Gilles Peress - Farewell To Bosnia

Is a picture worth a thousand words? It depends on the picture. These photographs are so overwhelming that words, any words, seem trite. So this book has virtually no text. The grainy surface of each black-and-white image is left to tell its own story. Silence is our reaction as we observe refugees in a rainy exodus or stiff corpses being neatly wrapped in plastic for burial, as we look into eyes that stare back, not knowing whose side those eyes are on and not caring, caring instead only that a little girl lies in hospital, her right arm amputated, her face deformed by shrapnel. Many of these photographs have appeared in news magazines throughout the world, and some are already embedded in the subconscience of our culture. Gleaned by a continual witness to war in the "postwar era" (Peress worked in Northern Ireland and in revolution-era Iran before Bosnia), they constitute an important document; they remind us just how close to chaos any society can be, just how near to evil we all can be. Ra{£}ul Ni{¤}no