Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
“Paradoxically, if you see an image as a photograph, it is a photograph – for you.” This is the idea inspiring the current exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography: “An image endowed with a photographic look is easily thought of as evidence of a presence in front of a camera, even though it may result from computational processes.”
Südosteuropa Mitteilungen is the leading bi-monthly German-language journal on politics, culture, economics, and society of south-eastern Europe. We are happy to announce publication of an article titled ‘Bilder von Frieden und Krieg betrachten – Die visuelle Darstellung von Bosnien und Herzegowina’ / ‘Looking at War and Peace – The Visual Representation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 7–20).
On May 7, we presented a paper at the Finnish International Studies Association Conference, which took place in Tampere, Finland. The conference was jointly organized by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, the Ministry of Defence of Finland, the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Tampere University, and the Foundation for Foreign Policy Research.
These notes are about peace research in a time of war. Indeed, the media is dominated by images of confrontation, polarization, armed aggression, and human suffering – all the sorry ingredients of modern warfare. War sidelines peace, war images sideline peace images.
Art as a Political Witness, edited by Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller and published in 2017, is now an OPEN ACCESS title (DOI: 10.3224/84740580) which is free to download.
On April 2, we presented a paper at Helsinki Photomedia 2022: the Fifth International Photography Research Conference at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Espoo. The conference, originally scheduled for 2020, was titled Images Among Us – a title alluding to the ubiquitousness of visual images in our media-saturated world.
There is an abundance of possibilities to visualize peace. Take, as just two examples, The Global Peace Photo Award[i] and The German Peace Prize For Photography[ii]. Both awards unite under one umbrella diverse images, representing various photographic aesthetics as well as political messages. It is not always possible to pinpoint what these images have in common, what could characterize them as “images of peace”.
Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), awareness grows that not only the international system is complex but also IR as a discipline. Considerable growth over the last decades coincides with increasing difficulties both to communicate across intra-disciplinary borders and to reach out to policymakers. The same can certainly be said about recent trends in peace and conflict research.
In our new article “Messiness in Photography, War and Transitions to Peace – Revisiting Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” we take a closer look at an interactive photography project published in the New York Times on the Web in 1996, Fred Ritchin and Gilles Peress’s project Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace.
We are pleased to announce that we contributed to the special issue for the 50th anniversary of Kosmopolis, the journal published by the Finnish Peace Research Association. In our article, Soveltava visuaalinen rauhantutkimus: Kuvat, rauhanvälitys ja aktiivinen katsominen (in English: Applied Visual Peace Research: Images, Mediation and Active Looking), we explore how images can contribute to peace processes from a more practical perspective, starting a new line of research: Applied Visual Peace Research. To do so, we look at possible ways images can advance peace processes by examining international peace mediation more specifically.