2026 Outstanding ART FOR Peace

Jan Banning is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work examines history, power, and human rights. Through meticulous research, formal portraiture, and the integration of personal testimony, Banning explores how individuals live with the enduring consequences of injustice and conflict. His practice seeks to give voice to those shaped by historical forces while resisting simplification or spectacle.

In his Rwanda project, Blood Bonds: Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda, created in collaboration with writer Dick Wittenberg, Banning produced 18 paired portraits of survivors of the 1994 genocide alongside the individuals who perpetrated violence against them and their loved ones. Photographed 30 years later, after community-based reconciliation processes, each portrait pair is accompanied by testimony that centers accountability, memory, and lived experience.

Banning does not present reconciliation as symbolic or complete. Instead, he portrays it as a fragile and ongoing human process shaped by trauma, remorse, and the necessity of coexistence. By placing victim and perpetrator within the same frame with equal compositional dignity, he neither erases moral responsibility nor reduces suffering to abstraction.

Through projects such as Blood Bonds, Banning contributes to peacebuilding by deepening public understanding of reconciliation as lived reality rather than an idealized outcome. His work preserves memory, affirms human dignity, and fosters thoughtful engagement that strengthens the cultural foundations upon which sustainable peace depends.