Frank talks to Alice König and Nicholas Wiater, the principal investigators of the Visualizing War project at the University of St Andrews, about the constructive function of social conflict; the visibility of peace in a world seemingly dominated by violence; the social impact of peace photography; the everydayness of peace photography and the – relative – peacefulness of everyday life; different ways to visualize peace; and the relationship between war photography and peace photography, among other things, in a podcast recorded May 25, 2021.
The podcast can also be accessed via Buzzsprout.
In Alice and Nicholas’s words: “In the podcast, we ask Frank what distinguishes ‘peace photography’ from other kinds of photography. That gets us talking about the long tradition of war photography, ‘anti-war’ photography, and the tendency to define and represent peace in relation to war – for example, by visualising peace through images of aftermath or post-conflict reconciliation and reconstruction. Frank argues for a broader approach to peace photography, and discusses the power of images of ‘everyday peace’ even in the midst of a war. He argues that if we can capture images of everyday peaceful practices, their momentum might grow and they might go on to generate more peaceful practices in turn. We also talk about the role that images of peace can play in mediation processes, through ‘active looking’. As Frank puts it in one of his books, ‘images reflect the world; in order to change the world, we need to change the images we see.’”
The Visualizing War project at the University of St Andrews, Season 1, Episode 25
Read more about the Visualizing War project on our blog or visit the project’s website.