Gilles Peress: Whatever You Say, Say Nothing

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.