Gilles Peress Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by S. Beth Atkin

Page 1 of 8

Background

Gilles, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Tell us a little about your background. Where were you educated, and in what subject?

I grew up in France, in Paris, and I studied political science and philosophy. Not photography.

Who were some of the political philosophers that influenced you?

Well, in political science, it was an institute to prepare you for government, so it was prime ministers and people like that. Philosophy was all the postmodern idols and heroes of the day.

Did one in particular most influence you?

They all influenced me incredibly in making me extremely suspicious of language.

Why was that?

I'm like a perfect child of fury. I was force-fed so much of this stuff. At the same time I was dealing with reality. I was extremely involved in the French social reality at the time, and I started to see a huge gap between language and reality.

What is the period that we're talking about?

The late '60s.

And is this why, at least in the two books that I mentioned, there is no text, it's all images?

There is some text but yes, there is an absence of text.

In the Bosnia book there are some letters.

In the previous book I did the text was also minimal. It was telexes from my agency to me and it was more about the business of photography than about what was happening in Iran at the time.

So the move into photography partly reflects the disillusionment and frustrations of the social reality when you were in school?

Well, it was simply a question of survival: I needed a tool and a vehicle to understand and formalize what was out there in the world, my relationship to reality. If I didn't have that tool, I most surely would be in some mental asylum somewhere. So it was that I needed something to be able to mediate the relationship to the world, other than language.

What was your first shoot once you were into photography?

At the time I was really involved in social issues. I kept hearing this whole political language of the late '60s about the working class, the masses, and so on. I kept hearing about those huge victories of the working class, the masses advancing. So the first project I did was actually about a great working-class defeat. It was about a town that had had one of the major strikes of the '60s and had lost the strike. And it was going back to that town and seeing what happens afterward, after a major defeat.

In the United States a lot of the disillusionment comes from the discontinuity of the words of the politicians and the reality on the ground; but you're saying that it was disillusionment with the relationship of the words of the left political leaders and the reality?

It's both, because a lot of language is political language. Even intellectual language is political language. It was the intellectual language, and that was also very much a political language. All the intellectual theories of the late '60s in France were extremely political. I mean, you couldn't talk about psychoanalysis without mentioning Marx.

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