This is the book dummy of ‘Power in the Blood’ by French photographer Gilles Peress. In 1972, Peress photographed what became known as Bloody Sunday, a massacre in the Bogside area of Derry, when British soldiers shot and killed thirteen unarmed protesters at a civil rights march. In the 1980’s he returned to the North of Ireland, where he intended to test the limits of visual language in its ability to fully describe and understand the conflict: “Days when big events happened and days when nothing happened, the smell of beer, the passage of time.”

Organized into a manuscript divided into 22 semi-fictional ‘days’, the resulting book got sidetracked in 1990 by world events and the vagaries of the artist’s life, and Peress only picked it back up in earnest in 2015 under the title ‘Power in the Blood’. Now called ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’, the book is published by Steidl, along with the companion textual volume, the Annals of the North.

The Martin Parr Foundation holds this key 2013 dummy of Power in the Blood that marks the book’s shift to its final form.

DIMENSIONS
26cm x 38.5cm
Depth: 7.2cm

MEDIUM
Photobook Dummy illustrated with digital prints.

EDITION
N/A

PAGES
980 pages in total.

DATE
2013