Karsten Greve

ADAM BROOMBERG & OLIVER CHANARIN
'Photographs'

Nov 19 - Jan 7, 2010

Within the context of the current photographic events in Paris, during Paris Photo, dedicated this year to photographers from Middle-East, the Karsten Greve Gallery presents several photographic series realized in Iraq and in Afghanistan by the British duo Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin.
With this first solo show in France consecrated to these young globetrotters, the Karsten Greve Gallery reiterates its collaboration with the photographers that were already presented in the group show EChO Wanted in 2008. This show permits to highlight the unique photographic approach by Broomberg & Chanarin as a form of conceptual ethnography.

Conceived in 2005, the Red House series feature photographs of graffiti made by Kurd prisoners on the walls of their cells hidden in the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s party and discovered only in 1991 when the site had been abandoned. These intense images capture the isolated details as well as the creativity of the prisoners living in the solitude, fear, endless boredom and supreme horror of incarceration. In spite of the grim context, the walls tell various stories through figurative and abstract inscriptions and drawings. Like much of their work, the Red House is concerned with the gathering of visual data relating to matters of human behavior, often in place of political tension. The camera is used to isolate these things, to cut them out for interpretation and reflection.

In June 2008, during a trip to Afghanistan, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin realised the series The Day Nobody Died. Embedded with British Army units on the front line in Helmand Province, they took along in a simple cardboard box a roll of photographic paper 50 meters long and 76,2 cm wide. They arrived during the deadliest month of the war, on the first day of their visit they witnessed several executions; a person from BBC was dragged from his car and executed, nine Afghan soldiers were killed in a suicide attack. The following day, three British soldiers died, pushing the number of British combat fatalities to 100. Casualties continued until the fifth day when nobody died.

In response to each of these events, and also to a series of more mundane moments, such as a visit to the troops by the Duke of York and a press conference, all events a photographer would record, Broomberg and Chanarin instead unrolled a six-meter section of the paper and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds. They obtained peculiar abstract forms and patterns with tones of black, white and different colors, all modulated by the heat and the light. Instead of a conventional photographic language the photographers invite the viewer to question his relationship with the representation of violence and the real nature of the relationship between culture, politics and morality.

Broomberg & Chanarin’s work is in opposition with the traditional role of photographer as a professional witness that serves in a way as a moral intermediary for the viewer who stays comfortably at home. In the series The Day Nobody Died this position is strengthened to the extreme. It consists of radically non-figurative, unique, action-photographs, offering a profound critique of conflict photography in the age of embedded journalism.

Working in tandem with this deliberate evacuation of content, are the circumstances of the works’ production, which amount to an absurd performance in which the British Army, unsuspectingly, played the lead role. Co-opted by the artists into transporting the box of photographic paper from London to Helmand, these soldiers helped in transporting the box from one military base to another, on Hercules and Chinooks, on buses, tanks, and jeeps. In this performance, presented as a film - also on view in the exhibition – the box becomes an absurd, subversive object.

In the most recent body of works Afterlife, Broomberg & Chanarin dissect the controversial photograph taken in Iran in 1979 by Jahangir Razmi some weeks after the revolution. This photograph that shows the execution of a group of Kurdish prisoners has been widely reproduced in the press and it was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Price. Based on numerous discussions with Razmi to understand the chain of events, and on the examination of the images produced that day, Broomberg and Chanarin realised their own version in using the technique of collage. They disrupt normal spatial and temporal aspects of Razmi’s photographs, presenting a mechanical break-down of the image, an autopsy that challenges our understanding of the event and our relationship to images of trauma.

The last part of the show presents a series untitled American Landscapes. Taken in commercial photography studios across the USA, they show studio interiors - combinations of surfaces, walls, floors, ceilings and cycloramas – neutral backdrops used in the photography to isolate an object – that become in this case the topic itself of the photograph. As in the previous series, Broomberg & Chanarin, refer to events outside the area of the photograph and capture the traces of past moments confronting us with an open expanse rich with possibilities.

All these different projects refer to non represented events and explore the question of abstraction in photography, placing the form before the content and the background before the foreground.