Ireland

Gilles Peress

1996 · Chromogenic print · Photographs

Unlike most press photographers who shoot pictures to accompany newspaper articles, Peress spends months on location making pictures that are meant to be seen in book-length photo-essays, recording vast landscapes of war and suffering all over the world-from Bosnia and Rwanda to Northern Ireland and Iran. He deftly avoids the pitfalls of much photojournalism, such as political sloganeering or falsely ennobling "victim photography." Instead, the artist allows the chaos and incomprehensibility of a situation to construct the pictures, each of which nevertheless has an irreducible compositional rigor. While acknowledging the impossibility of being able to truly describe genocide or war, Peress achieves a kind of beauty in his pictures by extracting the purest, most undiluted form of truth from the disarray of the world.

Artist

Gilles Peress

Date

1996

Medium

Chromogenic print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of the artist, in honor of Nicolas Peress, 2004