I am bad at memory - this is why I shoot pictures. Gilles Peress More Quotes by Gilles Peress More Quotes From Gilles Peress I don't trust words. I trust pictures. Gilles Peress photography photographer inspirational I don't care so much anymore about 'good photography'; I am gathering evidence for history. Gilles Peress care photography gathering We are entering into an age in which visual language is defined by a dialogue between photographers and audiences. This means not just the democratic posting of images but the democratic interpretation of images. Gilles Peress entering age mean I think I've got a peculiar disease. I call it the curse of history, and it has to do with the fugitive absence/presence of both personal and collective memory. At first I thought it was a kind of personal illness, just related to time, private time, time that passes in one's life. So I decided to forget and throw myself into the future. Gilles Peress collective-memory memories thinking I'm proposing to you that photography is a language on its own, which is that when you look at images you do derive ideas; and I'm also proposing to you that you can derive ideas without going through words. So I'm forcing you to really look. And this process of looking, it's like a new set of ideas that are being proposed to you. Gilles Peress photography looks ideas [The photograph is] still a space to reorganize our thoughts about reality and our place in the world. How do you disentangle the surface of reality? Gilles Peress space reality world Even before I started photography, I began to see that there was a disjunction between available languages and reality. Gilles Peress language photography reality The thing to remember is that the firefighters were alone at that time, there was no police. No ambulance. Nobody else. It was just those two guys for quite a while. Gilles Peress top-news They were the only ones who stayed, they were the only ones who tried to get in. They were the only ones who didn't run away. ... And they were doing it clearly against all odds. It was a desperate situation but they were there. Gilles Peress top-news In my apartment -- I live on the 17th floor -- I felt like the building was going to fall. Your mind played tricks on you. the beginning of the century was extremely chaotic and very, very intense and almost everybody was left disoriented in terms of what to think, what to do, what to feel. Gilles Peress top-news None of this was imaginable. Gilles Peress top-news