Reinterpreting security through images and stories
Using photography and discussion, our Visualising Security project allowed communities and individuals across the UK to express their own priorities for security through images and stories and to contribute to the Alternative Security Review.
The aim was to gather security concerns from a wide range of people in an accessible way. Images allow people who might never have been asked what is important for their security to represent their own ideas.
The images are gathered under different headings, basic needs, community, our environment and climate change, and war conflict and insecurity
Basic Needs
Roger Horne, Painting of a Monk
The picture of a monk is a linocut printed over a watercolour background. I bought it from an art student about 50 years ago, and I still love it – the colour of the background, the simplicity of the image, the peace in the monk’s face, and his focus on the book in his hand. Maybe I somewhat envy his peace and apparent contentment. This is one possession that really matters to me. It’s been part of my life for the last 50 years, I suppose.
Amanda Jones, My meme – Security within
So it’s just when you are secure, that’s how I feel because I think a lot of the time your thoughts are very stressful when you’re insecure and when you can find that peace in Quakerism that’s in you, thoughts are allowed to just float by… (Click to read more)
I do something called “experiment with light” and find that very helpful, which is the Quaker-led meditation. A lot of people come along to “experiment with light” to settle themselves because they are insecure about different problems going on in their lives. Once you’ve sat in meditation – because it’s a guided meditation – you allow those thoughts to just float by without actually thinking about them. It’s when you are settled and at peace and where you find the love or the light inside – it’s is one of the huge things that I do.
Chantelle Phinda, Freedom of Movement
I was on the train and then these two other trains went by and it just made me think of a freedom of movement and that gave a sense of security because … I was thinking “what if that didn’t exist? And what if we were restricted in our movement? Would I feel more secure? What? I feel insecure.” And I guess it just made me feel like that, that idea of freedom of movement tied quite closely into security as well. When you have the freedom to move, and have the freedom to go where you want to go. All these trains are headed in different directions. With that comes a sense of security and a sense of feeling safe. Which is weird because you don’t normally tend to associate travel with being safe. But if you flip it on its head and think of not being able to travel, being restricted, being kept in one place, that built a sense of feeling unsafe for me, if I’m actively being restricted from goming where I want to go.
I think of lock and key, that sense of safety, securing something, but I also think of it on the other side, of restricting something and seeing the trains go by and flipping all the of that on its head made me think of being able to travel, being able to move freely, instil that sense of security.
Helen Martins (WILPF), The Wrong Kind of Jew
Wearing my Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom T-shirt, this is my “badge of honour”. As the daughter of German Jewish refugees, who lost their entire families in the Holocaust, I am “the wrong kind of Jew”, deploring the Zionist apartheid state of Israel and standing with those who campaign for unconditional rights of Palestinians.
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) links human rights, women’s participation, disarmament, justice and development in all relevant bodies.
Katy Frank (WILPF), Food
To me, access to food is a key part of security. Quality food is a human right and the ability to share food with loved ones and community is a key part of creating a safe space
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) links human rights, women’s participation, disarmament, justice and development in all relevant bodies.
Paula Shaw (WILPF), Dying in Dignity
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) links human rights, women’s participation, disarmament, justice and development in all relevant bodies.
Marion McNichol, Passports
I’ve got 2 passports and so in a way I’d like to just have the Irish passport, but the British passport feels like … I have to have it somehow to live in this society. So there’s something about security and insecurity that’s kind of wrapped up in those passports.
Community
Jane Stephenson, The Mycelium
What helps me to feel secure is being connected with lots of different people and lots of different groups, and also recognizing that this is something that’s quite deep within how the world operates. So this image of the trees and the mycelium and all of that is all relatively new knowledge… (Click to read more)
They’re all connected I find quite inspiring I suppose and that when we encounter things that limit or reduce our ability to connect with others which right-wing policies often do, with their xenophobia and walls and, you know, separate culture wars, etc, that makes me feel very insecure.
And I’m finding now that my connections, particularly locally within the village where I live, are much, much, much broader than [my usual circle]. But I am enjoying them nonetheless, because I am seeing them as opportunities to express my opinions in forums where sometimes those ideas are quite alien or new or, you know, and that’s quite liberating, I suppose.
