Gilles Peress Internet Chat: Connecting Students to the World; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

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Rachel: M. Peress, almost all of your photos include people. Are people most interesting to you or were there few interesting non-human subjects? Was this a personal choice or one that came with the assignment? Do you have a favorite piece in Farewell to Bosnia?

Gilles: Rachel, last things first, as usual. I don't have a favorite piece in Farewell. It is a whole experience for me, or a transcription of a whole experience. As far as people in the pictures, because it is a very human situation, involving real human beings, it is self-evident that people would be an important motif in the images themselves. However, one of my personal discoveries through this project has been about the nature of still lifes as very powerful metaphors of human events, as very powerful representations of history's imprint on the physical world.

Johanna: You've said that the project was very personal to you as I would assume it would be when documenting such raw emotion. You've also said that you can meet someone one day and they'll be gone the next. What were your relationships with your subjects like? Personal or distant?

Gilles: War is about dislocation, fragmentation -- dislocation of communities, of families -- fragmentation of bodies, which means that somebody next to you one minute is gone the next. So all relationships are in the moment. In some ways, there is a pathetic beauty to those relationships where everything is said, everything is given on the moment, knowing there is no tomorrow. And that goes as much for the relationship between the photographer and his subject as for any relationship between members of the same family, the same community, lovers, friends, and so on.

Christian: You seem to have a detached approach to war (and rightly so) but as you took pictures, did the situation, people, etc. begin to affect you? Or did it not?

Gilles: Christian, I don't see where you see the detachment.

Christian: As in not being directly involved.

Gilles: I think you have a misconception as to war being totally discontinuous human experience from other states of being such as peace and so on; discontinuous from other human experiences and state of affairs.

Rachel: Not getting emotionally involved?

Gilles: Von Clauswitz, a theorist of war, describes war as the continuation of politics through other means. You could approach the same notion of continuity from a psychiatric, psychoanalytical angle. War has been part of human experience from immemorial times. The sooner we acknowledge it, stop romanticizing it, the sooner we can start to bring it under a more powerful rationale that has to do with international justice, international tribunals, the laws of war. The sooner we are able to accept its existence as normal, the sooner we will be able to identify the abnormal behaviors that constitute crimes of war. Then we should be able to reduce the abnormality of the specifics.

Lesley: About halfway through the book, on a four-page spread, there is a picture of a sobbing woman surrounded by photographers. This is the only picture in your book that includes a view of other documentation of the war. Why did you choose to take this picture? What were you trying to portray? Do you see yourself as one of the photographers surrounding her?

Gilles: Lesley, of course I have to be honest about myself, about some of the more distasteful elements of my activity. I have to point out to you that there is no clean, perfect human activities; that even doing nothing is doing something. And in most cases, it is more criminal than doing an imperfect act.

Rachel:So is it kind of a confession?

Gilles: Rachel, any work you do has an element of confession and autobiography because you have to be honest to the reader that what they are about to see, hear, or read has gone through the distorting prism of one individual's subjectivity and has also been shaped by the limitation of any given media, be it photography, literature, cinema -- which are all by essence imperfect at transcribing experience.

DonJuan: Speaking of individual subjectivity, do you attempt to keep as high a level as possible of objectivity, or rather let your subconscious direct you as it will?

Gilles: Let's be honest. There is no such a thing as objectivity, and there is no action that is not in part driven by the subconscious, whether it be individual or collective. I think the sooner you acknowledge the subjectivity of any human communication, the sooner you can enter into a methodology of self doubt whereby through a succession of subjectivity and doubt you can keep reexamining your successive perceptions and in the process, over the distance, obtain some form of objectivity resulting from acknowledgment of your condition as subjective, tempered by doubt.

Rachel: M. Peress, could you please explain the "you are damned if you remember" passage in the internet version?

Gilles: Rachel, it is about the curse of history. If you don't remember history, as Marx states it, you are condemned to repeat it. Marx says the second time history repeats itself, it is a farce. I disagree. I think it is a tragedy. However, if you are "aware" of history, given our current structures of transmission of history -- all history from our parents, slanted nationalist histories through our curricula -- there is compelling evidence in fairly ritualized societies such as Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia, etc., that along with this history that is being passed to you, images, mental images, are being passed on to you. Images that leave you in a powerless horror in the middle of the night. In order to be able to deal with these images, you have to act them out; therefore repeating the horror of the past. It is the stories that were told to the children of Yugoslavia at bedtime that are directly responsible for the re-creation fifty years later of images of similar patterns, tone, and emotions today.

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