"The Greatest Artist Working in Photojournalism Today:" Gilles Peress at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art

In 1998, the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a set of eight works by Gilles Peress. Four of these were photographs from the series Farewell to Bosnia, a project undertaken by the photographer to document his experience of the war in Bosnia in 1993. This thesis traces the public lives of these images in exhibitions and publications in the lead up to their acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By examining this in conjunction with the history of photojournalism and how news pictures have operated in various contexts, this paper will show that by the time these four photographs were selected for the museum's collection, the genres of art and photojournalism were deeply intertwined. The news picture had become so naturalized on the gallery wall that the description of Gilles Peress as "the greatest artist working on photojournalism today" represented an equally coherent merging of categories.