Artist:
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Gilles Peress
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Title:
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Rwanda
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Date:
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1994
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Medium:
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Gelatin silver print
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Dimensions:
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8 13/16 x 13 in. (22.38 x 33.02 cm) (image)
10 15/16 x 13 7/8 in. (27.78 x 35.24 cm) (sheet)
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Credit Line:
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The Alfred and Ingrid Lenz Harrison Fund
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Location:
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Gallery 277
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âI came out of Rwanda thinking, well, maybe God is 50/50 also, 50 percent good and 50 percent evil. And then comes the question, what is the margin between good and evil and how do you shift from one to the other?â
-- Gilles Peress, April 10, 1997
Gilles Peress is a French photojournalist who is renowned for his sensitive and humanizing documentation of wartime. These two photographs were taken in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide. One photograph features a solitary shrouded body, lying on bare, cracked earth. There is a sculptural beauty to the shrouded body that is immediately negated by the skeletal form visible under the folds. The barren landscape and lack of ceremony surrounding the shrouded body alludes to latent violence, and an unspoken, elegiac history.
In the second photograph, Peress has captured a tattered photo album. Like the watch in the Shomei Tomatsu photograph, Peress has isolated the object of the photo album from any context. The focus is on the album itself, and the lost or abandoned memories that it contains. Through the photograph transforms the album into a symbol of death; a memento mori.
Artist/Creator(s)
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Name:
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Peress, Gilles
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Role:
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Photographer
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Nationality:
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French
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Life Dates:
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French, born 1946
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Object Description
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Inscriptions:
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Artist's Stamp; Number LR: [c Gilles Peress Magnum Photos]; UR: [94-2-140/16]; UC: [Top]
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Classification:
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Photographs
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Physical Description:
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body wrapped in a large cloth
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Creation Place:
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Africa, Rwanda, , ,
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Accession #:
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95.46.36
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Owner:
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The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
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