Nick Aslett, Security – Open Community in Harmony with the Earth
My thoughts often go to the community as a real source of of strength and security. But I always have a dilemma about community because as well as the positives are that the communities can be introspective and protective and they can damage as well as build strength… (Click to read more)
Whilst communities have undoubted strengths and I’ve benefited enormously from those strengths over my life I’d like to consider myself a positive part of the community that I’m in, real, real community starts with our ability to live in peace and harmony with the environment that we are in. So this is the idea of circularity and recognizing that every action that we take has a consequence on our environment and if we aren’t conscious of that first before we act, then we cause damage.
We have found ways of protecting ourselves from the damage that we create and as a consequence have lost any kind of realistic connection with the environment that we live in. Security in this image is about the positives that our environment provides us with and when we embrace them and when we take the benefit of our environment and our community seriously and we don’t overreach it and we don’t overuse it. That’s what represents security. That to me would be the harmony that we need and I seek.
Celia Feane, My Neighbour’s Cat
The cat represents the neighbours because the neighbours’ cat comes into our garden. Sometimes it poos but we don’t complain or mention it because they are the best neighbours we could wish for because they look at us as elderly neighbours to be kept an eye on. So we feel secure. And I know even if I was on my own here, if anything happened, I would have help.
We’ve got a hedge and a biggish fence but then quite a bit of fence that is small enough to look over. That makes interaction easy and I feel sorry for houses when I see great huge hedges all around because it might keep the noise of the traffic away, but it also inhibits good relationships – neighbourly, small interactions that are very important.
So translating that to nations, our relationship with France is fine despite Brexit, but there’s our neighbour Russia over there….If I was a similarly aged woman living in the West Bank [Palestine], however nice my neighbours were, I would feel extremely insecure and threatened. So anything is fragile, isn’t it?
Pelumi, Security in Community and Investment
This is a picture that I took on Sunday. So when I thought of security there were different layers to it. Behind the people, there is a security guard at the door, a very obvious meaning of security. But also the reason I took a picture of this building on this particular shot is this is a new building that our church has got after like years of saving up and over 20 years of people contributing. And it made me think of security in another way in terms of that community aspect, in terms of the reason for security, the reason for safety is not just for the here and now, but for the legacy, like protecting the vision of the past and what will be built on top of that. And I really like how the door is open, but there is a security guard. There’s a presence there, but it’s still welcoming people in. There’s still a back-and-forth. There’s still diversity coming through the doors. And yeah, that’s why I took this picture and this is what came to mind. Like, they’re different things that signal security and safety.
Marion McNichol, Family
This picture is a family image: my brother and sister, my three sons and my grandchildren.
And that was what I came up with as a sort of security. Having contact with them, being able to kind of meet together, support each other.
Marion McNichol, Cross-border Support
The family at the back there, are a Syrian family that we found a house for and then brought over and supported for nearly three years. And there’s something about being able to cross borders and help people across borders that feels like a kind of security issue. That it felt an important image to me.
Our environment and climate change
Martin May, Mountain Colour Wash
At the moment we have a very militaristic top-down approach to security, which is symbolised by the black mountain over the green hills … what we want security to be [are] the green hills and the beach and the river and the sea. We want to recognize our green spaces our ecosystem and our biosphere as our security, and we want to portray the militarism which passes for security as the problem, we want to do away with the militarism and instead take a restorative, ecological approach to security.
War and conflict aren’t security. It’s an expression of insecurity. So it’s an expression of … a lack of certainty about the future, about what the future holds because climate change is frightening.
Phoebe Spence, My Retrofit
Being privileged to receive a legacy, I decided to invest it in retrofitting my house. My home is the basis of my security – basing me in the community, reflecting my identity, a safe space for friends and family… (Click to read more)
So I have some energy security with solar panels, good insulation, and also an air source heat pump. Disconnecting the gas supply felt like quite a statement – no fossil fuels, no fracking gas.
I am fortunate to have a garden in which I grow food – also for the wildlife, on which we ultimately all depend – to secure the fragile ecosystems that have evolved over millions of years. So I conserve water as far as possible, collecting and using rainwater.
I chose my home, as volunteering with asylum seekers, I am even more aware how important a home, and its services, is for a sense of security.
I think security is about the basics, food and warmth and feeling safe.
Celia Feane, Hope in Children who Act on Climate Change
The photograph is to represent hope. That all the children who are interested in climate change and know about climate change and they’re doing something about climate change. So, I think they’re my hope.
Sheila Triggs (WILPF), Garden
I have attached a picture of my garden which gives me a feeling of security.
