Top 8 Quotes & Sayings by Gilles Peress

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.

I am bad at memory - this is why I shoot pictures.

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.

I don't trust words. I trust pictures.

[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?

I don't care so much anymore about 'good photography'; I am gathering evidence for history.

Even before I started photography, I began to see that there was a disjunction between available languages and reality.

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.