Gilles Peress (born December 29, 1946) is a French photographer and a member of
Magnum Photos. Peress began working with photography in 1970, having previously studied political science and philosophy in Paris. One of Peress’ first projects examined immigration in Europe, and he has since documented events in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, the Balkans, Rwanda, the U.S., Afghanistan, and Iraq. His project,
Hate Thy Brother, a cycle of documentary narratives, looks at intolerance and the re-emergence of nationalism throughout the world and its consequences.
Peress’ books include
Telex Iran;
The Silence: Rwanda;
Farewell to Bosnia;
The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar;
A Village Destroyed; and
Haines. Portfolios of his work have appeared in the
New York Times Magazine, The
Sunday Times Magazine, Du magazine,
Life, Stern, Geo,
Paris Match, Parkett, Aperture and
The New Yorker.
Gilles Peress’ work has been exhibited and is collected by the
Museum of Modern Art,
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1, all in New York;
Art Institute of Chicago; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C;
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Victoria and Albert Museum in London; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Musée Picasso, Parc de la Villette and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Sprengel Museum in Hannover.
Awards and fellowships Peress has received include a
Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, Pollock-Krasner and New York State Council on the Arts fellowships, the
W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography and the
International Center of Photography Infinity Award.
Peress is Professor of Human Rights and Photography at Bard College in New York and Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley. Peress joined Magnum Photos in 1971 and served three times as vice president and twice as president of the co-operative. He and his wife, Alison Cornyn, live in Brooklyn with their three children.
Source: Wikipedia
Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Gilles Peress made his first photographic series in 1970 after attending the Institut d'Études Politiques (1966-68) and the Université de Vincennes (1968-71). By 1971, he had established himself as a freelance photographer, publishing work in Du, the London Sunday Times, The New York Times Magazine, Photo, and other periodicals. In 1972 he joined Magnum, the international cooperative photography agency founded in 1947 by
Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Robert Capa,
George Rodger, and
Chim (David Seymour); he has served twice as the organization's president. A National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1979 allowed him to travel to Iran, where he made the photographs published as
Telex: Iran--In the Name of Revolution (1984), his first book. Other major projects include his documentation of the Irish civil war from 1971 to 1979, published as
An Eye for an Eye: Northern Ireland (1986), and
Hate Thy Brother, an ongoing cycle of photographs documenting the resurgence of extreme nationalism around the world. Peress's work has been included in group exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, ICP, and elsewhere. He has received, among other honors, a W. Eugene Smith Award, the Ernst Haas Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and ICP's Infinity Awards for Journalism in 1995 and for his publication
The Silence in 1996.
Gilles Peress's photography demonstrates his uncommon ability to navigate and communicate the atmosphere and urgency of volatile political environments. While his early work identified him as a "concerned photographer," his more recent work suggests an increasing concern with form and a more obvious sense of subjectivity. In this respect, Peress's photographs echo the photojournalism of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose conflation of aesthetics and reportage set the precedent for artistic photojournalism earlier in the century.
Source: International Center of Photography
