A mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima after the US dropped an atom bomb on the city in 1945. Children fleeing a US napalm attack on a Vietnamese village in 1972. A lone man carrying shopping bags standing in front of a line of tanks on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Passengers lying dead in the aftermath of a Maoist ambush of a passenger bus in Chitwan in 2005. Children desperately extending utensils in the hope of recieving aid amid the genocide in Gaza.
The history of violence, conflict, and genocide across the world is well documented and ingrained in the global consciousness. But what comes to mind when people are told to conjure an image of peace?
The foreword of Tiffany Fairey’s new book Imaging Peace, asks this very question, leaving the reader to ponder. Unlike imagery of violent events, photos of peace are passive symbols – a V sign, a dove, an olive branch, a dove carrying an olive branch.
One could argue that depicting peace has limitations. After all, in the absence of violence, don’t all photographs depict peace? But in societies which have faced wars, conflicts, and genocide, peace is not a foregone conclusion, it needs to be built and protected. The end of war does not automatically mean peace.
This is where peace photography comes in.
COUNTER ARCHIVE
Fairey’s book looks at various methods of the visual documentation of peace in six countries which have faced armed conflicts, genocide, and violent events: in Colombia, Rwanda, Nepal, Northern Ireland, Mexico, as well as Bosnia and Herzgovina.
The approaches include photovoice, photo mentorship, therapeutic and participatory photography, and in the case of Nepal, visual archives that focus directly on the memory and aftermath of the decade-long Maoist conflict.
The Nepal chapter looks at post-conflict visual documentation by three collectives in the aftermath of the decade-long Maoist insurgency: a trilogy of books and travelling exhibitions titled A People War, Never Again, and People After War led by journalist Kunda Dixit, who is the publisher of Nepali Times, The Feminist Memory project initiated by the Nepal Picture Library, and Memory, Truth and Justice, of Voices of Women (VOW) media.
The case studies are examples of a 'counter archive', a component of peace photography which subverts established historical accounts and creates space for previously sidelined and intersectional stories to be shared.
Through travelling exhibitions and books, the initiatives allowed what began as a collection of photographs to evolve into testimonies, facilitating discourse and ultimately helping healing.
Fairey argues that in Nepal, like elsewhere in the world, historical archives are repositories of power structures, and archival practices have served to uphold dominant historical narratives of the decade-long conflict while excluding ‘marginalised and plural histories’.
‘Such archives not only establish and legitimise hidden and revised histories, but by making them visible they work to activate and build public and political imaginaries,’ writes Fairey.
One of the women featured in the Feminist Memory project is Ashmita Khadka. In an archival image, Khadka is smiling at the camera (pictured, above) with her hair wrapped in a towel as she kneels in the snow, happy because to wash after many days.
