Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I always try to escape categories because where those categories are attached, predictable forms, they really have very much to do with market, or where to market the pictures. I’m interested in what’s unpredictable, and I’m interested in what happens in the no-man’s-land between known categories.
... 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.
I tried to drop every element of style, to be as simple as possible.
There’s a big choice to be made right now. Either you fall on the postmodernist incapacity for dealing with the world, which is that there is no accurate description of the world so there is no point in going out to look at the world. And if you’re not going to look at the world then certainly you’re not going to change it.
