By Chuck Myers
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Washington - For the last two years, television has provided us with countless fleeting glimpses of the war in Bosnia.

These days, however, the bloody conflict has taken on a more lasting visual permanence.

In spring 1993, veteran photographer Gilles Peress traveled to the former Yugoslavian province to record the effects of a war which has claimed more than 200,000 lives, as part of a large project on growing hate and nationalism in Europe.

A year later, the results of his time there provide the focus of ''Farewell to Bosnia: New Photographs by Gilles Peress,'' a powerful new display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It details both the horrors of war and the fortitude of a besieged nation.

Unless you close your eyes or turn away, the blunt power of the 80 full frame 30-by-40-inch black-and-white prints is inescapable. An examination of these images becomes an exhausting emotional experience not unlike viewing the horrific scenes of the Holocaust during World War II.

''You enter into a zone of human experience that is almost impossible to describe,'' Peress, recently in Washington, said of his time in Bosnia. ''It is a blend of fatalism, of sadness ... of incredible anger.''

The 47-year-old award-winning French photographer is no stranger to conflict. Over the past 20 years, he has chronicled the ongoing troubles in Northern Ireland.

War's devastating emotional and physical impact are felt on many levels throughout the works. Largely devoid of armed combatants, the focus here is on ordinary innocent people of all ages.

Hands, divided by an evacuation bus window, reach out for a poignant final farewell in one photograph. Children lull and move about a rubbled area that serves as an orphanage in another. A view of Sarajevo's abandoned war-torn streets is offered through a cracked Holiday Inn upper-floor window.

Two juxtaposed works of a dead man dressed in a business suit lying on a morgue table, taken from separate angles, provide different perspectives on the man's identity - his name and his face.

A child's legs riddled with shrapnel wounds stretch out on a bed in a series of works simply entitled ''Dismemberment.'' Nearby, pictures of a boy who has lost both his arms, and a man with a gaping wound to his left leg, are both heartbreaking and repulsive.

Through his lens, we see a world turned upside down, with refugees fleeing the countryside from the mayhem which has, in many cases, leveled their homes and towns.

''You just have to imagine yourself a prisoner for two years under shelling and seeing your family, your friends, your culture, disappear,'' Peress said.

Rather than defining the divisions between Muslim and Serbian communities, the photographs, such those of a Catholic church service and Sarajevans going about their business amid the destruction, reveal a strong social continuity.

Peress added that even in the remote areas, where Islamic extremists tend to be more active, ''there are huge conflicts within the Bosnian army as to the issue of Islamic fundamentalism. The ideology of the Bosnian army is still essentially multi-ethnic.''

As a window on our time, the photographs also possess strong historic context and irony. Two images, showing destroyed trolleys on a street which lines Sarajevo's Miljacka river, were taken about 100 meters (109 yards) from the spot where Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, in 1914 to set off World War I.

''If there is anything that I come out with in terms of this project, it is a sense of a repeat of history,'' explained Peress. ''The war in Bosnia is the special war of our generation.''

''Farewell to Bosnia'' was organized by Phillip Brookman, photography curator at the Corcoran, and Urs Stahel, director of the Fotomuseum in Winterthru, Switzerland. It remains on view until May 2.

Due to the situation in Bosnia, there are no plans to take the show there. Instead, visitors are asked to leave their impressions of the exhibit on aerograms which will be delivered to the residents of Sarajevo.
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