Welcome to Konflictcam

Posted on 2015-03-15 09:44

Welcome to Konflictcam. We’ve come a long way in the last year, from a nascent idea to a built-out, user-friendly platform.  The initial inspiration for Konflictcam came from our founder, Sami Ahmad, as he looked at conflict photos coming out of the Syrian Civil War and the Ukraine Conflict being posted alongside cat memes and baby photos on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  He saw the need for a platform to archive and catalogue these photos, a non-partisan space dedicated to the democratization of global conflict imagery. 

Finding your way around the site, you will note that our organization takes an extremely broad view of what constitutes a conflict image.  We include content as diverse as images of environmental degradation, human rights abuses, protests, and war.  All of our content is user-submitted, and most images are open-source (licensing should be clear for each photo).  Our images come from sources such as Wikimedia, Flickr, Twitter, the Library of Congress, various non-profits, and our users themselves.  We would like to eventually introduce a user spotlight feature as we grow, bringing attention to users on the front lines who are capturing images of their stories and sharing them on our platform.

Our image database dates back to the beginning of war photography with Roger Fenton’s work from the Crimean War and continues into the present with an ever-evolving archive of images from Islamic State dominated Iraq and Syria, the ongoing Boko Haram insurgency, and whatever protest movements are carrying the news of the day. We aim to be the go-to source for conflict photos from both yesteryear and today, and we hope to find photos from lesser-used corners of the internet and bring them to the fore.

Being a registered non-profit, we need your help.  We need people helping to flesh out our database, building out what we already have, and turning the Konflictcam platform into the place on the internet for seeing humans at both their best and their worst. So please, dive in, explore, upload, and feel free to contact us if you need any assistance.

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