Peace photography: Healing through the lens

Peace negotiations and reconciliation processes can change the world – but they’re not much to look at. The shortage of compelling images is one of many challenges to making peace more tangible in our very visual world.  

But if  we expand the concept of peace to include what peace actually means to people who have lived through conflict, then what peace looks like can be expansive. Like a portrait of a family reunited after a war. Or something unexpected, like a photo of a man walking on stilts through a refugee camp, entertaining a host of children.  

Our guests this episode are Tiffany Fairey, a Senior Research Fellow based at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and Ingrid Guyon, a photographer and participatory visual media practitioner. They’ve both spent over 15 years working around the world helping communities affected by conflict to tell their own stories through photography.  

Fairey and Guyon are co-authors of Peace Photography: A Guide, which presents a methodology and approach that celebrates peace efforts and encourages creativity, drawing on projects in 21 countries. Fairey’s upcoming book Imaging Peace: How People Use Photography to Resist Violence, Transform Conflict, and Build Connection will be out this autumn from Edinburgh University Press.  

To view the images discussed in this episode, go to makingpeacevisible.org/podcast.  

LEARN MORE

Download a free copy of the guide in English, Spanish or French; browse peace photography projects, explore Fairey’s research, and more at imagingpeace.org.  

Follow the Imaging Peace project on Instagram @imaging_peace.

Read Tiffany Fairey’s essay on the Everyday Peace Indicators project in Colombia in The Conversation  

Read Ingrid Guyon’s blog post for Beyond Skin on visiting Belfast as a peace photographer

ABOUT THE SHOW

 The Making Peace Visible podcast is hosted by Jamil Simon and produced by Andrea Muraskin. Our associate producer is Faith McClure. Learn more at makingpeacevisible.org

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