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This question, posed by Fred Ritchin (2013), challenges photography’s long entanglement with conflict, suffering, and spectacle. While photography has been central to how war and violence are seen, far less attention has been given to how the medium might help imagine, foster and enact peace (Möller 2019). This talk will discuss Tiffany Fairey’s book and project, Imaging Peace, the first multi-country, multi-year study of localised and community-engaged peace photography in diverse conflict and peace settings. Initiatives range from photo-mentoring, counter-archives, cross-community, therapeutic and photovoice projects and indigenous collectives in countries such as Colombia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Nepal and Bosnia & Herzegovina. In all these projects, local actors intentionally harness photography to not only depict peace but to actively drive and shape it. They use images and image-making and sharing processes to support healing and dialogue, repair relations, resist ongoing violence, cultivate complexity and navigate difference in contexts of deep division and polarisation. A photography of peace is not defined by the absence of conflict or by an exclusive focus on the subject of peace but by its relational, ethical and imaginative orientation: how it invites viewers and makers alike to acknowledge past and ongoing violence but also to see differently, to recognise others, and to make plural, non-violent futures visible and thinkable. In doing so, it repositions photography as a form of social, political and affective repair amid a resurgent global landscape of conflict and authoritarianism, which makes the imaginative and perpetual labour of peace more urgent than ever.
Tiffany Fairey is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her academic research explores creative, community-centred peacebuilding with a focus on visual peace research. Co-founder and former director of the award-winning charity PhotoVoice, Fairey pioneered participatory visual practice and is an established photovoice specialist. She has held a Leverhulme Fellowship and been awarded the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal. Publications include Peace Photography: A Guide and Imaging Peace (forthcoming, 2026).
Event image credit: (c) Edwin Cubillos / Everyday Peace Indicators