Portrait of Peress

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Tool of the Trade:
rangefinder camera

 

 

 

I work much more like a forensic photographer in a certain way, collecting evidence. I've started to take more still lifes, like a police photographer, collecting evidence as a witness. I've started to borrow a different strategy than that of the classic photojournalist. The work is much more factual and much less about good photography. I don't care that much anymore about "good photography." I'm gathering evidence for history, so that we remember.

– Gilles Peress, U.S. News, October 6, 1997

 

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Desigining Telex Iran

TELEXES

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In 1979 and 1980, the American Embassy in Teheran, Iran was seized by Islamic fundamentalists and 52 people were held hostage. Gilles Peress traveled Iran for five weeks during the “hostage crisis,” taking pictures to understand a country and a people who were portrayed in the United States media as “fanatics jumping out of the television screen, knife between their teeth, red eyes demanding justice.” (Editors, Telex Iran, 1983)

This photo shows the confusion. The composition is neatly divided into four equal parts. Figures move in and out of the four squares and back and forth creating dizzy shifts in scale. Equally unsettling is the tilted horizon and the head in the lower foreground whose chin, lopped off by the camera, seems to reappear in a sign overhead. Cornell Capa, a fellow photographer and journalist, wrote that Peress’ photos of Iran were “brilliant visual nervousness… aspirins will not help.” (Cornell Capa, Telex Iran, 1983)

This photo was the cover image for a book Peress assembled of his Iran pictures titled Telex Iran. Peress put the pictures in a sequence that made the most sense to him, included text that didn’t detract from the pictures, and designed the overall look and feel of the book. Instead of captions, the pictures are punctuated by telexes that make up a parallel story of communications to and from Peress (in Iran) with lab technicians and his Magnum photography agency offices in New York and Paris.

 

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Where is Iran?
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Peress’s photographs are the puzzled, chaotic articulations of a self-avowed outsider looking for explanations in areas where other journalists, confined for months to their on-the-spot positions in front of the American Embassy, were unable to go. In this context the photographs are asserted as questions rather than answers, a strategy in keeping with a growing disbelief that it is possible to present conclusions without involving the reader in the photographer’s attempt to understand. The revelation of the image is located in the telling not just in the evidence of what has been told.

Fred Ritchin, In Our Time the World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, 1989

All of these women seem completely unaware that there is a gunman in their midst, or are they so used to guns they are not alarmed? The stairway where the gunman is stationed looks like a space reserved just for him, isolated in the center of dark, repeated shapes of the women on the left, and dark, deep space of the hallway on the right.

According to the editors of Gilles Peress’ book on Iran, photographs like these “do little to describe another people and place, but go a long way toward measuring the distance separating perceptions and cultures.” (Editors, Telex Iran, 1983) In other words, rather than show you another culture, they show you how far away you are from understanding that culture.

 
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Peress and Peress
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The fact that each person is looking in different directions makes this claustrophobic street, packed with people and vehicles, even more menacing. As viewers, we naturally follow the gazes of the people in picture as they criss-cross through the scene. The cloaked woman moving toward us in the center of the picture is the only person looking at us, with only one eye.

In order to make this picture, Peress had to be able to see it happening as the figures moved into these positions, get his camera up and on the right settings, and choose the precise split-second to snap the picture. In much of Peress’ work choosing the right picture really means choosing the right moment to take the picture.

 
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The gestures these people make… say volumes about their relationships to each other and their roles in the Bosnian war.
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My photographs show a nation invaded, a nation at war. Refugees are on the road, drifting through the rain, moving through camps and hospitals, an endless cavalry of images flashing by in a blur: exhaustion, too many images, too much horror. The witness becomes indifferent. My point is that we, in the comfort of our lives, must question our role in the history of Bosnia, which is also our history.

– Gilles Peress

When Gilles Peress spent three months in Bosnia in 1993, his aim was not to explain the war that was happening there. Instead, he wrote, “I set out only to provide a visual continuum of experience, of existence.” (Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia, 1994) This photograph provides a visual answer to the who, what, and where questions of the journalist. The fallen victim of the Bosnian conflict is apparently a civilian; her family or friends gather on the left hand side of the picture. A Red Cross worker stoops toward the victim; others grip guns. There are obviously military present as well. The gestures these people make toward each other and the objects in the picture, the guns, the handles of the stretcher that hold the victim, say volumes about their relationships to each other and their roles in the Bosnian war.

 
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       Comparing Contexts

       Magnum
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Gilles Peress surveys a Bosnian city through a window pierced by a bullet. The angle of the camera tilts the horizon slightly so the two towering buildings seem off-balance. The photograph conceals more than it shows and what it does show is not very clear. This could be any city in the world, and the bullet hole could be evidence of any disaster, from a family tragedy to a civil war. That, perhaps, is the point.

Photojournalists like Peress know that publishing photographs in the mass media can create confusion. Editors who have other points of view and interests of their own can change the meaning of a photo with titles or captions, cropping and placement of a picture in a publication. Consider a photo of a famine victim next to an ad for a new Honda. The personality of a publication can have an impact as well. Think about the same photo appearing in Time and in Playboy. The selection process itself can change the meaning of a photograph. Most photojournalists are required to submit all the photos they have taken for an assignment so an editor can choose. How can photojournalists maintain control of their work? For Gilles Peress, the answer is the professional cooperative Magnum. (To find out more about Magnum, click on the bar above.)

