We begin 2026 with a six-part series centered around themes of place, movement, and conflict. These issues demand deeper human-centered context, as displacement, political instability, and environmental pressure increasingly define daily life for millions.
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In the early 2000s, Colombia was in the midst of a long internal armed conflict shaped by insurgency, counterinsurgency, narcotics trafficking, and competition over land and natural resources. The conflict involved the FARC guerrillas, government military forces, and right-wing paramilitary groups, each operating within a landscape marked by rural inequality, weak state control in some regions, and sustained external involvement. These actors were fighting not only over ideology, but over oil, territory, and routes used to move narcotics toward markets in the United States and Europe. For civilians living in conflict zones, daily life unfolded under chronic instability, violence, and displacement.
Between 2001 and 2005, British photojournalist Jason P. Howe made three visits to Colombia to document the hostilities. The breadth of the work is exceptional given that it was Howe’s first photojournalistic project. The photographs reveal multiple layers of the conflict, from armed patrols and insurgent spaces to civilian life in communities living under the pressure of nearby violence— a bus bombing, and later a firefight along the road.
This body of work functions both as a record of a specific historical period and as a study of the fragmented realities of Colombia’s war. Howe notes that the level of access he was able to achieve across multiple sides of the conflict was unusual, and not something he would later encounter to the same degree during his subsequent time in Iraq or Afghanistan. His early Colombia photographs remain significant not only for what they show, but for how they situate armed conflict within a wider human landscape shaped by overlapping systems of power, violence, labor, and survival.
About Jason P. Howe
Jason Howe is an internationally recognized photojournalist whose work has taken him from the front lines of conflict in Colombia, Iraq, and Afghanistan to the remote high plateaus of the Pamirs and into rarefied political environments at the highest levels of power. Known for operating with precision and credibility in complex, high-risk settings, he has built a body of work defined by access, range, and sustained visual authority.
His photographs have appeared in many of the world’s most respected publications, including The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Le Figaro, and Rolling Stone. His work has also been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions and presented through festival screenings, reflecting a career that has moved fluently between journalism, documentary practice, and the broader cultural sphere.
In addition to his editorial work, Howe has completed major commercial assignments in demanding international contexts for clients in the tourism, logistics, and telecommunications sectors. He is also the author of COLOMBIA: Between the Lines, a long-form publication drawn from his reporting on Colombia’s armed conflict. He lives and works in Andalusia, Spain.
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