Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding

How can photographers, curators, and editors convey narratives of peace and not just stories of war?
Providing interdisciplinary and international perspectives on timely debates, Picturing Peace explores humanitarianism and visual culture, community collaboration, collective memory, and imagined futures for creating and sustaining of civil societies. How things look and are perceived are not superficial issues; when it comes to war and conflict, photography is vitally relevant not only to documenting violence, but also to rebuilding peaceful societies.

Genealogies of photographic representation and conflict; ethical questions related to the gaze and decolonisation; the significance of archival material for reassessing the cultural construction of enmity and harmony; and, finally, how recent initiatives have sought to think through and enact possibilities for peace. These timely issues - operating between picturing and peacebuilding - feed into a wider, urgent question: how can we care for a shared world?

Exploring multiple forms of peace photography, the volume offers a range of voices from preeminent international scholars, as well as interviews with practicing photographers who have experience of working with post-conflict communities, including Jacques Nkinginzabo (Learning for Change, Rwanda); Newsha Tavakolian (Magnum Photos); and Martina Bacigalupo (Agence Vu). Picturing Peace is a timely investigation into the politics of representation, questioning how photographers might help foster social relationships, transform conflicts, and reconcile communities in the image-oriented cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries.