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.
Despite the ‘pictorial turn’ in peace studies, integrating visual research methods remains challenging.[i] Academia seems hesitant to put the visual at the heart of its endeavors. Scholars tend to ‘capture’ and categorize meanings by ‘reading images’ instead of allowing themselves to be ‘captured by’ the image and its evocative and imaginative potential.[ii] The image as data, however, demands the researcher to first ‘sit’ with the image and question which certainties might be disrupted. We often approach the image as text, while visual analysis may require alternative methodological steps and reporting techniques.[iii] It is important to ask: ‘What does the image do to us?’ Instead of: ‘How can we label it?’.
At the time of writing more than 26.000 black and white ‘Peace Now’ posters are spread and attached to public spaces across the Netherlands. The organizers of the initiative, which started in the ‘peace city’ Utrecht, describe the free poster (image 2) as a ‘positive conversation starter’ in the context of increasing polarization.[i] Citizens are, by making the peace sign visible, enabled to express their feelings of powerlessness and ‘wishes for the world’, while wars at a distance continue to rage. According to its makers, the black and white colors represent current societal contrasts. The bold lines also shape the dove and olive branch, two popular examples of peace symbolism. The font of the poster recalls memories of the ‘60s and ‘70s anti-war protests.
“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)