Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
“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”.
Given the forum that this blog post[i] is written for I should state straight away that I consider the arts (visual and performative) to be a form of communication and to have the same kind of transformative power that the more ordinary forms of communication (talk, writing, news media) have. In this I follow Cooley and Dewey – the latter argued that art was the ‘most universal and freest form of communication’, one that is able to break ‘through barriers that divide human beings, which are impermeable in ordinary association’ (Dewey 2005[1934]: 254). Others have argued that art ‘can influence the way people interpret, perceive, and ultimately act in their communities’ (Hawes 2007: 18), ‘communicate and transform the way people think and act’ (Shank and Schirch 2008: 218). Overall, what ‘is expressed within the imagination of art simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by the society; both a reflection of society and a key agent of its transformation’ (Premaratna 2018: 8). It is particularly effective when words don’t seem to be able to capture experiences, trauma, wishes and desires. Understood in this way, the arts are fundamental to and constitutive of civil society and as such, cannot be dismissed as entertainment or ‘add-on culture’; as something peacebuilding missions do not need to prioritise.
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.