BOMB 118/Winter 2012
Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia, Chapter 4: To Sarajevo; French Hospital (1993). All images courtesy of Gilles Peress.
Gilles Peress’ first photographic project, in 1971, was of French coal miners in Decazeville. Beginning about the same time, he started to document the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a project he has continued to work on for 25 years. His images of Turkish immigrant workers in West Germany in 1973 documented the calculated decision by Western European governments to organize, and import cheap, Third World labor, a strategy that changed the face of Europe. Peress has sometimes worked as a journalist to help finance those projects that constitute his personal search—a search to understand his own history—French citizen who watched countless movies, studied philosophy, and was educated in the principals of Rousseau and Godard—and how his experience collides with the larger landscape of history and society. His book Telex: Iran (Aperture, 1984) defined a new standard of photographic bookmaking and made clear how the personal life of an artist influences his or her perceptions about everyday social reality. Over the last five years, Peress has concentrated on a series of linked projects—books that include Farewell To Bosnia (Scalo, 1994), Le Silence (Scalo, 1995) and exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Centre Georges Pompidieu in Paris, in which he orchestrated his images of civil war in Northern Ireland, hatred in Bosnia, and genocide in Rwanda into photographic installations. In these intense presentations, which are inspired by Peress’ passion for photography as a language and his belief that the medium is freer of the codes embedded in spoken or written language, he installs his photographs in sequences that aim to move viewers to take a stand on the pressing question of our time: Is man good or evil? A subject that most of us would rather have answered for us, or duck entirely. Determined in his search, Peress has defined a vision that uses photographs to change how we connect with the world and acknowledge our social responsibility toward it, and how the medium’s real power can challenge traditional photographs, books, and exhibitions.
(Interview, Photography)