Gilles Peress: The Northern Ireland Conflict, 1968–1998 brings one of documentary photography’s most sustained bodies of work to the Perlman Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. On view from November 14, 2026 through April 11, 2027, the exhibition draws from photographs Peress made in the 1970s and 1980s during The Troubles, the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland that ended with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Gilles Peress, who was born in France and studied political science and philosophy in Paris before turning to photography, joined Magnum Photos early in his career. That background shows in the work’s careful balance of political urgency and human observation. His photographs do not flatten the conflict into headlines. Instead, they stay with the people who lived through it: civilians, families, marchers, mourners, soldiers and residents moving through streets shaped by fear and routine at the same time.
The exhibition reflects the humanist approach that has long defined Peress’s reputation. His pictures carry a directness that makes room for grief, tension and dignity without pushing the viewer toward easy conclusions. In that respect, they stand apart from images that treat unrest as spectacle. Peress photographs with empathy, but also with a clear sense that the camera cannot stand outside history. It registers suffering, yet it also reveals the structures around it.
The period covered by the exhibition includes some of the most consequential years of the conflict, from the late 1960s onward, when violence between Unionists and Irish nationalists hardened into a prolonged civil emergency. The photographs make that history visible without reducing it to a single event. They show what conflict looks like as lived experience: tense, repetitive, ordinary and devastating all at once.
The Northern Ireland Conflict, 1968–1998 presents Peress as a photographer of witness rather than distance. The result is a hard-edged, humane account of a society under strain, and of photography’s ability to stay with what is difficult to absorb.
Image: Gilles Peress (French, active United States; b. 1946). Riot During the Hunger Strikes, Balholm Drive, Ardoyne, Belfast, 1981. Gelatin silver print. Gift of David L. and Mary M.D. Parker. 2009.68.9. © Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos, courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
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