We Folk

The series of portraits in this book, which include Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevic and many other Moscow citizens, were created by a machine: a facial recognition system recently developed in Moscow for public security and border control surveillance. The result is more akin to a digital life mask than a photograph; a three-dimensional facsimile of the face that can be easily rotated and closely scrutinised.

A catalogue from the exhibition of the same name at the Galería Jumex in 2014. The book is structured along three axes: the artists’ exploration of exhumation and the re-publication of traces; an approach to and reading of the context through time; and the way the questions and findings of the work group are displaced or translated into new territories and beings: the dodo and the extinction of a landscape.

Humans and Other Animals is enhanced by British Sign Language and produced in collaboration with students and staff at London’s Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children. Making unexpected connections between familiar words and their meanings through black-and-white photography, text and brightly coloured graphics, the artists play with the complex relationship between image and text.

Ghetto, Broomberg and Chanarin’s first collaboration with Trolley, was published ten years ago. It saw the then creative editors and principal photographers of Colors Magazine document 12 contemporary gated communities, from a maximum-security prison in South Africa to a psychiatric hospital in Cuba. Photographed entirely on large format colour negative, Ghetto took three years to produce and over time has become a popular classic within photobook history.

The format of Broomberg and Chanarin’s illustrated Holy Bible mimics both the precise structure and the physical form of the King James Version. By allowing elements of the original text to guide their image selection, the artists explore themes of authorship, and the unspoken criteria used to determine acceptable evidence of conflict.

Black Market takes its name from the eponymous film Al Suq al Soda, or Black Market. Directed by the surrealist painter-turned-filmmaker Kamel el-Telmissany, the film was banned shortly after its release in Egypt in 1945, and has since all but disappeared. What is more, this rare copy of the film, a recording from television, has been partially erased by another film – an unknown porno probably made in the 1970s or 80s. The two films share the same strip of magnetic tape, but sit uncomfortably together and transmit inverse aesthetic, moral and political positions.

The first volume displays a series of polaroids by the artists. Mixing private moments, self-portraits and images from their documentary projects, the beautiful collection of personal polaroids form an intimate and imperfect inventory of their fifteen-year collaboration.

War Primer 2 is a limited edition book that physically inhabits the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s remarkable 1955 publication War Primer. The original is a collection of Brecht’s newspaper clippings, each accompanied by a four-line poem that he called Photo-epigrams. It was the culmination of almost three decades of intermittent activity. Brecht’s book is a practical manual, demonstrating how to “read” or “translate” press photographs. War Primer 2 is the belated sequel. While Brecht’s War Primer was concerned with images of the Second World War, War Primer 2 is concerned with the images of conflict generated by both sides of the so-called “War on Terror”.

The Belfast Exposed Archive occupies a small room on the first floor at 23 Donegal Street and contains over 14,000 black-and-white contact sheets, documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. These are photographs taken by professional photo-journalists and ‘civilian’ photographers, chronicling protests, funerals and acts of terrorism as well as the more ordinary stuff of life: drinking tea; kissing girls; watching trains.

Fig. contains over ninety still lives, portraits and landscapes by celebrated photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, drawing together specially commissioned work made around the south coast of England and other works made internationally, tracing links between photography, imperialism and the colonial impulse to acquire, map and collect.

Chicago is a fake Arab town built by the Israeli Defense Force for urban combat training. It is a place that is familiar to Israeli and American soldiers but until now largely unknown outside Israel. Chicago stands in the middle of the Negev desert; a ghost town whose history directly mirrors the story of the conflict for Palestine.

A decade after the fall of apartheid and how have things changed for those living in South Africa today? The authors spent three months traversing their homeland examining the way people live, how they work, how they love and how they die. Initially commissioned for the new Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, the book brings together the many portraits that represent this new South Africa.

In a journey through twelve modern ghettos, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin document the lives of their inhabitants by asking each the same questions and then taking their photograph. From a refugee camp in Tanzania to a mental asylum in Cuba and an old people’s holiday camp in the USA.

Trust is a series of photographs made in the last two years of the twentieth century. On the surface, it is very simple. Photographs of faces made in a documentary way: real people leading real lives, aware of the camera only as an incidental, seemingly uncomplicit in the making of the photographs.