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

Photo by S. Beth Atkin

Page 4 of 8

The Process

When you leave these places and you put together a book, does that end the process of being haunted by the memories, or do they still stay with you after you've moved on to the next assignment?

First, I don't have assignments. I wish they were. Yes, it's a whole process.

When I leave for any place, whether it's Bosnia or Rwanda and so on, I try to have as little a preconceived idea [as possible] about what is that place, what is happening there, what I'm going to do there, and what is the final project going to be. For me the whole process of going, staying, trying to spend as much time understanding and then doubting my own understanding, being extremely subjective but through the process of doubting myself coming to some kind of objectivity, coming back, editing the pictures, living with those pictures, putting the books together and so on -- it's a process by which I try to understand. It's only at the end, once the book is there, that I have some sense of what it is I went through, what it is that I was confronted with both outside but also inside, because to anything you bring your own inner world. So it's a painful process. I mean, during the process of doing the Rwanda book I was in a serious depression for the whole period. I had this feeling that I was going to vomit all the time. You know, you live with it.

Let's talk a little about what you've just said. You go into Rwanda: do you do any research on the history of the conflict?

Some, but I try to avoid having a script -- I'm going there and this is what I'm going to find out and this is what I'm going to illustrate, and so on. You know, it's really very much a dialog with reality.

You see, I also have a strange notion as to what is a picture. I see that an image has several authors: there is yourself; there is the camera (because I think that photography through each camera speaks in a different way); there is reality, because reality speaks very forcefully through photography; and then there is the viewer, which is a person who looks at the image, makes his own interpretation of what's happening. And I do think that photography is very much "open text," where half of the text is in the reader. So for me to go anywhere with a preconceived notion of what it is that I'm going to do, what it is that I'm going to say, and what it is that I'm going to tell you, would be a fairly delusional, self-defeating project.

So you get off the plane. Do you go right to the front? I'm left with the sense that the stories that you are telling by capturing what you see are really stories of the people and how they are being affected by what you call the "curse of history."

Well that's very evident in these two books because they deal with very dramatic situations. To answer the first part of your question, it really depends. In the next book on Bosnia, what happened is that I said to myself (it was prior to the '95 offensive, just after Srebrenica, prior to Dayton) "Well all right, I want to take a second look at the situation." When I came off the plane I actually started to drift into an antiquated Illyric tribes role. I started to look at the past of that region. And I started to approach this whole reality from a totally different angle than I had that time around. So it's unpredictable. Thank God.

Next page: The Meaning of Images: Bosnia

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