Adam Broomberg / Oliver Chanarin

Meeting in South Africa, Then Moving from COLORS Editors to Collaborative Artists

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were friends before they became an artistic duo. According to an interview with Art on the Underground, they met in Wupperthal, South Africa, later became close in London and lived together, and eventually worked on the magazine COLORS^*20. A conversation in BOMB likewise describes friendship and editorial work as preceding the collaboration, followed by their departure from COLORS and the production of their own editorial and commercial photography^*23. They did not form around an abstract idea of deliberately combining two viewpoints. They became collaborative artists after years of sharing reporting, editing, and image selection. Later, they emphasized a process of argument and counterargument about the work and weakened individual ownership of photographs to the point that who pressed the shutter became unimportant^*20. That history is directly connected to their later emphasis on selecting, sequencing, and assigning meaning to images rather than privileging the photographer’s single “decisive” exposure.

After Rosler and Sekula—Treating Captions, Institutions, and Circulation as Conditions of Photography

Long before Broomberg and Chanarin, photographers and critics had challenged the evidentiary authority of documentary photography. MACBA’s Universal Archive places Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and others within a 1970s critique arguing that the testimonial value of photographs is not automatic and must be understood through text, institutions, and economic conditions of use^*21. For Broomberg and Chanarin, this was not an abstract theoretical problem because they had worked as both editors and photographers at COLORS. In the BOMB interview, they describe the unease of seeing photographs made through specific encounters with people pass into agencies or other publications, severed from the relationships in which they were made and given new explanations and uses^*23. Their response was more specific than the general claim that “photographs lie.” Each project isolates a concrete procedure through which an image comes to function as evidence: what the military permits a photographer to see, which frame an editor chooses, how a museum classifies an object, or what a search engine ranks first. Their reductions, appropriations, and substitutions are necessary because they keep these procedures from disappearing outside the frame.

The Day Nobody Died—Not Photographing War, but Leaving Material That Was There

In 2008, Broomberg and Chanarin joined the British Army as embedded artists in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, carrying a fifty-meter roll of photographic paper instead of making conventional war photographs. Their official text explains that on days when significant events occurred, they removed roughly seven meters of paper from its box and exposed it to sunlight for about twenty seconds^*5. In the Cleveland Museum of Art’s The Day Nobody Died II, no people or explosions appear; only an abstract field of color remains^*6. Yet the paper itself traveled through the military supply system into the war zone and physically received the light there. The work preserves photography’s indexical claim that something was “there” while withholding the dramatic scene through which viewers might feel they have understood the war.

Treating the Military Embed System as Part of the Photographic Apparatus

The color fields of The Day Nobody Died cannot be separated from the military logistics that carried the photographic paper into the war zone. Bringing a large box into the embed required inspection, transport, escort, and compliance with military rules; the logistics of production therefore made the embed system itself part of the work. In a conversation with Conscientious Photography Magazine, the artists explain that their research into embedding led them to focus on a structure in which the military could control photographers’ movement and what they were permitted to photograph, with embed rules sharply restricting images that could serve as evidence of conflict^*15. The Guardian likewise presented the project as a critique of photojournalism’s incorporation into political, military, and economic systems^*7. Refusing the dramatic image of war is therefore not an aesthetic preference for abstraction. It is a way of making visible the gap between the ideal of a photographer freely recording truth on location and the institutional conditions that actually govern access.

War Primer 2—A Photobook for “Reading” Existing War Images

The official archive for War Primer 2 reproduces pages and exhibition views of the work^*11. The artists overlaid low-resolution images of the “war on terror,” gathered through Google searches and other online sources, onto pages from the English edition of Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer. MoMA describes the book as a critique of the political economy of conflict imagery, using contemporary screen images against Brecht’s combination of Second World War press photographs and short poems^*2. The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation identifies the work as the recipient of its 2013 Photography Prize^*4. Forma likewise emphasizes the publication’s use of an existing photobook structure to bring historical war imagery into collision with contemporary internet images^*16. Here searching, selecting, printing, and layering replace the taking of new photographs as the central work of the photographer.

