By Tiffany Fairey
A new book, Imaging Peace, explores the symbiotic relationship between picturing peace and enacting it.
“What does peace look like to you?”. It’s the question at the heart of createPeace’s invitation to artists everywhere. It was also the question that framed a year-long, large-scale street exhibition of photographs by conflict affected communities that ran on one of London’s busiest streets between March 2025-26.
The Imaging Peace exhibition was part of a four-year research process where I investigated how photography – image making and sharing practices – can foster dialogue and healing, transform conflict and nurture peace in the aftermath of war and contexts of ongoing violence. This multi-country study has produced the visual methods resource, Peace Photography: A Guide, and a website containing 26 case studies of visual peace projects from around the world.
This month also sees the publication of my book, Imaging Peace, that captures in-depth learning from six diverse visual peace case studies: an indigenous photography collective, visual counter-archives, youth, photo mentoring, photovoice and therapeutic photography projects.
In all these initiatives, images are made and shared by people with lived and intergenerational experience of conflict and mass violence. They use photography, with intention, to open up difficult conversations, reveal hidden stories and to inspire that peace is possible. They take pictures to remember and process the harms of war, to resist ongoing violence and injustice, to celebrate their culture and traditions that sustain peace, to show peaceful coexistence, to counter divisive narratives and to imagine and insist on non-violent futures. My research views their work through a peace photography lens to try to better understand how, in the words of Frank Möller, photography can be ‘complicit with peace’ (2017:322).
The book argues that imaging peace (using images to represent and nurture peace and resist violence) is central to building our imaginaries for peace because images are potent, unpredictable political forces that help shape the conditions in which peace emerges. Whilst we have an excess of images of war, we have a very limited visual vocabulary for peace which curtails our capacity to imagine and enact it.
The deceptively complex question: ‘What does peace look like?’ requires us to reflect on this contested and abstract concept and define what peace is for us. Making a picture of peace, and sharing it, provokes conversation about what matters to peace, what prevents it, about different and common perspectives. It helps form what people, or a community, imagines peace to be. To image peace is to begin imagining it. The imagination, the peace scholar John Paul Lederach writes, must lie at the centre of peacebuilding because in contexts where peace is not yet a reality, it gives us the “the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist.” (2005:29)
Imaging Peace draws on collaborative research with peacebuilders and community members working with local photographers in Colombia, Rwanda, Nepal, Northern Ireland and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Across all these cases, photography’s peace effects and capacities are not a given. Images can be used to drive conflict and division as much as they can be used to overcome it. However, what is clear is when photography is harnessed to think about and pursue peace it is the processes of making and sharing images as much as the picture themselves that work to foster healing, resistance, solidarity and dialogue.
In Rwanda, young people held exhibitions in their own homes. Neighbours sat together, looking at photographs, by the young photographers, of issues shaping their lives, talking about the sensitive topics depicted and rebuilding the web of relationships still affected by the legacy of genocide. In Colombia, six communities affected over generations by the country’s internal conflict produced 114 everyday peace photo stories to capture their everyday signs and indicators of peace, co-existence and justice. Their kaleidoscope of images – much like the huge range of peace art on this website – reveal that peace looks different in different places to different people.
As the number of conflicts around the world continue to rise, peace feels more fragile than ever. But as we mark International Day of Peace, it is worth us returning time and time again to the question of what peace looks like. We need a multitude of visual interpretations to feed our collective peace imaginaries: to show the many different pieces needed to sustain dynamic peaceful cultures.
Fairey, Tiffany. 2026. Imaging Peace. Transforming Conflict, Resisting Violence and Building Community Through Photography. Edinburgh University Press. For more on the research see imagingpeace.org.
Fairey, Tiffany, and Ingrid Guyon. 2025. Peace Photography: A Guide. King’s College London.
Lederach, John Paul. 2005. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford Univeristy Press.
Möller, Frank. 2017. ‘From Aftermath to Peace: Reflections on a Photography of Peace’. Global Society 31 (3): 315–55.