Ireland

1996

Not on view

Unlike most press photographers who shoot pictures to accompany newspaper articles, Peress spends months on location making pictures that are meant to be seen in book-length photo-essays, recording vast landscapes of war and suffering all over the world-from Bosnia and Rwanda to Northern Ireland and Iran. He deftly avoids the pitfalls of much photojournalism, such as political sloganeering or falsely ennobling "victim photography." Instead, the artist allows the chaos and incomprehensibility of a situation to construct the pictures, each of which nevertheless has an irreducible compositional rigor. While acknowledging the impossibility of being able to truly describe genocide or war, Peress achieves a kind of beauty in his pictures by extracting the purest, most undiluted form of truth from the disarray of the world.

Artwork Details

Overview

Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

Provenance

Exhibition History

Title: Ireland
Artist: Gilles Peress (French, born 1946)
Date: 1996
Medium: Chromogenic print
Dimensions: Image: 36.7 x 56.1 cm (14 7/16 x 22 1/16 in.)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Gift of the artist, in honor of Nicolas Peress, 2004
Object Number: 2004.357
Rights and Reproduction: © Gilles Peress
Curatorial Department: Photographs

More Artwork

By Gilles Peress

In the same medium

From the same time and place

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Burning Lundy in Effigy, Derry, Gilles Peress French, Gelatin silver print — Burning Lundy in Effigy, Derry
Gilles Peress
1981

William Street, Derry, Ireland, Gilles Peress French, Gelatin silver print — William Street, Derry, Ireland
Gilles Peress
1972

Derry, 1971, Funeral of an IRA Volunteer, Gilles Peress French, Gelatin silver print — Derry, 1971, Funeral of an IRA Volunteer
Gilles Peress
1971

Goma, Zaire, Gilles Peress French, Gelatin silver print — Goma, Zaire
Gilles Peress
1994, printed 1997

Sarajevo, Bosnia, Gilles Peress French, Gelatin silver print — Sarajevo, Bosnia
Gilles Peress
1993, printed 1997

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