MoMA Learning

Gilles Peress is a French photojournalist who has documented events of conflict, revolution, and war all over the world. In 1994, he photographed victims of the Rwandan genocide, which was the result of long-simmering conflicts between the country’s two major ethnic groups, the Tutsi and the Hutu. Untitled (boy with hand to head) is a portrait of an injured boy in what appears to be a makeshift hospital. The boy peers directly into the camera’s lens and, by extension, at the viewer.