The struggle of immigrant workers to survive in
unfriendly foreign countries continued to interest
him. He documented the miserable social condi-
tions of Portuguese and Algerian immigrant work-
ers in France and Belgium. In 1974, he traveled to
Germany to photograph Turkish immigrants who
also shared the status of an uprooted labor force.
After settling in New York in 1975, Peress began
to gain professional recognition in the United States.
He received his first New York Art Directors’ Club
Award in 1977 for his reportage of French peasants
in Burgundy. He then turned his documentary eye
on subjects and events located in the United States,
focusing on the social misery of joblessness, New
York street life, and the U.S. presidential election
in 1976. Peress traveled to Canada to record the first
visit of Pope John Paul II and then to Central Amer-
ica, including Guatemala and Colombia. His photo-
graphs were regularly published in theSunday Times
Magazineand theNew York Times Magazine.
With the aid of a National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship, Peress traveled to Iran in Decem-
ber 1979 and January 1980. His moving photo-
graphs of the Islamic revolution in Tehran received
much critical attention and appreciation even
before he published the bookTelex Iran(1983). In
one of these images, he captures the fierce eye of a
veiled young woman as she walks towards the cam-
era. This picture testifies to Peress’s capacity to
engage the viewer’s emotions in the subject matter:
faces partly cut off by the frame are so near that the
beholder feels a part of the scene. The selection of a
striking detail, such as this eye, allows the viewer to
relate to the unfamiliar scene.
In the 1980s, Peress ended his black-and-white
record of ‘‘a society locked in a circle of retribu-
tion’’: Northern Ireland. These photographic views
of daily tension and civil violence, gathered over
almost 20 years, were first publicized in the exhibi-
tion,Power in the Blood, which traveled throughout
Europe and the United States. His documentation
of armed political struggle was furthered by his
assignment forNational Geographic in the early
1990s to record the legacy of Simo ́n Bolı ́var in
Venezuela. Peress’s wanderings through Colombia,
Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru allowed him
to expand his knowledge of Central and Latin
America and to return with troubling and intriguing
color images. One such image isCajamarca, Peru,
1991 , taken during carnival, which records the sym-
bolic burning of a baby with a mixture of vivid
colorfulness and magical confusion.
His booksFarewell to Bosnia (1994) andThe
Graves(1998) are sad testaments of the massacres
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. They exem-
plify Peress’s ability to edit and gather material for
history in a self-conscious way, as he declared. His
own family history may also be at stake. Peress
acknowledged in his 1994 book that his interest in
Bosnia had been partly motivated by a cathartic
desire to confront his father’s troubling accounts
of World War II. Photographs, such as the black-
and-white imageThe remains of victims from the
graves at Pilice Collective Farm(1996), record the
traces of human insanity. This photograph belongs
to the large number of Peress’s images that have a
highly disturbing appeal. He is sometimes criticized
for composing pictures whose aesthetic appeal leads
one forget the subject matter.
Peress arrived in Rwanda to record the ethnic
cleansing of the Tutsi by the Hutus shortly after
the mass killing had begun in 1994. Finding evi-
dence of the massacres was painfully easy as places
where the Tutsi had been killed were numerous—
one of these scenes is hisChurch at Nyarubuye
(1994). He confessed inmagnumthat this experi-
ence inspired him to question commonly held
assumptions about the fairness of mankind. His
book,The Silence(1998), presents his images of
this tragedy.
On 25 September 2001, Peress, Michael Schulan,
and two other friends initiated a project entitled the
Democracy of Photographs. In a storefront not far
from Ground Zero, they invited the public to hang
their personal photographs of New York during
and after the events of September 11. Visitors as
well as submissions were numerous. This initiative
illustrates Peress’s belief in the need for collective
participation in the act of remembrance.
PhilippeJarjatSeealso:Magnum Photos; National GeographicBiography
Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, 29 December 1946. Stu-
died at the Institut d’e ́tudes politiques in Paris, 1966–1968,
and at the Universite ́ de Vincennes, 1968–1971. Joined
Magnum Photos as an associate member, 1972; member,- New York Art Directors’ Club Award, 1977; Artist in
Residence Apeiron Workshop, Millerton, New York, 1977;
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1979; Amer-
ican Institute of Graphic Arts Award, City of Paris/Kodak-
Pathe ́Foundation ‘‘Prix du premier livre,’’ Prix de la critique
couleur; Fondation nationale pour la photographie Grant,
Imogen Cunningham Award, 1983; National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowship, W. Eugene Smith Award, 1984;
Vice-President Magnum Photos, 1984–1985; President
Magnum Photos, 1986–1987 and 1989–1990; Ernst Haas
Award, New York Art Directors’ Club Award, 1989; Art
Matters Grant, 1990; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship,
1992; Fondation de France Grant, 1993; International Cen-
PERESS, GILLES