The Art of Visual Peacemaking

A few weeks ago a new organization, The International Guild of Visual Peacemakers (IGVP), launched their website.   Their vision statement describes IGVP as a group of “visual communicators devoted to peacemaking and breaking down stereotypes by displaying the beauty and dignity of various cultures around the world.”

Instead of having photography, videography, design and other visual arts confirm stereotypes, IGVP have developed an ethical code to emphasize common humanity and to reduce the “social distance” between “us and the “other” by highlighting the beauty and dignity of all people.

I first heard about this website from Howard Zehr’s blog.   Howard Zehr, who is on JustPeace’s advisory board, is a professor at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and a key leader in the restorative justice movement.  He is also a photographer and was asked to help craft IGVP’s ethical code and be a contributing blogger.  In his first blog post on the IGVP site, Zehr points out a few examples of how he has used photography to promote healing and understanding in his work with victims and offenders in the criminal justice system.

While there isn’t anything inherently theological or faith-based about IGVP, people of faith can learn a lot from the organization’s example.   ‘Art’ has always been an integral part of religious language.   The biblical prophets spoke the language of art to critique the status quo and to inspire a different way of being.   They obviously did not have photography and videography in their repertoire, but they did use the artistic tools of the day – lyrical poetry and song.   And, if cameras had been around back then, I think we would have seen the prophets following a similar ethical code as IGVP.

As Walter Brueggemann writes, the role of the prophet is “to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”¹ When the dominant culture espouses an ideology of exclusion, otherness, violence and revenge, it is the job of the artist-as-prophet and the prophet-as-artist to enact, what Brueggemann calls “prophetic imagination” to depict a different way.

IGVP is committed to erasing the false sense of otherness that the mainstream media often emphasizes for ‘shock value’.  By focusing on one another’s common humanity, visual artists can create a culture of peace and reverse our tendencies to fear that which seems different than us.  In fact, visual peacemakers can help us realize that we’re not really all that different after all.

Properly executed, images have the power to make us aware of situations and conditions around the world that we were formerly unaware of. Images can cause us to identify and feel at one with with people across the globe if the photo or video captures the pain, suffering, hope, love and longing that all of us can relate to.

Social theorist Theodor Adorno comes close to Brueggemann’s ‘prophetic imagination’ when speaking of music:  ’Music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express — in the antinomies of its own formal language –the exigency of the social condition and to call for change through the coded language of suffering.”² The purpose of art then, is not reconciliation, but the promesse de bonheur–the promise of reconciliation–what Adorno believes to be art’s truth content.

Successful art then is, “not so much the work which reconciles objective contradictions in the illusion of harmony, but much more so that which expresses the idea of harmony negtively by engraving the contradictions, pure and uncompromised in its innermost structure.”³

Observing the great work of IGVP and reading their code of ethics for visual peacemaking makes me think of the Church and how art is most commonly employed in church services and church events.   Do we take our cues from the biblical prophets or from corporations and the mainstream media?   Do we express an “illusion of harmony” to make everyone feel comfortable and content with the way things are, or are we expressing an idea of true harmony like IGVP by breaking down stereotypes and creating, displaying and engaging art to make our common humanity evident?

1. Walter Brueggemann. The Prophetic Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001., p. 3
2.  Theodor Adorno, “”On the Social Situation of Music,” p. 393
3.  Theodor Adorno, “Culture Criticism and Society,”  p. 32