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) links human rights, women’s participation, disarmament, justice and development in all relevant bodies.
War, Conflict and Insecurity
Lily Hamourtziadou, Ever Present Surveillance
The image I wanted to share is one really of potential endless insecurity… The idea is that drones provide us with a more ethical war, fewer casualties, and precision airstrikes. Only the guilty people get hit…. (Click to read more)
But I’m concerned that they make us less secure and they completely remove any prospect of peace, real peace, because you’re always being watched and monitored and potentially you could be a target yourself. And you know, famously they say you won’t hear the drone that kills you. This being watched, that was associated with totalitarian states, with the secret police that the West was so against and so moral about. Now it’s come here and it’s presented to us as a victory and as the best way to safeguard our security.
And that I find extremely troublesome… I think that is the biggest threat we face as a humanity and that guarantees that there will never be peace. That’s what I feel.
Diana Francis, My Main Campaign Message
This is my chief campaigning message, and we have it on our stall, our peace stall, at our weekly vigil on a Saturday in the centre of Bath, and it gets a lot of attention. It gets photographed, we give them away to people who promised to put them in a window and we’ve seen them in all sorts of places. As time goes on, they go to other countries as well… (Click to read more)
But for me it says that’s all. And it says it is not just about war and the devastation that it causes, but about the things that are not addressed because we’re too busy fighting wars, creating more conflict, and also desperately, seriously adding vastly to climate change.
It’s not my witticism. It came from the Yugoslav wars. It was graffiti, I think in Pakrac [Croatia] and it went around on emails and I just thought it said everything for me.
Lily Hamourtziadou, My Casualty Counting Notebooks
For the last 18 years, I have worked as a casualty recorder and I record on a daily basis civilian deaths in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. These are six of my 18 notebooks. This is my work, which has become very personal to me and it is a human tragedy and the worst insecurity I could imagine that I experience indirectly… (Click to read more)
What is particularly painful about this is that while this is going on, we are experiencing this from a place of safety, despite the fact that our country here is directly involved in that horror. This really hurts me you know.
I’ve, I’ve been doing this for years now and I’m always emotional when I take out the data from reports and I actually physically write it down, especially when there are names, especially when there are children. So that for me is the greatest insecurity I have experienced, that I have witnessed in my capacity as a casualty reporter.
I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve been asked why I do it. Why do you do it? You’re not even Iraqi. And then I say, no, I’m Greek, so why do you do it? That I shouldn’t feel anything or think anything about these Iraqis that are dying because, well, I’m not one of them. It’s not like they’re Greeks or British people, you know? And the fact that we are all connected seems to escape completely from the minds of people who say this to me.
Philip Austin, Manchester Victoria with the Arena in the Background, 22nd May 2017
This is a picture taken on a nice, sunny May afternoon in Manchester Victoria station I’ve just been to a meeting of the Greater Manchester Interfaith Network which I’m involved in with interfaith things in in Bolton, Manchester. A lot of it is about building better understanding and connections between people, of different faiths… (Click to read more)
I don’t know what made me take this picture, but it just felt like it was very relaxed, comfortable, people were just relaxing, walking to their trains and it just felt like a sort of nice peaceful scene really.
The glass bit beyond the old buildings, that’s Manchester Arena and this is on May 22nd of May 2017.
And that night there was the attack on Manchester Arena, the bomb explosion, and it just seemed extraordinary that I’d just taken that photo there that afternoon.
And it affected me quite significantly because I’ve been so close to it, I guess in time and place and of course it raised a lot of issues of interfaith stuff locally. And then a lot of questions came up about it through interfaith meetings.
I’ve heard since that Greater Manchester police think they failed, they should have picked this guy up earlier. What should they have picked up? And then where? Where does the hate or where does the distress come from that causes somebody to want to blow themselves up in a public space like that?
The insecurity that’s been created around the world that leads people to that terrible decision to do that?
And then think about the people who had gone to that concert and it was full of joy and hope and the insecurity that’s been bred from that people were feeling very anxious about going to concerts and venues without thorough searching and so on.
Philip Austin, Glade of Light Memorial in Manchester
This is the memorial which has been built a short distance away from the arena for the people who were killed in that attack … I’ve only visited that once just a few months ago and it’s quite odd because this this was a very busy thoroughfare where it’s been put with buses… (Click to read more)
You know when I first arrived, Greater Manchester buses pounding up and down, but they pedestrianized this bit of the city centre next to the cathedral. Yeah, all around there are these huge tower blocks going up.
