A Quote by Gilles Peress

I am bad at memory - this is why I shoot pictures. — © Gilles Peress
I am bad at memory - this is why I shoot pictures.
Making photos is helpful of course to master the craft. To get comfortable with the camera. Learn what a camera can do and how to use the camera successfully. Doing exercises for example if you try to find out things that the camera can do that the eye cannot do. So that you have a tool that will do what you need to be done. But then once you have mastered the craft the most important thing is to determine why you want to shoot pictures and what you want to shoot pictures of. That's where the thematic issue comes to life.
Pictures can live in one's memory. That's why they are important.
Don't be afraid to take bad pictures, because good pictures are the mistakes of bad pictures.
It would be so easy to lose the plot now. It's not about achieving something for its own sake, and taking pictures for their own sake. But to make conscious decisions and choices, and it includes this constant questioning - Why am I taking pictures? Because really, the world is... it has pictures enough. I mean, there are enough pictures out there.
Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.
All my life I have painted pictures so that certain people would drop dead when they looked at them, but I have not succeeded yet. The worst painting cant hurt you, but a bad driver can kill you, a bad judge can send you to the chair, a bad politician can ruin an entire country, That is why even a bad painting is sacred.
The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.
You have to take a lot of bad pictures. Dont' be afraid to take bad pictures... You have to take a lot of bad pictures in order to know when you've got a good one.
I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.
We are somewhat amused by the hysteria manifest in the press at the suggestion by Gordon Liddy that if one is menaced by bad guys (particularly the ninja) one is wise to shoot for the head. That statement has got a whole bunch of journalists and commentators bleeding from the nose. One wonders why it should. Where else should you shoot a man if he is probably wearing an armored vest? If you decide to shoot you have made the big decision. Where you place your shot is merely a technical matter.
A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
If a man can shoot 10 birdies, there's no reason why he can't shoot 18. Why can't you birdie every hole on the course?
Ninety percent of video game AI really is pretty damn bad. I think that's actually why it's so much fun to shoot things. Because the AI is so bad and the characters are so annoying.
Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot him and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?
A story is ultimately a memory. It's important when you're telling a story to think about why this memory is a memory. You don't remember everything in life; you just remember certain things - so, why this one?
Whatever pictures are put into the world, the balance needs to be readdressed, it needs to be observed. That's why I am also really questioning what a lot of photography has done since I began. I am not saying because of me, but I mean, photographing some friends partying and publishing the pictures meant something else in '92 than it does in 2011. And I find the younger generation is not questioning this at all today.
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