About Gilles Peress
Gilles Peress is the recipient of many awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, La Fondation de France, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He also received the W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography. Peress began working as a photographer in 1970, embarking on an intimate portrayal of life in a French coal mining village as it emerged from the ashes of a debilitating labor dispute. He then joined Magnum Photos, the prestigious photography agency founded by Robert Capa. Peress soon traveled to Northern Ireland to begin an ongoing 20-year project about the Irish civil rights struggle. “Power in the Blood,” a book that synthesizes his years of work in Northern Ireland, is the first part of his ongoing project called “Hate Thy Brother,” a cycle of documentary stories that describe intolerance and the re-emergence of nationalism in the postwar years. “Farewell to Bosnia” was the first part of this cycle, and “The Silence,” a book about the genocide in Rwanda, was the second.
In 1979 Peress traveled to Iran in the midst of a revolution. His highly regarded book, “Telex Iran: In the Name of Revolution,” is about the fragile relationship between American and Iranian cultures during the hostage crisis.
Peress has also completed other major projects, including a photographic study of the lives of Turkish immigrant workers in Germany, and a recent examination of the contemporary legacy of the Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar.
Peress is Professor of Human Rights and Photography at Bard College, NY and Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley. Peress joined Magnum Photos in 1971 and served three times as vice-president and twice as president of the co-operative.