| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Gilles Peress Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Page 5 of 8
Let's talk about these two books. The one book which we have here is Farewell to Bosnia. You did this a couple of years ago?
The project was done in '93 - '94.
Let's take an image that we can show on the camera and talk a little about it, and go back to what you were saying before about there being many authors: you, the camera, and the reality. Tell us how you came to take that image.
At first I have to warn you that the structure of the book itself is really according to this whole open text theory, which is that I consciously didn't edit the book. The book is really organized in sequences of images and in a certain way I leave an enormous amount of work to you, the reader, to reconstruct what the reality is and to make up your own reality into it, rather than me telling you this is the meaning of this image. But you chose this one. So maybe you can tell me why you chose this one.
Okay, but for our audience let's contextualize if we can. This is occurring as the Serbs are moving in. The structure of this book is determined by the course of the conflict, is that correct?
Yes.
You're going into the different places where the Serbs are coming or they're about to come or they've just been.
Yes. It's the siege of Sarajevo. It's also the war in central Bosnia between the Croats and the Bosnians. All right, I'm very much like Fabrice del Dongo at the Battle of Waterloo in Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma. He was there, but history, as it unfolds, is not always a very obvious monument or architecture in front of you. There is a lot of the trivial of life and there is a lot of notions of simultaneity of life, of life that goes on while catastrophe unfolds, and so on. And this is why I work the way I do; I work extremely open to what's around me. I document from the most minute detail to the most spectacular scene. Sometimes, in some projects like the new Northern Ireland project, in the structure of the book I will make an effort to describe the simultaneity of things as they unfold. So, yes I do work in a very open way and I document everything that's around me. It's a very existential approach. I shoot pictures of the glass of water I drink if I feel that it means something at that time.
So in a way it's a collection of images that come into being in an honest effort to capture what is going on. But in the final analysis it's the viewer who has to ask the right questions of himself and of the photograph, is that correct?
Yes, do some work to reconstruct.
Now in this photograph which I picked, as I look at it, clearly your images do empower you to think about what's happening to these people. Obviously the glass is separating them. They're still trying to reach out. This is obviously taken in some sort of vehicle, so people are being forced to move.
They are being separated.
Because I have a family, because I'm really sensitive to those family issues, I'm extremely moved always when I see how those conflicts impact families. One of the things that always moves me the most is when I arrive on a scene and I see those family albums lying on the floor. And there's always a picture of a child from a better time. And you really wonder what's happened to that family, what happened to that child. And the tearing apart of the family, that always affects me the most. With Eric [Stover] we went to document the graves at Srebrenica. In the morgue a lot of people had those pictures of their family, and the pictures had bullet holes through them. The pictures were half decomposing from the body fluids. And yet you could still see a child being held by his mother and so on. And the reality is that its families like your family, my family, that are being totally affected. And when you think about all of those issues, you have to think of your own child and your own family in this situation.
So not only are you taking pictures of what this "curse of history" is doing to these people and how their lives are being ripped apart -- and I think in some parts of Bosnia the middle class existence is being torn asunder -- but you hope that it will resonate with the viewers' own lives in the sense that they will compare their own order to the disorder of these events. Viewers can ask questions based on their knowledge of their own lives in the picture that we were looking at. In capturing the everyday existence turned upside down, you are empowering the viewer to think.
There's a moment where my language finishes and yours starts. In a certain way mine ends here and yours starts when you choose the image and you start to think why.
It's really an ongoing dialogue to evoke the conscience of people about the atrocities that are going on in Rwanda and Bosnia. You said that that was the second great evil, that the West and the great powers were not responding. This is a vehicle for doing that.
In the law in France there is such a crime as non-assistance to a person in danger, which is that you can go to jail for not assisting somebody in danger. On the basis of this crime there are lots of people, even in our own government here that could go to jail.
Next page: The Meaning of Images: Rwanda
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