Picturing Peace

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. *