GILLES PERESS

Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: from the chapter “The Last Night”

WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY NOTHING

BY LUCY SANTE

Gilles Peress, who came to Bard in 2008 and is now Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography, has been a front-line photographer his entire working life. He joined Magnum Photos in 1971, when he was 25, and has since served the cooperative twice as president and three times as vice president; his page on the agency’s website still lists him as “Available for work.” He has published 11 books, of which his most recent counts as two, although maybe it should be three or four: the two massive volumes of Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021), his chronicle of the Troubles in the North of Ireland, and the equally stout companion volume of historical and geographical reference, Annals of the North.

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing constitutes one leg of his ongoing series Hate Thy Brother (the first, Farewell to Bosnia, came out in 1994, followed by The Silence: Rwanda a year later). Peress went to Derry in 1972, and right away he witnessed the British Army’s massacre of 14 civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. Within a year he had embedded himself so thoroughly that his photographs were often called upon as evidence in court. He developed many local ties, sometimes deep and sometimes tragic; one of his closest Republican friends turned out to be an informer and was killed by the Irish Republican Army. It is clear from the work—the title comes from the IRA’s “Green Book”—that Peress left a part of his soul in Ulster.

The plates are not organized chronologically but in 22 chapters that represent thematic “days”—“Day of Internment,” “Day of Roses,” “Prison Days”—spanning the better part of two decades. The “Prod” (Protestant) and “Taig” (Catholic) sides are represented evenly; Peress gives a clear measure of the ways the two seem to share a culture as well as being irreconcilably warring states. The pictures are immersively horizontal; they appear cinematic by virtue of their dimensions, size, and at least implied action. Peress’s photos are never at rest; violence is always imminent if not present, and people are typically all headed in different directions; even his gravestones seem to be in motion. The vast sequence of images—representing not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, and 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.

So many elements of Peress’s style have been echoed or imitated by others that they have become part of the vocabulary of photo reportage, particularly his wide-angle condensation of scenes, his radically edited framing to expose the bones of a scene, his collage-like stackups of contrasting planes. But his own use of those approaches is inimitable, because of the way he uses them—sometimes almost subliminally—to convey the emotional fog that hangs invisibly in the air above a scene. His individual images are brilliant and memorable, but his sequences are of a whole other order, documenting events urgently and somehow kaleidoscopically. His way of seeing, forged from crisis, is stark and blunt and immediate, and chiseled and classical and lapidary.

Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante has been at Bard since 1999.