IN BRIEF
Peace is not only built through political agreements or diplomatic negotiations: it is also shaped by the images we see, share and create. Today, media coverage often gives much more visibility to war, violence and destruction, while peace remains harder to see. This creates a distorted imagination, where conflict feels inevitable and peace appears only as the absence of war. The Imaging Peace project tries to change this perspective. It explores how communities affected by conflict use photography to tell their own stories, process difficult experiences and open spaces for dialogue, care and connection. The key point is that photography’s power is not just in the final image, but in the process behind it: who takes the picture, what they choose to show, and how those images are shared and discussed. So, visualising peace is not neutral. It is a political and ethical act that can help us imagine different futures, beyond violence and conflict.
Why Images (and Image-Making) Matter for Peacebuilding
At a time when conflicts are increasingly mediated through screens, the images we see—and those we don’t—play a powerful role in shaping how peace is imagined, understood, and pursued. My ongoing Imaging Peace research, and the projects featured in the Ending Wars / Imaging Peace exhibition that opened at the Bologna Peacebuilding Forum on May 7th, begin from a simple but urgent premise: peace is not only negotiated in conference rooms or written into political agreements; it is also constructed visually.
Images do not just document reality. They frame it by feeding our political imaginations. They influence what counts as violence, who is seen as a victim or perpetrator, and what futures appear possible. But just as important as the images themselves is who creates these images, how they are produced, and under what conditions. In this sense, image-making is not neutral but a crucial form of agency and participation in the shaping of conflict and peace narratives and the matter of how we see and understand peacebuilding.
A dominant challenge in contemporary media is what has been called the “visibility bias” towards violence (Hoebel et al 2022). Dramatic images of destruction, suffering, and crisis circulate widely drawing attention to the horror and harms of war. Meanwhile, peace in its many different forms, that are often slow, fragile, and less visually spectacular, remains underrepresented. When peace is shown it is often only in its more negative forms, as an absence (of conflict) rather than being visualised in its own right, in more active and positive forms. This imbalance risks reinforcing the idea that conflict is inevitable and limits our understanding of the active, urgent work of peacebuilding.
Imaging Peace has examined what a photography of peace might consist of. While war photography, as a genre and practice is well established, the relationship between photography and peace has been neglected by researchers (Möller 2019). Despite this, visual practitioners around the world have long harnessed images and photography as a medium for peace by using visual practices to foster healing, dialogue, care and connection in settings of fragile peace and ongoing conflict and violence. The research has focused, not on professional image production, but on initiatives when photography is used by communities whose lives have been shaped by conflict and violence to document their lives and tell their stories.
From research into more than 30 international peace photography and visual peacebuilding initiatives, the exhibition showcases eight projects. These include photography by a collective of Rohingya photographers living the world’s largest refugee camps, army veterans in the USA, survivors of conflict related sexual violence in Central African Republic and displaced children in Turkey. These projects illustrate a range of visual approaches and methods that can be explored further in our free resource, ‘Peace Photography: A Guide’. They include visual archival campaigns to photovoice and therapeutic photography projects. The photographers involved show us what peace looks like in the day to day lived experiences and the lives of people who actively chose to pursue peace in the midst of ongoing violence and aftermath of war. Shifting the focus away from peace as being an abstract notion debated by politicians and as an outcome of high-level diplomacy they remind us that peace is also negotiated in everyday practices of resistance, care and co-operation.
A key argument in my forthcoming book, Imaging Peace, is that photography’s potential for peace does not lie only in the images themselves but in the encounters and dialogue that happens in the processes of making and sharing images. When people tell their own visual stories they decide what goes in the frame and what should be seen. When people create and share images with others they reflect on the drivers of conflict and what is important for peace. They engage with different perspectives that can transform how they see their past, present and future. They can work to process complex emotions and experiences. Images can be used to mediate difficult conversations. These encounters do not necessarily resolve conflicts but they can help people to navigate tension, ambiguity and discomfort. They can work towards transforming perspectives and locate new imaginative horizons for peaceful cultures or what Boulding calls ‘peaceableness’.
Of course there are no guarantees. Images can work to distort, coerce and entrench division as much as they can to transform conflict and foster repair and connection. What is crucial is an intentional approach that thinks about how the visuality of peace is directly linked to how we imagine peace as a political possibility. The exhibition in Bologna offers a space to reflect on these questions collectively. It invites viewers not just to consume images, but to engage with them: to ask what is shown, what is missing, and how different visual choices might lead to different understandings of conflict and peace. In a world saturated with images of conflict, choosing to actively visualize peace is not a neutral act. It is a political and ethical intervention—one that can help reshape how we understand the present and what futures we consider possible.
Contributing Projects and Partners:
Feminist Memory Project, Nepal Picture Library; Fotohane Darkroom; Everyday Peace Indicators; Kigali Centre for Photography; Odyssey Project; Picturing Reparation, Voices that Count; Post-Conflict Research Centre; Rohingyatographer
REFERENCES
- Boulding, Elise. 2000. Cultures of Peace. The Hidden Side of History. Syrancuse University Press.
- Fairey, Tiffany, and Ingrid Guyon. 2025. Peace Photography: A Guide. King’s College London.
- Fairey, Tiffany. 2026. Imaging Peace. Transforming Conflict, Resisting Violence and Building Community Through Photography. Edinburgh University Press.
- Hoebel, Thomas, Jo Reichertz, and René Tuma. 2022. ‘Visibilities of Violence: On Visual Violence Research and Current Methodological Challenges’. Historical Social Research 47 (1): 7–35.
- Möller, Frank. 2019. Peace Photography. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan.
Credit for the image: (c) The Home Stay Exhibitions / Kigali Centre for Photography
Tiffany Fairey
Dr Tiffany Fairey is a visual sociologist and leading photovoice and visual peace specialist with more than two decades of experience in participatory research, innovation, and practice in academic, community and NGO settings. She joined the Department of War Studies in 2019 having previously been based at University of the Arts London and co-founded and led the award-winning charity, PhotoVoice. An established arts and peace scholar, her work is concerned with creative and lived experiences of transitional justice, conflict transformation and peacebuilding, with a specific focus on visual peace research. Her Leverhulme Fellowship project, Imaging Peace, is the first multi-country empirical study of peace photography practice, ethics and impact. An active member of the Visual Embodied Methodologies Network, she is currently focused on the ESRC-funded Intersectional Gendered Violence, having previously worked on various interdisciplinary arts and peace-building projects including AHRC funded Art & Reconciliation, Izazov, a Changing the Story project and Imaging Social Justice.
