Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
These notes are about peace research in a time of war. Indeed, the media is dominated by images of confrontation, polarization, armed aggression, and human suffering – all the sorry ingredients of modern warfare. War sidelines peace, war images sideline peace images.
Art as a Political Witness, edited by Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller and published in 2017, is now an OPEN ACCESS title (DOI: 10.3224/84740580) which is free to download.
On April 2, we presented a paper at Helsinki Photomedia 2022: the Fifth International Photography Research Conference at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Espoo. The conference, originally scheduled for 2020, was titled Images Among Us – a title alluding to the ubiquitousness of visual images in our media-saturated world.
There is an abundance of possibilities to visualize peace. Take, as just two examples, The Global Peace Photo Award[i] and The German Peace Prize For Photography[ii]. Both awards unite under one umbrella diverse images, representing various photographic aesthetics as well as political messages. It is not always possible to pinpoint what these images have in common, what could characterize them as “images of peace”.
Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), awareness grows that not only the international system is complex but also IR as a discipline. Considerable growth over the last decades coincides with increasing difficulties both to communicate across intra-disciplinary borders and to reach out to policymakers. The same can certainly be said about recent trends in peace and conflict research.
In our new article “Messiness in Photography, War and Transitions to Peace – Revisiting Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” we take a closer look at an interactive photography project published in the New York Times on the Web in 1996, Fred Ritchin and Gilles Peress’s project Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace.
We are pleased to announce that we contributed to the special issue for the 50th anniversary of Kosmopolis, the journal published by the Finnish Peace Research Association. In our article, Soveltava visuaalinen rauhantutkimus: Kuvat, rauhanvälitys ja aktiivinen katsominen (in English: Applied Visual Peace Research: Images, Mediation and Active Looking), we explore how images can contribute to peace processes from a more practical perspective, starting a new line of research: Applied Visual Peace Research. To do so, we look at possible ways images can advance peace processes by examining international peace mediation more specifically.
We are pleased to announce our new publication “Visual appropriation: a self-reflexive qualitative method for visual analysis of the international” with International Political Sociology. The article is the outcome of a long-standing research cooperation with Rune Saugmann Andersen, analyzing the contribution of the Irish photographer Richard Mosse’s images to our understanding of international politics.
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.
The capability of visual images to create compassion with distant others, especially suffering others, has always been regarded as one of the strengths of visual representation, especially photography and video documenting, nowadays almost instantaneously, the plight of others. Social documentary and concerned photography, for example, always expected that a politically powerful community, however defined, would respond to its awareness-raising visualizations and politically intervene in, and ameliorate, the conditions photographers could only depict.