Gilles PeressFrench, 1946Rwanda
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “Rwanda” now? Collection: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis. Not on view at present. Checked September 29, 2026.
Minneapolis, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the work
“I 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?”
-- 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.
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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.
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Details
- Accession number
- 95.46.36
In the catalog
Sources
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
- Image: Minneapolis Institute of Art — © Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos
