Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding

(Hardback)

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How can photographers, curators, and editors convey narratives of peace and not just stories of war Providing interdisciplinary and international perspectives on timely debates, Picturing Peace explores humanitarianism and visual culture, community collaboration, collective memory, and imagined futures for creating and sustaining of civil societies. How things look and are perceived are not superficial issues; when it comes to war and conflict, photography is vitally relevant not only to documenting violence, but also to rebuilding peaceful societies. Genealogies of photographic representation and conflict; ethical questions related to the gaze and decolonisation; the significance of archival material for reassessing the cultural construction of enmity and harmony; and, finally, how recent initiatives have sought to think through and enact possibilities for peace. These timely issues - operating between picturing and peacebuilding - feed into a wider, urgent question: how can we care for a shared world Exploring multiple forms of peace photography, the volume offers a range of voices from preeminent international scholars, as well as interviews with practicing photographers who have experience of working with post-conflict communities, including Jacques Nkinginzabo (Learning for Change, Rwanda); Newsha Tavakolian (Magnum Photos); and Martina Bacigalupo (Agence Vu). Picturing Peace is a timely investigation into the politics of representation, questioning how photographers might help foster social relationships, transform conflicts, and reconcile communities in the image-oriented cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Author Bio

Jolyon Mitchell is Professor of Communications, Arts and Religion at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI). His research and teaching focuses on religion, violence and peacebuilding with particular reference to the visual arts. He has published extensively on the uses of different media arts in promoting peace and inciting violence. Pippa Oldfield is Senior Lecturer in Photography at Teesside University, UK, and former Head of Programme at Impressions Gallery, Bradford. She is the author of Photography and War and has curated numerous exhibitions on the topic of conflict and its aftermath including Bringing the War Home: Photographic Responses to Recent Conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and No Mans Land: Womens Photographic Viewpoints on the First World War. Tom Allbeson is Senior Lecturer in Media History at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University, UK. He is co-editor of the Journal of War and Culture Studies, author of Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City, and co-author of Conflicting Images: Histories of War Photography in the News (2024). His research concerns media history and visual culture in contemporary Europe and the US with specialisms in photojournalism and conflict, visual culture and reconstruction, collective memory in post-conflict societies, and urban history.