Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
A lot of museum space has been dedicated to war. Libraries and bookshops contain countless volumes of military history. Most of us can think of multiple war films. There are well-established traditions of war reporting and conflict photography. Peace, on the other hand…
Once again, politics and the media are dominated by images of confrontation, polarization, destruction, armed aggression, and human suffering – the whole sorry repertoire of failed attempts at peaceful conflict transformation of which we thought as a thing of the past, at least in Europe. Once again, however, war sidelines peace, war images sideline peace images.
Imageandpeace.com would like to direct your attention to the exhibition Visual Peace, displaying new paintings by Sebastian Schultz.
“Paradoxically, if you see an image as a photograph, it is a photograph – for you.” This is the idea inspiring the current exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography: “An image endowed with a photographic look is easily thought of as evidence of a presence in front of a camera, even though it may result from computational processes.”
Südosteuropa Mitteilungen is the leading bi-monthly German-language journal on politics, culture, economics, and society of south-eastern Europe. We are happy to announce publication of an article titled ‘Bilder von Frieden und Krieg betrachten – Die visuelle Darstellung von Bosnien und Herzegowina’ / ‘Looking at War and Peace – The Visual Representation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 7–20).
On May 7, we presented a paper at the Finnish International Studies Association Conference, which took place in Tampere, Finland. The conference was jointly organized by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, the Ministry of Defence of Finland, the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Tampere University, and the Foundation for Foreign Policy Research.
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”.