PEACE PHOTOGRAPHY
Dr Alice König and Robert Rayner
Photographs are world-building. They don’t just reflect the world around us: they shape what we know, and impact how we feel. In his book Peace Photography Frank Möller explores the role that photography have played in determining how we visualise and approach peace. He contrasts the use of ‘war photography’ in representing peacemaking, to highlight photography’s equal potential of making peace, as a subject in itself, more tangible and better understood. By telling the stories of local activists, photographers also play a vital role in gaining support for grassroot peace efforts across the world.
The University of St Andrews’ Visualising Peace Project has been working with amateur and professional photographers to picture peacebuilding from new perspectives. In 2023, we hosted an exhibition called Picturing Peace, featuring Hugh Kinsella Cunningham’s award-winning photographic project on the Women’s Peace Movement in the DRC. Visualising Peace student Robert Rayner also investigated ‘Everyday Peace’ through with a group of amateur photographers.
The participants were asked to send in photos that symbolized ‘peace’ to them. Many were self-effacing about their submissions, claiming their contributions were just ‘generic landscapes’. Though, several people commented that they found the curation process enjoyable and that they felt relaxed or calm looking at their peace photographs. The way that people were included in the submitted photos was particularly interesting: when they were the subject of the image, the people in peace photographs were almost always family members or friends. Many other photos, such as those of old towns, merely implied the existence of people.
Positive peace is not just the absence of violent conflict, but the presence of strong institutions, justice, and social harmony. When the Everyday Peace Indicators Project asked people in post-conflict zones to photograph peace, participants included drone-free skies, de-mined roads and un-looted livestock. Despite significant differences, due to people’s distance from or proximity to conflict, the global similarity across different manifestations of ‘peace photography’ is striking.
From war-torn cities to quiet university towns, peace photography demonstrates that many individuals and communities have an implicit understanding of positive peace. The commonplace calm and bonds of connection and care evident in different examples of peace photography across cultures indicates that true peace – and therefore true peacebuilding – must encompass all of life: both its mundanity and transcendence.
The ‘everyday peace’ collage created by Robert will go on display – alongside other visualisations of peace, curated by the wider Visualising Peace team – in the cloister of St Salvator’s Quad from April to June 2024. In March 2024 the Visualising Peace team will be collaborating with PRISMA to run a photography competition entitled Visualising Peace. We are keen to see how people all around the world, in different contexts and communities, understand peace – from inner peace to geopolitical or even cosmic peace, past, present and future. The deadline for entries is 31st March, and a selection of photographs will be exhibited at a local showcase in St Andrews in April 2024 in the lead-up to PRISMA announcing the winner in the April issue. You may submit several photos for the competition, but please do so via separate entries with one photo per submission.
We look forward to seeing your work and your interpretation of peace!
This article first appeared in PRISMA, Issue 13.