imageandpeace.com was launched during this year’s summer.
In Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism (2016), Debbie Lisle analyzes “dark” or “political tourism,” i.e. tourism encountering the aftermath of violent conflict. Lisle’s book elucidates what encounters of war and tourism looked like indifferent historical constellations (for example, the British Empire, post-World War II, bipolarity, and the “War on Terror”). It shows that these encounters are historically contingent, differing across space and over time, and that very often “counterconducts” can be found – social practices ignoring or challenging the hierarchical order within which they operate and which they are supposed to confirm.
We are pleased to share the Call for Papers for the biennial conference of the European Peace Research Association in August 2021. Next year’s conference themed Empowering Peace: The role of civil society in peacebuilding and conflict transformation will take place at Tampere University, Finland.
Imageandpeace is delighted to present the photographic essay “Between Violence and Peace” by Shihab Chowdhury. The artwork – eleven photographs and explanatory text – engages with a subject – the Finnish Civil War – that is still capable of dividing opinion in Finland more than 100 years after it took place.
“What is peace? You can’t make peace if you know nothing about it.”
– Mira Sidawi in Imagine
Many violent conflicts have been covered by photographers, and many have been forgotten again. Our attention span is staggeringly short. Therefore, it is a highly interesting endeavour to re-visit well-known scenes of conflict and to explore today’s situation. And for us, who are exploring and searching for visions of peace, it is even more interesting to see the current situation through the camera lenses of photographers who have already reported about a conflict during the peak of violence. This is the concept behind Imagine: Reflections on Peace, a volume comprised of both photo and written essays.