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Picturing Peace

Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding

Pippa Oldfield editor Dr Tom Allbeson editor Professor Jolyon Mitchell editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Publishing:23rd Jan '25

£95.00

This title is due to be published on 23rd January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Picturing Peace cover

This book provides critical new insights into the relationship between photography and peace by considering how making and sharing images can contribute to 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.

A wide-ranging and insightful focus on one of photography’s most fundamental drivers – the question of proposing, creating, visualising and sustaining peace. This is an innovative volume that sheds light on photography’s complex and understudied engagement with peace. * Parvati Nair, Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, UK *
Can images help us imagine peace in a world plagued by war? Through a series of masterful essays, co-authored by leading scholars and award-winning photographers, this ground-breaking volume reminds us that making peace is also about visualising peace, about seeing how peace might work in pictures - a work just as arduous as it is noble and just as fragile as it is necessary. A must-read! * Lilie Chouliaraki, Chair in Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK *
War photographers say their images call for peace, but what it means to visualize alternatives to conflict has been undertheorized in analyses of our image world. This collection rectifies that, bringing together many leading writers to open up new imaginaries. * David Campbell, Education Director, The VII Foundation *
This excellent book confronts readers and viewers with a number of searching and difficult questions. Presenting a new affective terrain that explores slowness and the unspectacular, local participation and agency, it questions who is looking, and for whom. It suggests how mainstream categories of war and humanitarian photography have obscured our capacity to see difficult spaces in sensitive ways, and this shift brings something very new. * Patricia Hayes, National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. *

ISBN: 9781350258853

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

352 pages