ABOUT
Imaging Peace considers how photography can shape peace.
Imaging Peace is a multi-year, multi-country study of peace photography led by Dr. Tiffany Fairey, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
© Erica Duncan, Odyssey, USA
Photography plays a potent role in war and conflict, but little thought has been given to its contribution to peace.
Imaging Peace is a Leverhulme Fellowship research project that examines the critical and neglected relationship between photography and peacebuilding by investigating case studies of community-engaged photographic practices in six countries dealing with the aftermath of war and genocide and ongoing violence, conflict and division.
In our accelerated visual age images are persistent forces that shape memory, perceptions, history and politics as much as they depict them. Despite significant scholarship on the photography of war, violence and suffering very little research has explored the visuality of peace. A new agenda for visual peace research seeks to more systematically understand the political significance and effect of images on post conflict peacebuilding in diverse cultural settings and the intentional harnessing of images and image-making for peace.
Working with photographers and research partners, Imaging Peace is researching the history, practice and methods of community engaged, photography interventions that work as forms of peace photography or strategic visual peacebuilding. The research will examine culturally specific and plural examples of noteworthy photography interventions where images and image-making are being intentionally used to build relations, to catalyse dialogue and healing and to create new imaginaries of peace.
Exploring questions around impact and ethics, it will build critical knowledge about their intentions and effects and analyse correlations and differences in their methods and strategies.
‘‘Fishing on Lake Nyirakigugu.’.
© Gisele Uwase / Kigali Centre for Photography, Rwanda
