Gilles Peress and Chris Klatell: Annals of the North

Book excerpt: An almanac to the world of Gilles Peress' Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, delineating the decades of conflict in Northern Ireland In Annals of the North, New York-based photographer Gilles Peress (born 1946) and writer and lawyer Chris Klatell combine essays, stories, photographs, documents and testimonies to open up for the reader the complicated and contradictory storylines that emerged from the conflict in the North of Ireland. Weighed down by 800 years of colonization but only the size of Connecticut (with half its population), Northern Ireland provides a remarkably intimate stage set. Interweaving text and image, Annals of the Northexamines the multifaceted struggle between Irish Republicans and Nationalists, Protestant Unionists and Loyalists, and the imperial British, to explore broader themes of empire, retribution and betrayal, as well as the tense dialectic between the ordinary demands of everyday life and periodic explosions of violence. The book is at once wide-ranging yet deeply personal and political, alternately dense and humorous, legal and literary.