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. In his 2019 book Peace Photography (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) Frank Möller discusses the role that different kinds of photography have played in determining how we visualise and approach peace and peacebuilding.
Noting the enduring influence of ‘war photography’, he argues that some photographic trends have obscured our view of the many different ways in which people make peace, even amid conflict. But he also points to photography’s capacity to reframe our vision of the world in ways that make peace and peacebuilding more visible and realisable. Peace photography can actively contribute to peace, Möller argues, by making it better understood and more tangible. And by pointing their lenses – and our gazes – towards the creative work of grassroots peace activists, photographers can harness more support for them at local, national and international levels.
The University of St Andrews’ Visualising Peace project has been working with amateur and professional photographers to picture peace and 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. Later that year, Visualising Peace student Robert Rayner investigated ‘Everyday Peace’ through the lens of amateur photography. Robert canvassed an international and interdisciplinary group of St Andrews students, asking them to send in photos from their camera roll that looked like peace to them. You can see a collage of the results below:
Many people were self-effacing about their submissions, claiming their contributions were just ‘generic landscapes’ or apologising that ‘they’re not the best’ but were personally significant. Some felt that their photos had an overarching theme, while others said they were ‘quite random’. 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 and conveyed peace to some through the absence of people. In this collage of peace photos, strangers seemed a very rare component.
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. In this corner of St Andrews, landscapes, social spaces and pets were popular, although the reasoning behind them was articulated very differently. 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 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 Magazine 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.
Please use this link to submit your peace-themed photo, with a corresponding caption that explains where the photo is taken and how it relates to peace or peacebuilding: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDwAVYhoIjl85CkHb4HrEY-zGf2TjM_cjb9LueUTOkTP6ilg/viewform
You may submit several photos for the competition, but please do so via separate entries with one photo per submission.