Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
‘Unconcerned but not Indifferent’ Foto8 (March 2008)

Timmy (center), with Peter (left) and Frederick, Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, South Africa (c-type print, 12" x 16", 2003)

Dion, 41, General in the 28s describing his imaginary uniform, Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, South Africa (c-type print, 12" x 16", 2003)
If two ends of the spectrum were identified this week during the debate about race and how it is (mis)treated by photographic practice we could see them as the moronic fashion world practitioners and then everybody else – “everybody else” being social documentarians, new-media image-makers, old-school bang-bang-club photographers and fine art practitioners. This second larger group is where most thoughtful folk place their energies.
Bizarrely there are a couple of guys who run the length of this spectrum. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin used to be the creative directors of Benetton’s controversial Colors Magazine AND they travel through Africa and Central America taking photographs of people in institutions.
Broomberg and Chanarin have also pissed a lot of people off. They are that good.
We all remember Steven Mayes’s departure speech from the World Press Photo, but Broomberg and Chanarin beat him to his oft-repeated remarks that photographers repeat motifs and collectively thicken the pen around photojournalism’s self-drawn caricature.
A full year prior to Mayes’ rallying call for new imagery (genuine, everyday Black culture; affluent drug use and users; and real sex), Broomberg and Chanarin were throwing punches low and hard at photojournalism’s conceit. They quoted Brecht; ‘The tremendous development of photojournalism has contributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about conditions in this world. On the contrary photography, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, has become a terrible weapon against the truth.’
In turn, Broomberg and Chanarin relied on Sontag and Barthes;
‘Since its inception photojournalism has traded in images of human suffering. If one of its motivations for representing tragedy has been to change the world then it has been unsuccessful. Instead the profession has turned us into voyeurs, passively consuming these images, sharing in the moment without feeling implicated or responsible for what we are seeing. Roland Barthes summed up the analgesic effect of looking at images of horror when he wrote “someone has shuddered for us; reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing – except a simple right of intellectual acquiescence”.’
They provide a pat description of the “obscene feeling” jury process in which there is no text, caption or context. Judgement is dependent only on the aesthetics of the image: “We are asked to judge whether, for example, a photograph of a child suffocating to death in a mudslide is sufficiently beautiful to win a prize.” After this Broomberg and Chanarin explain the means by which the panel narrowed down the 81,000 images to five winners, suggesting with some contempt that Hetherington’s Exhausted Soldier was a predictable result.
Before I go any further, I should say that Tim Hetherington voiced a stirring rebuttal to Broomberg and Chanarin’s derision.

Self-Portrait by Mario, Ren Vallejo Psychiatric Hospital, Cuba. (c-type print 12" x 16", 2033)
So what? They’re a grumpy duo with a pocket full of common critical theory? Yes … and no. They go further. To my observations they apply what they preach. I have coined the term Slow Photography for this piece because they lug about a 4×5 camera and as well as standing over the top of their medium format to hold a conversation, they’ll usually stick around for a week or three.
They’ve described the relationships they build with their subjects as very important. Lucky for them they have the leisure to hang around you are saying?! Fair point, but they use their time well.
With Ghetto, they went to Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison in South Africa and made portraits of male, female and transgendered inmates. They went to Ren Vallejo Psychiatric Hospital, Cuba also. In total they went to twelve rare communities, methodically photographing and asking the same questions: “Who is in power here? Where do you go to be alone, to make love, to be with friends? What are your hopes and dreams?”
I love that question, “Who’s in power here?”
Broomberg and Chanarin simultaneously reference old slower photo-processes and question the sped-up practices of 21st century photojournalism. Charlotte Cotton, Curator of Photographs at the V&A, has observed, “The sense of activity being slowed for the camera references nineteenth century photography both in terms of process and style. It also serves to detach their photographs from the conventions of photojournalism.”
And if we needed any more proof that these two geezers are on top of their game, lets look how they dealt with the two major conflicts of the beginning of the 21st century.
They got quiet with wartime scratches and scrawls, but have received none of the plaudits Peter Van Agtmael, Tim Hetherington, Roger Ballen or bubble chamber photography have.
The Red House documented the prison and torture center run by Saddam Hussein’s Baath party in Sulaymaniyah, Iraki Kurdistan, 330 kilometres from Baghdad.