You’ve got this strange Oasis of greenness being put in the middle and you can see the label on this, the monument’s called the The Glade of Light, which obviously for Quakers has significance in terms of it says something to me about sort of vulnerability.
Just that space feels quite surrounded by all that urbanness.
Helen Martins (WILPF), Women in Black Against War
At the weekly Women in Black Against Militarism and War silent vigil in London. Women in Black is a world-wide network of women committed to peace with justice and actively opposed to injustice, war, militarism and other forms of violence.
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) links human rights, women’s participation, disarmament, justice and development in all relevant bodies.
Carmen Wilson, Gun culture, anger at Capitalism and Supermarkets
This is actually a supermarket in a small county, rural town outside of Albuquerque. This is a common chain of supermarkets across the Southwest (USA) and across New Mexico. And I thought that I would provide this because first off, it shows what a lot of people, just everyday, average people think of as human security – being able to provide the basics, food, shelter, things like that. But this is really a luxury, to be able to walk into a big supermarket and have all of these options right at your fingertips. … (Click to read more)
But what really is interesting about this photo is that I was at this supermarket in a different location earlier in the day. And then I went past this supermarket and I saw maybe 10 cop cars outside, a fire truck, a SWAT car, a bomb threat team of some kind and an ambulance. Actually in 2019 the gas station attendant who I’ve spoken to before was shot and killed and then later I found out that the incident was a bomb threat.
But then there is this militaristic society where, you know, you realise that at any moment you could not be safe because gun and domestic terror incidents in this country are a big issue and just increasing.
Greed, Inequality and Corruption
Peter Lawrence, The Scandal of Food Insecurity
We read everywhere about the insecurity of people who are suffering unprecedented levels of poverty, both absolute and relative. Somebody like me was brought up on the welfare state and free school meals and all the things that my generation enjoyed, and then one or two generations after, a lot of things are not there anymore…. (Click to read more)
I’ve seen [a number of headlines] in the press over the last few days. “Trussell trust record number of 3,000,000 food parcels and 3/4 million people visiting for the first time.” And that’s only one chain of food banks.
And then today the London Stock Exchange chief telling us that we should pay bosses more. The Bank of England chief economist who said “we need to accept that we’re poorer”… is on £190,000 a year. Well OK, so in 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5%, whilst incomes for the richest fifth, which includes that Bank of England economist, rose by almost eight percent.
So not everybody is suffering, and a lot of people are being made richer.
There are differences between people who have security, have secure incomes, have secure employment and earn a hell of a lot of money as compared with people who are clearly struggling and then you have to ask the question… what kinds of other insecurities does it generate? For example, what does that mean in terms of popular discontent and where does that go?
Paula Shaw (WILPF), ICAN’s Nobel Peace Prize
Paula Shaw (left) poses with WILPF UK members Sheila Triggs (right) and Dr Rebecca Johnson (centre), also founding co-chair of ICAN (2017 Nobel Peace Prize), at a WILPF UK training day on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) links human rights, women’s participation, disarmament, justice and development in all relevant bodies.
Nick Aslett, Pillars of Insecurity
In ‘old school language’, security used to be things like the pillars of democracy, where people talked about health and security and all the sorts of things that government is supposed to provide. These, to me, represent the pillars of our current democracy: corrupt finance industry, a corrupt media, a corrupt global corporate world… (Click to read more)
Tufton Street is around the corner for the House of Commons and it’s the home of a large number of policy-making institutions that create policy, primarily right wing policy for the current Conservative administration. And most of the funds for what happens in Tufton Street come from big business. So it’s basically the personification of the corruption of our social administration.
So these are my pillars and that’s why I feel a deep sense of insecurity, because every one of them is corrupt at its core. Every one of them is about self-interest and has no respect or interest in the sustainability of our time on this planet. And that’s why I feel deeply, deeply insecure.
Marion McNichol, Community Redevelopment
This is a building just near us and it’s got a poster that says Save our Settle from Craven District Council’s Ashfield car park development. And that’s a kind of an insecurity image in a way that local people felt like the council were making decisions that didn’t involve them that we didn’t support that we were all opposed to… This man felt the only way he could do something about it was pay for a big banner and put it on his house basically because he lived opposite the redevelopment.
