The idea for Contra came after its founders finished studying representations of conflict at university and found themselves working in the arts, frustrated that the critical discussion they had encountered in academia had no real home in public life. George Brodie and Ben Bohm-Duchen wanted a platform for the kind of slow, considered analysis that the news cycle cannot accommodate — a place to ask what the images of conflict that flood our screens actually mean, whose purposes they serve, and what they leave out. So they built one.
Published annually as a not-for-profit from London and Berlin, Contra explores the relationship between visual culture and conflict through themed editions. The first issue addressed Displacement. The second, Protest, featured two covers: one by Sun Mu, a former propaganda artist for the North Korean government who now paints bold satirical images of the regime, and another that approached resistance from a completely different visual angle. The third issue, Ruin, brought together stories of destruction alongside narratives of revival and regeneration. Each edition nearly doubled in size from the last, growing from a focused debut to a publication of almost two hundred pages.
The team behind Contra — Alex Morrison, Lucas Giles, and Shivani Hassard alongside the two founders — are all volunteers with demanding day jobs. Morrison is deputy editor of Sotheby’s magazine; the others work across the creative industries. They collaborate with artists and photographers from around the world, and the magazine is stocked on three continents. A custom typeface family, Contra Grotesque, designed by All Purpose studio, gives the publication a visual identity as deliberate as its editorial stance. Beyond the printed page, the team runs exhibitions and events, including an ongoing collaboration with fellow indie magazine It’s Freezing in LA!.
In a media landscape that treats conflict as breaking news and then moves on, Contra insists on staying with the image long enough to understand what it is really showing. The magazine has been covered by It’s Nice That, Dazed, Stack Magazines, and magCulture — but its real audience is anyone who has ever looked at a photograph from a conflict zone and wondered what they were not being told.
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