 
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       Where is Bosnia?
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I remembered my father, his amputated arm and his pain, his descriptions of addiction to morphine, of World War II, the German occupation and the concentration camps. I began to think that I had come to Bosnia in part to see, almost to relive visions buried in my childhood memories. Fathers telling horror stories from the war. Mental images so horrific that one is compelled to actually “see” them to deal with them. And to see them, you have to act them out.

–Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia, 1994

This photograph shows people digging a mass grave in Bosnia. Part of its horror is that it seems like an everyday event conducted by rather ordinary people. Gilles Peress used his camera in Bosnia to show how complicated war can be. The people in this photo hardly look like monsters, and the grave site could be in a small-town backyard in the American Midwest.

A camera can often serve as a shield as well as a witness to scenes like this one. By placing a camera between us (and himself) and these burial preparations, we all become removed from the actual experience. Yet the photo is terrifying if you stop to ponder what came before and after the moment in this picture. Were the people who were meant for this grave alive or dead when this photo was taken? Peress doesn’t give us a clue.

 

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Where is Rwanda?

 

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Artspeak

Ever notice how the language of violence and the language of photography sometimes overlap? A gun is loaded, and so is a camera. Shoot a victim, shoot a picture. A gun is shot, and so is a roll of film. New, auto-focus cameras are called point-and-shoot cameras by many in the business. For those who are disturbed by such metaphors, there are alternative ways to describe photography. A picture can be “taken” and a photograph is “made”.

Gilles Peress traveled in Rwanda, making pictures during a particulary grim war between two of the country’s ethnic groups. In this photograph the realities of the conflict get almost too close for comfort. Peress chose a point of view many photographers might avoid. Most would move away from the figure in the center of the frame in order to compose the picture, but Peress uses that figure to create the composition. The other figures in the picture seem perched on the center figure’s shoulders.

The tilted horizon line is a characteristic of many Peress pictures. It lends movement to this scene, as if we are looking through a hand-held movie camera as the photographer walks forward, following the main figure into the frame.

 

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       Is it photojournalism or is it art?
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Good photographs depend on what is pictured, but it is equally important is how the subject portrayed. Because of the way Gilles Peress portrayed his subject in this photograph, a human river of refugees takes on a quiet, timeless beauty. The real situation is certainly not beautiful. It is Rwanda in 1994, where a bitter war between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups leaves hundreds of thousands dead and just as many exiled and homeless.

The dusky atmosphere and the repeated shapes of the figures gently curving off into infinity contribute to the feeling of quiet. The figure perched in the tree overlooking the scene surveys the landscape, and becomes an extension of the tree, human and tree limbs entwined together.

 

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…the only hint of violence in this photograph is the woman's bandaged hand.
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The woman in this photo raises her pitcher, and the sky appears to flow in. It is Rwanda in 1994, and a conflict between ethnic groups there will cost hundreds of thousands of lives. But the only hint of violence in this photograph is the woman’s bandaged hand. Photographer Gilles Peress exploits the fact that photographs can often hide more than they show. We are so far removed from Rwanda that we probably wouldn’t even identify this woman with that area of Africa. Perhaps that is part of his message.

Peress used the sky as a field of light in the photograph, a background for the woman’s face. In fact, the light comes from somewhere behind the woman to create a glowing profile. The diagonal shape in the upper left corner (echoing the shape of her head scarf), the horizontal string of buildings at her shoulders, and the vertical pole in front of her face complete a frame around her head.

 

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For more about Gilles Peress:

Gilles Peress, Telex Iran: In the Name of Revolution,
Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1983
 

A large-format book that documents Peress’ travels during five weeks in the midst of the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis. Accompanied by telexes sent and received by Peress and the New York and Paris Magnum offices, as well as an essay by Iranian writer Gholam Sa’edi.


Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia,
New York: Scalo Publishers, 1994
 

More than eighty photographs made during three months in Bosnia in 1993. Peress writes in the book’s introduction that he “set out only to provide a visual continuum of experience, existence,” and not an explanation of the events in Bosnia. Also includes a few letters to colleagues and a diary entry.


Gilles Peress, The Silence,
New York: Scalo Publishers, 1995
 

Photographs of violence in the ethnic clash of Hutus and Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. No explanation seems possible for these very disturbing photos.


Link to New York Times site
http://www.nytimes.com/specials/bosnia/

 

A site designed by Peress and featuring many of his Bosnia photos, including those from a return trip after 1994. Also includes audio files of Peress talking about his work on Bosnia and background information about the recent political developments in Yugoslavia.


ArtsConnectEd
http://www.artsconnected.org/
 

ArtsConnectEd is a collaboration between The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center which provides online access to the rich collections and reference, archive, media, and curriculum resources of both institutions.

Search ArtsConnectEd for related books and materials in the libraries of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center

Search ArtsConnectEd for more Gilles Peress photographs in the collections of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center


 

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