Given that images work as potent forces, driving political narratives and shaping public perspectives and discourse, this seems like a glaring omission. These days as conflicts, authoritarianism and polarisation are on the rise, the question of peace, its fragility and also its co-option by diverse political actors, is more urgent and contested than ever.
Peace scholars assert that for peace and peaceful co-existence to be created it has first to be imagined. How we see and ‘image’ peace sets the parameters for how peace is defined and understood and how we view our relationships with others including those with whom there are complex histories of conflict, harm and radical disagreement.
The large-scale street exhibition, Imaging Peace, currently on display on hoardings attached to the South East wing of Bush House on The Strand, reveals what peace looks like from the perspectives of those who are actively striving for it.
The images are by photographers in communities where people’s lives are directly shaped by conflict, war and mass violence. They show not only what is important to peace for different communities – from combat veterans and refugees to survivors of conflict-related sexual violence and youth growing up in legacy of genocide - but how the process of photography itself is being harnessed to navigate divisions, rebuild relations, support healing and transform conflict in contexts of ongoing violence, frozen conflict and fragile peace.
The featured projects are contributors to the Leverhulme funded multi-year, multi-country research, Imaging Peace, for which I am the lead. The study explores how we understand peace with and through images and the question of what contribution photography, both images and the process of making and sharing images, can make to conflict transformation and prevention.
Working with six key partners and drawing on learning from an additional 19 case studies of peace photography from diverse peace and conflict settings around the world, the research I have conducted for Imaging Peace shows how photography is being harnessed to undermine divisive conflict narratives in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to build intergenerational dialogue and support community peacebuilding in Colombia and to support social healing in post-genocide Rwanda.
Local visual and peace practitioners, cognisant of how images and image-making can be used to drive conflict and violence as much as they can to foster peace, harness intentional, trauma-informed and careful methods when working with conflict-affected communities. These have been captured in the open-access practitioner resource, ‘Peace Photography: A Guide’.
One key finding has been how photography is being used to navigate difference and rebuild relations in contexts where legacies of genocide or sectarian and ethnic violence have entrenched divisions within communities, freezing conflict and acting as a threat to their fragile peace.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the female-led peacebuilding organisation Post Conflict Research Centre, harness visual storytelling to counter the divisive ethno-nationalistic narratives that dominate in the political and media discourse. They show, through multi-ethnic stories, how peace between Bosnia’s different ethnic groups exists and is possible. The Love Tales, a photo initiative shared through their online media platform, in exhibitions, their magazine and festivals, is an example of this. The project tells the stories of couples from across Bosnia and Herzegovina who are in successful interethnic relationships, challenging the persistent and ingrained narrative that real connections between Bosnia’s ethnic groups are unattainable.
In Northern Ireland photography has been used to rebuild relations between Protestant and Catholic groups living alongside the peace walls. These structures were built to separate communities and continue to serve as potent symbols of the ongoing divisions in the country despite the signing of the 1998 Good Friday agreement. In one project, Exchanging Perceptions, where the two communities were not yet ready to meet together face-to-face, photography worked as a mediator, enabling the groups to see each other’s viewpoints and neighbourhoods. In another project run by Belfast Exposed, groups of young people from Protestant and Catholic communities came together to digitally remove the peace wall using imaging software. In so doing they not only created an image of what does not yet exist; their community without walls, but they also engaged in a dialogue that moved them a step closer to breaking down the mental walls in people’s head that act as an obstacle to community reconciliation.
In Rwanda, home-based photo exhibitions are being used to bring people together and to facilitate difficult and sensitive conversations that are crucial to sustaining community peace and deepening ongoing reconciliation efforts.
In all these cases, and many others, the collaborative making and sharing of images, is being shown to build people’s political peace imaginaries by sharing plural perspectives that allow for the bridging entrenched divides in conflict-sensitive settings. Images, as unstable objects that have no fixed meanings, help people to sit with and navigate difference and complex viewpoints. They enable groups to encounter each other and engage in a dialogue which recognises both divergence and commonality in experience but without compelling a resolution.
In a world fractured by conflict and competing narratives, these peace photography practices can function as a critical tool for engaging with complexity, fostering dialogue, and expanding the ways in which peace is imagined, negotiated, and enacted.
The Imaging Peace Exhibition will be on display on The Strand until July 31st.
For more information see Imaging Peace website and download Peace Photography: A Guide