Gilles Peress: Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
Gilles Peress: Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
By (Author) Gilles Peress
Steidl Publishers
Steidl Verlag
1st September 2021
Germany
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Photographs: collections
Photojournalism and documentary photography
941.608240222
Physical Properties
Hardback
1056
Width 255mm, Height 375mm
Description
Shortlisted for The Photographer's Gallery's Photography Foundation Prize
In 1972, at the age of 26, Gilles Peress photographed the British Army's massacre of Irish civilians on Bloody Sunday. In the 1980s he returned to the North of Ireland, intent on testing the limits of visual language and perception to understand the intractable conflict. Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, a work of "documentary fiction," organizes a decade of photographs across 22 fictional "days" to articulate the helicoidal structure of history during a conflict that seemed like it would never end-where each day became a repetition of every other day like that day: days of violence, of marching, of riots, of unemployment, of mourning, and also of "craic" where you try to forget your condition.
Held back for 30 years and now eagerly anticipated, this ambitious publication takes the language of documentary photography to its extremes, then challenges the reader to stop and resolve the puzzle of meaning for him or herself.
Each copy accompanied by Annals of the North, a text-and-image almanac to Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, also published separately by Steidl.
Reviews
A work of "documentary fiction", an attempt to portray...he unfolding of people's lives throughout a seemingly never-ending conflict. It is not chronological, or even logical, but it is strangely fascinating to turn the pages and take a sort of behind-the-scenes look.--Roy Greenslade "Belfast Media"
Author Bio
Born in 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Gilles Peress moved to New York in 1974 and began a series of interrelated projects that push the formal and conceptual possibilities of photography to interrogate the structure of history and the nature of intolerance. The resulting cycle of interlocking narratives in books and on walls encompasses eight monographs and has been widely exhibited (at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others) and collected.
