By “this,” I understood him to mean everything about the scene of consuming violence—everything but the fact that he was heading into it. That made perfect sense; he was in his element. Gilles became a photographer in his twenties, in the nineteen-seventies, because studying literature and philosophy and political theory had undermined his trust in language. And it turned out he had a genius for photography. Over the decades, in Northern Ireland, Iran, the Balkans, Rwanda, and wherever else he went, he had come as close as anyone with a camera to realizing what Joseph Conrad described as the artist-chronicler’s task: “It is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.” Better yet, rather than making you see, Gilles lets you see—admitting you, with each click of the shutter, to join him as he enters into an immediate and transparent intimacy with lives lived in the teeth of history.