Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
In a cooperation with Tiffany Fairey, we have contributed the chapter “Peace Photography, Visual Peacebuilding and Participatory Peace Photography” to The Routledge Handbook of Conflict and Peacebuilding Communication, edited by Stacey Connaughton and Stefanie Pukallus (chapter 36). The handbook was published online on 29 October 2024.
It is with deep sadness that we received the news of the untimely death of Paul Lowe, one of the giants of photojournalism.
Winner of the Global Peace Photo Award – Peace Image of the Year 2024, worth € 6000, is Elisa L. Iannacone, Great Britain / Mexico, with an image from her work Dream of Childhood.
Complexity theory alerts us to the limits of disaggregation in complex settings but research and analysis nevertheless often equal disaggregation. Because a complex social situation cannot be analyzed in its entirety, research often focusses on individual component parts of this situation, analysis of which seems manageable. Analyzing several components and subsequently assembling the results of the individual analyses, researchers hope to gain a complete picture of the overall setting or at least a picture that is as complete as possible.
Everybody remotely interested in the history of photography will immediately recognize the famous names featured in this exhibition – André Kertesz, László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa – and their contributions to art and photography: Bauhaus, abstraction, surrealism, photojournalism, street photography, war photography and so on. How the world appears in photography even today cannot be separated from the work of these photographers.
Just in time for your midsummer celebrations, we have an exhibition review for you: The exhibition Robert Capa: The Photojournalist, curated by Gabriella Csizek, shows approximately 150 photographs from the Master Collection. Capa’s most famous photographs can be seen here including a considerable number of images taken during the Spanish Civil War and some of the famous photographs from the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Often, Capa was not only a witness but also a participant taking pictures in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances, which supported both the authenticity of his images and his influential claim that proximity to action is an essential ingredient of photojournalism.
The Political Cartoons of Derso and Kelen: Years of Hope and Despair by Stefan Slater and David Macfadyen
“We bury a man of peace like Dag Hammarskjöld with military honours; we greet the arrival of the pope to the Holy Land with 21-gun salutes; we have no other ways to express our respect. Militarism is deep-seated in our brain and marrows,” wrote political cartoonist Emery Kelen (born in 1896), whose work – coauthored with Aloïs Derso (born in 1888) – is the subject of Stefan Slater and David Macfadyen’s fine book.
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. … She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.” (SOURCE: Dorothea Lange, Photographs of a Lifetime, New York: Aperture, 1982, p. 76)
Curators: Sam Bardaouil and Daria Prydybailo
In her solo exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, Seeing Without Light, Nadia Kaabi-Linke shows works representing two decades of artistic creation:
Looking back at the year 2023, we find it difficult to present a positive outlook for the upcoming year. Too many people suffer from violent conflict, and too many divisions exist, and seem to intensify, between and within countries. Advancements in peace seem illusionary in many contexts.