After a bomb shattered the small Colombian town of Granada in 2000, it was overrun first by guerrillas, then by paramilitaries. It was just one more chapter in a 40-year armed conflict between multiple factions engulfing the country-one too complex even to be termed a civil war. Still, amid the barely cleared rubble, Granada's inhabitants found the strength to march through the streets bearing a huge, beautifully handmade sign declaring their devastated home a "territory of peace".

Colombian photojournalist Jesús Abad Colorado captured this extraordinary moment of resilience on film, and it's now one of 24 of his black-and-white images, all from the past decade, on display at the Museum of Anthropology starting Tuesday (March 28). Titled A Visual Journey on Memory, Place and Displacement, the series shows the impact of constant violence and mass forced migration of Colombians, as well as their varied expressions of hope and remembrance.

"What you can say about this conflict is that the main victims are civilians, but not because they are taking sides," explains Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, a Colombia native and an assistant professor at UBC's school of social work who, with a team of volunteers, has brought the photos to a larger public. Instead, she says in an interview on campus, millions are caught between warring factions, tarred by presumed associations, and forcibly uprooted or even killed. Somehow they must manage to endure, trying to lead a semblance of normal life amid the chaos.

It's these glimpses of the human spirit that Abad Colorado reveals, whether through a shot of a young guerrilla boy laughing as any child might-except that he's got a bandoleer full of ammunition slung around his body. Or in the image of a toddler clutching her beloved pet speckled hen, the one thing she's chosen to take along from her former home during a sudden relocation of her whole village by the armed forces.

"Those are the ambiguities of living amid the war," says Riaño-Alcalá, who adds that Abad Colorado has been kidnapped twice and remains at constant risk. "The way he likes to talk about his work is 'against forgetting', as a work of memory, and definitely [with] himself as a witness." Abad Colorado is perhaps the only photographer to chronicle what is happening in his country; his images will undoubtedly play an important historical role.

But it's the personal dimension that is most potent. From the men playing street dominoes as a casket is carried by to the little boy buttoning the shirt of what appears to be his dead father, the images are a record of a human tragedy so unrelenting-so mundane, perhaps-that it has mostly fallen off the Canadian news radar.