Making the Traces of Archival Selection into the Work

People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground grew out of research into roughly 14,000 contact sheets from the Northern Ireland conflict held by Belfast Exposed. Belfast Exposed identifies the colored circular stickers left by earlier editors to mark possible selections as the project’s starting point^*12. Broomberg and Chanarin removed those stickers and enlarged the small circular areas that had been hidden underneath. Their official archive reproduces the resulting “dots” works^*13. Frieze argues that this procedure refuses to treat the archive as a neutral repository, bringing traces of past selection, reporting, and political use into the meaning of the photograph itself^*14.

Fig.—Museum Classification and Photography’s Empiricism

In the 2007 book Fig., museums, colonial collecting, ethnographic classification, and the language of explanatory display become objects of critique. In an interview with Seesaw, the artists explicitly identify the empiricism embedded in figure numbers and museum language as a concern^*3. Since the nineteenth century, photography had also served scientific and administrative systems that classified people and objects as “types.” The book therefore examines how display cases, illustrations, captions, and photographic description produce the authority of knowledge. An interview with Photoparley likewise shows the pair’s attention to the histories of classification and institutions behind the assumption that photography transparently explains its subject^*19.

Holy Bible—Layering Disaster Images and State Violence onto an Existing Bible

For the 2013 Holy Bible, Broomberg and Chanarin placed photographs selected from the Archive of Modern Conflict onto pages of the King James Bible and marked passages of text with red lines. TIME describes the book, developed through their research on Brecht, as addressing relationships among disaster, violence, state power, and photography^*17. Lisson Gallery’s announcement of a reissue of War Primer 2 likewise situates both books within the history of the photobook and the critique of war imagery^*18. Pasting photographs onto an existing authoritative text unsettles the conventional relation in which an image simply illustrates or verifies a written account; text and image instead destabilize one another on the page.

Spirit is a Bone—Photography Without a Human Photographer, Toward Machine Vision

Spirit is a Bone uses facial-recognition technology developed for Moscow’s public-surveillance system. Its portraits are not made by subjects posing for a photographer; a machine extracts faces as data, producing what the artists call “non-collaborative portraits.” Aperture discusses the work through a shift in photographic history from evidence and record toward surveillance and prediction^*8. GRAIN’s exhibition material likewise presents the conversion of faces into three-dimensional data as a meeting point between portrait photography and technologies of state and police identification^*9. The artists’ text The Bone Cannot Lie extends this inquiry into the history of biometric systems that turn the body into measurable evidence^*10. The power attached to photography does not disappear when a photographer no longer presses the shutter; the work shows that it can instead become automated.

Permission, Selection, Publishing, Search, Identification—Making the Production of Image Authority Visible

Describing Broomberg and Chanarin as artists who “investigate image infrastructures” can sound abstract, but each project identifies a precise mechanism. The Day Nobody Died uses the British military embed system and supply chain to carry photographic paper into a war zone. People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground enlarges only the areas hidden beneath the circular stickers with which archive editors marked possible selections. War Primer 2 layers images obtained through Google searches onto the pages of an existing book. Spirit is a Bone lets facial-recognition software in a public-surveillance system generate portraits. Photoworks also traces how the artists developed from editorial work at COLORS toward photobooks, archives, and political imagery^*22. Their contribution therefore concerns more than the choice of subjects in documentary photography. They made permission before the photograph, selection afterward, placement on the page, search ranking, and machine identification visible as materials that help produce photographic meaning.

Collaborative Authorship and Distance from the Authority of the Individual Photographer

Their institutional critique is inseparable from the fact of collaboration. According to their conversation in BOMB, they met and became friends in South Africa before moving through Fabrica and editorial work at COLORS into joint artistic production^*23. In the Art on the Underground interview, they explain that working as a pair slows the decision to press the shutter and creates time to discuss why a photograph should be made at all^*20. Collaborative authorship does not guarantee objectivity because two people are involved. It functions as a production condition that prevents one photographer’s intuition from becoming the final justification for an image. That structure corresponds to works in which photographic paper, existing books, archive stickers, search results, and facial-recognition systems—elements other than the authorial eye—help determine the image. Their official archive records that the collaboration, which lasted twenty-three years, formally ended on February 20, 2021^*1.