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