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PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Boxed, hbk, 3 vols, 14.75 x 10 in. / 1960 pgs / 54 color / 1158 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 8/31/2021
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2020 p. 107

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783958295445 SDNR40
List Price: $1,400.00 CAD $2,100.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

THE SPRING 2026 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Preview our SPRING 2026 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.

Gilles Peress: Whatever You Say, Say Nothing

A long-awaited, multivolume “documentary fiction” of photographs and documents portraying the Northern Ireland conflict

A New York Times Book Review 2021 holiday gift guide pick

In 1972, at the age of 26, Gilles Peress (born 1946) 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 helical structure of history during a conflict that seemed like it would never end—days of violence, of marching, of riots, of unemployment, of mourning.

Accompanying each copy is Annals of the North, a text-and-image almanac to Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, also published separately by Steidl this season; the books are housed together in a tote bag.

Held back for 30 years and now eagerly anticipated, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing takes the language of documentary photography to its extremes.

Featured image is reproduced from 'Gilles Peress: Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Belfast Media

Roy Greenslade

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.

Derry Journal

A chronicle of conflict ventures to the very outer limits..

Rencontre D'Arles Awards

Special Mention for Author's Book Award

Baffler

Daniel Trilling

Gilles Peress’s photographs bring Northern Ireland’s fraught history to life.

Washington Post

Kenneth Dickerman

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing' is not only well worth your time, it will surely go down as one of the most compelling photographic works of our time.

Bookforum

David O'Neill

Peress is presenting a famously complex history as well as a complex argument about presenting that history, but the photographs themselves are too direct, warm, and iconographic to allow the enterprise to become joylessly meta.

New York Times

Lucy Sante

The vast sequence of images here, representing not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, that also play out in headlines, TV news footage and, above all, graffiti, rises in waves and recedes into choppiness, as capacious as a 19th-century novel but as indeterminate as an ocean.

1000 Words

Alex Merola

The simultaneity of good and evil; the push and pull of power; the helicoidal unravelling of time. That this work speaks to such profound, ineffable ideas is a testament to the potential of the photobook when it finds its upper limits. And, indeed, few could have executed this unison between content, structure and form so flawlessly as Gerhard Steidl has: a book of all books, unlike anything that has come before.

New York Review of Books

Nick Laird

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, Gilles Peress’s collection of photographs from the Troubles, presents an overwhelming narrative of Republican heroics.