Photographs are world-building. They don’t just reflect the world around us: they shape what we know, colour how we think, and impact how we feel. They focus our gaze towards certain events and people – and away from others. The perspectives they take frame our perceptions, direct the questions we might ask, and prompt particular emotional reactions. In both positive and negative ways, photographs – like many other kinds of storytelling – influence how we understand and interact with the world and with each other.
https://peace-dr-congo.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/peace-photography/
For us, visualising peace goes well beyond simply ‘picturing’ it: it involves evoking, figuring, engendering and ultimately realising it: narrating peace into (certain ways of) being.
The Visualising Peace project studies many different kinds of peace storytelling, in a wide range of media and genres. From the start, we have been particularly interested in visual politics – the ways in which the images that we consume, create and share influence how we think, feel and behave. Over the course of the project, students like Harris Siderfin, Marios Diakourtis, Otilia Meden and Maddie McCall have researched peace art and worked with different media to represent peace through the visual arts themselves. For a sample of their work, you can explore the following links in our Museum of Peace:
- Peace from Pieces – Harris Siderfin
- Visualising Peace after Forced Displacement – Marios Diakourtis
- Cyber Peace and Artivism with Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox – Otilia Meden
- Fractured Peace: a visual representation – Harris Siderfin
- Drawing a Peace Narrative (Literally) – Maddie McCall
- Inner Peace – Otilia Meden
We have also researched the power of artivism – peace activism through the arts. You can find a range of reflections on artivism (in song, film and other media, not just the visual arts) through this link.
As part of his research into visualisations of peace and peacebuilding in Tolkien’s writings and illustrations, Albert Suriñach I Campos has produced two oil paintings of his own, inspired by specific ‘pockets of peace’ in Tolkien’s work. You can read about them and his wider research in this report, and see the two images below.
We have been lucky enough to learn directly from award-winning photojournalist Hugh Kinsella Cunningham, who has shared his experienced of photographing peace with us; and in June-July 2023, we hosted an exhibition of his work that showcases the women’s peace movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As part of this, student Viktor Lopez-Roso researched different aspects of visual politics and strength-based photography, to help prepare our website and exhibition leaflet, which can be downloaded here.
As the culmination of our work on Picturing Peace, we hosted a Visualising Peace photography competition and exhibition in April 2024. You can see the winning and shortlisted entries and read more about the project here.


The mere of Cuiviénen
This painting, which focuses on a scene of “The Silmarillion”, presents a more scenic moment of peace that more accurately echoes the general themes of the book. Posthumously published after his death, The Silmarillion was Tolkien’s lifelong project, painstakingly detailing the history of Middle-Earth since its inception. In it, Ilúvatar, Father of the gods, devises unknown plans for the arrival of the different mortals (elves, humans) to the physical world, Middle-Earth. The description of the piece reads:
“Before the First Age of Middle Earth, far before even the Sun had been born, the first elves sprung from existence in the shores of the lakes of the Cuiviénen, unbeknownst to the gods themselves, as the first step in Eru Ilúvatar’s creation plan. Upon finding them, the gods gave the race of the elves their name – the Eldar, the “ones concerned with the stars”, for that is everything they saw, in the sky and in the lakes.[1] The stars, that minor light, less blaring than the Sun, is a poetic simile of a more nuanced and subtle light. They remind us of hope in times of darkness, of the light that needs to be carefully observed to be noticed, of the mystery and beauty in the Universe. This scene has always appeared particularly peaceful to me, a pure moment of creation that springs in silence, spontaneously, unconcerned by the schemes and conflicts that were shaking the primordial gods at the time. “
[1] Silmarillion, p.34
The shores of Tol Eressea
This painting explores the narratological element of peace, and how it is found through the story and not so much in the setting. The description of the peace reads:
“When Frodo returns to the Shire after his odyssey to throw the ring in Mordor, he finds himself unable to find peace, haunted by the shadow of the Morgul blade that pierced his shoulder. Many have compared Frodo’s struggle to enjoy his peaceful home again after coming back from war as an allegory of the PTSD of soldiers returning from war, as Tolkien would have seen during World War I. As a solution, Gandalf and the Elves offer him the chance to sail with them beyond the lands of mortals into the Undying Lands, where the gods and all the elves reside in eternal harmony. This last journey can be interpreted in a more religious or spiritual way, viewing the Undying Lands as a metaphysical heaven, or as fantasy, understanding the lands of Aman as a paradisiac fantasy version of a deathless utopia. The only certain interpretation is that the journey into the Undying lands stands for Frodo finally finding peace. I was always awe-struck by the imagination of a physical space that literally represents peace, and tried my best to portray it in this artwork. We know that Frodo would have arrived first to Tol Eressëa, a small island that acts as a kind of “purgatory” for mortals that would arrive to Aman, so it was on descriptions of said island that I based my painting.”