Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.
I don’t care so much anymore about “good photography,” I am gathering evidence for history.
How do you make the unseen seen?
I am bad at memory—this is why I shoot pictures.
[The photograph is] still a space to reorganize our thoughts about reality and our place in the world. How do you disentangle the surface of reality?
I think I’ve got a peculiar disease. I call it “the curse of history,” and it has to do with the fugitive absence/presence of both personal and collective memory. At first I thought it was a kind of personal illness, just related to time, private time, time that passes in one’s life. So I decided to
forget and throw myself into the
future.
We are entering into an age in which visual language is defined by a dialogue between photographers and audiences. This means not just the democratic posting of images but the democratic
interpretation of images.
I’m proposing to you that photography is a language on its own, which is that when you look at images you do derive ideas; and I’m also proposing to you that you can derive ideas without going through words. So I’m forcing you to really look. And this process of looking, it’s like a new set of ideas that are being proposed to you.
