A collaboration built around portraits, memory and press freedom, transforming the faces of journalists who have been killed, imprisoned or persecuted into a visual archive against forgetting
For more than twenty years, Gianluca Costantini has used drawing as a form of political testimony, focusing particularly on human rights, political prisoners, activists and journalists persecuted for their work. This commitment has found a natural connection with the German project Wahrheitskämpfer, an initiative dedicated to creating a visual memorial to journalists who have been killed, imprisoned or persecuted around the world.
The name Wahrheitskämpfer can be translated as “fighters for truth.” The project began in Frankfurt in 2015, in the aftermath of the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Its founder, artist Susanne Köhler, describes how the attack led her to notice the almost daily reports of journalists being killed around the world. Portraiture became her response: a way of transforming anonymous news reports and statistics back into individual human beings.
Since then, Wahrheitskämpfer has grown into a large collective project. More than 100 German and international artists have contributed portraits, and its collection now encompasses hundreds of journalists from around the world. The works are presented both through an online archive and in travelling exhibitions. In 2019, the initiative became the non-profit association Wahrheitskämpfer e.V.
Its guiding principle is simple but powerful: “Remember their faces – Remember their stories.” The portraits are accompanied by texts explaining who the journalists were, what they investigated or reported on, and the circumstances of their imprisonment, persecution or death. The project describes itself as a mobile and virtual memorial to press freedom and is based on the conviction that democracy is impossible without free journalism.
This approach has much in common with Costantini’s own practice. Over the years, he has developed drawing as an instrument of art, testimony and activism, using portraits to return individual identities to people who might otherwise disappear behind statistics, headlines and casualty figures.
A portrait is not simply an illustration of a news story. Drawing requires time: looking at a face, studying it, reconstructing its features and, at the same time, learning the story of the person represented. The resulting image can then circulate independently — through exhibitions, newspapers, campaigns, demonstrations and digital platforms. As explored in The Performative Drawing, Costantini’s drawings often acquire new meanings when they leave the artist’s hands and are used by activists and communities in public space.
The collaboration with Wahrheitskämpfer has brought a substantial group of Costantini’s portraits into the project’s archive. A dedicated page on Wahrheitskämpfer collects his contributions, connecting journalists from different countries and different moments in the recent history of attacks on press freedom.
Among them is Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist killed while reporting in the occupied West Bank in 2022. The archive also includes Costantini’s portraits of journalists and media workers killed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius, French-Irish cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian journalist and producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova.
Other portraits concern journalists who experienced imprisonment or persecution rather than death. They include Fung Wai-Kong, a senior editor and commentator for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily; Egyptian journalist Hisham Fouad; Ingush journalist Rashid Maysigov; Turkish journalist and former Cumhuriyet editor-in-chief Can Dündar, who lives in exile in Germany; and Eritrean journalist Temesgen Gebreyesus, imprisoned since 2001.
Eritrea has occupied an important place in Costantini’s work on press freedom for many years. His portraits have been used to keep alive the memory of journalists and reformers who disappeared in the country’s 2001 crackdown. In 2025, these faces returned to public space in Bologna during a vigil commemorating the victims, an action documented by ChannelDraw in Giving Voice to the Silenced: Remembering Eritrea’s 2001 Victims in Bologna.
A particularly significant part of Costantini’s contribution to Wahrheitskämpfer concerns Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in Gaza. The project’s dedicated page includes his portraits of Ayman Mohamad Al-Gharbawi, Ibrahim Mohamad Al-Gharbawi, Saed al-Halabi, Mohammed Ali, Mohammad Balousha, Yousef Maher Dawas and Mohammad Jarghoun, among others.
Since October 2023, the portraits of journalists killed in Gaza have developed into one of Costantini’s most extensive projects on press freedom. Working with documentation from the Committee to Protect Journalists, he has progressively created a visual memorial in which every death is represented by a face. This work became the exhibition Nel mirino della memoria, dedicated specifically to portraits of journalists killed in Palestine.
The accumulation of these faces is essential to the meaning of the project. Seen individually, each drawing tells the story of one person. Seen together, they create something different: a visual geography of the repression of journalism.
Hong Kong, Egypt, Turkey, Eritrea, Ukraine, Palestine and other places become connected through the experiences of people who were imprisoned, forced into exile or killed because they documented events, investigated power or simply continued doing their jobs.
For Costantini, this relationship between drawing and censorship is also personal. In 2016, the Turkish government included his name in a court order demanding the blocking of online content and accused one of his drawings of promoting terrorism. Ten years later, he reconstructed that experience in Ten Years Later: When a Drawing Became “Terrorism”, examining how an image itself can become the target of political repression.
Wahrheitskämpfer does not limit its work to an online archive. Since 2017, the portraits have also circulated through travelling exhibitions. In 2018, the project was invited by UNESCO to participate in the international World Press Freedom Day conference in Accra, Ghana, where journalists from around the world encountered portraits of colleagues and friends represented in the collection.
The exhibitions are also conceived as spaces for action. Visitors can learn about imprisoned journalists, sign petitions and participate in letter-writing campaigns. In this way, portraiture moves beyond commemoration: the image becomes a starting point for engagement with people whose fate may still be changed.
This idea is central to Costantini’s wider work. His drawings do not necessarily remain drawings: they can become posters, banners, protest signs, memorials and instruments for campaigns. The twenty years of human-rights work collected in Ceasefire 2005–2025 demonstrate how the same visual language can move between art, journalism, political action and collective memory.
This is perhaps where the collaboration between Gianluca Costantini and Wahrheitskämpfer becomes most meaningful. Both practices are based on the idea that drawing can resist disappearance.
A journalist killed in a war can become a number in a casualty report. A reporter imprisoned for years can gradually disappear from international attention. A journalist forced into exile can become detached from the country and public they once addressed.
A portrait works in the opposite direction.
It restores a face.
It asks us to look.
And, by asking us to remember the face, it asks us to remember the story.
See Gianluca Costantini’s portraits on Wahrheitskämpfer
Discover the Wahrheitskämpfer project
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