The Red House

The Red House

The Red House
And, then when they were “privileged” enough to merit an embedded assignment with the British military in Afghanistan they thumbed their noses at any notion of photojournalism. Instead they took 70 metres of photo sensitive paper and unrolled sections to expose it to light and that became the record of each day and their time in conflict.
Each roll was given its title based on the occurrence of an event, death or absence of death during that day. Below is the work from the day of a prison escape.

The Jail Break, June 13th 2008. 76.2 x 600cm, c-type
9 comments
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October 17, 2009 at 7:06 am
Sean
Broomberg and Chanarin have produced some excellent work it seems.
The final piece ‘The Jail Break, June 13th 2008’ is impressive.
There is a gradual moving away from representation to abstraction in the works you have mentioned. It would be interesting to here their reasons for this.
Best, Sean.
October 17, 2009 at 8:34 am
John
Fascinating post. Great timing for me, too, given what I’ve been doing in class lately. I think I’ll have my students read it, plus Broomberg and Chanarin’s article and Hetherington’s response next week.
Thanks for the thoughts and the links.
October 17, 2009 at 8:51 am
petebrook
I think Broomberg and Chanarin are the best of artists who work from concept … although I’d stop short of calling them conceptual artists. They make products that challenge (not in a complicated way) the areas of photographic practice they see as problematic. As they see it, rolling out light sensitive paper and exhibiting the product is a informative to the public as a shot of a allied soldier hiding behind a mud wall at an “every-place” in AFghanistan/Pakistan.
October 17, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Sean.
Your comment: ‘…rolling out light sensitive paper and exhibiting the product is a informative to the public as a shot of a allied soldier hiding behind a mud wall…’ is insightful.
I went to see the exhibition SOUTH yesterday at the ACP, an ‘award-winning Australian documentary photographers who have covered conflicts from Vietnam in 1965 to present day Afghanistan. This collection of their images exposes the impact that war has on its victims, both civilians and military, whose lives are shattered by wars they did not start and over which they have no control.’ (http://tmp.acp.org.au/current/).
Some of the images were very moving, they possses a certain sadness – and the this repetition of images of suffering from the 60s to now made this even more so. Some of the images I had seen before, but much of it was new to me.
The two approaches could not be more different. The interesting question is why work such as he ‘Jail Break, June 13th 2008’ are as informative, if not more so, than the others (which, of course, you touch on in the post).
In a wider context it cold be said that, in general, what is actually going on, and why, is beyond the ken of most reports anyway. People died yesterday and here is a picture of it, and this building was bombed yesterday and here is a picture of it only goes so far. This type of reporting is little different than the way in which a cat stuck up a tree would be reported.
For those who are willing, perhaps the work of Broomberg and Chanarin asks the question why more directly by omitting a depiction of event the title (caption) describes. It is saying this happened – now go and find out why… (just thinking off the top of my head here…).
The work reminds me of alternative approaches to photography exhibited at Abbot Hall in Kendal in 2007 (see http://pentimento.squarespace.com/journal/2007/1/24/alchemy-exhibition-abbot-hall-kendal.html for a brief over on this).
Have you come across any other such works pertaining to prisons?
Best, Sean.
November 14, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Garry Clarkson
These guys are singularly (and doubly) the most important photographers working today. Showing how you can cope in a war whilst holding a camera and wearing a helmet is NOT the same level of discomfort as actually being shot at. It was fine for Robert Capa (as much as I love what he did) but we don’t live in 1947; so this form of machismo had to end. About time for me! There is no point regurgitating the same hackneyed cliches. Thoughtful, sensitive and about the particularity of the photographic medium.
February 12, 2011 at 2:21 am
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December 6, 2016 at 4:38 am
Chantal
How do you get permission to take photos on prision for the women with baby section I.would love to capture there moments which they can not while they are doing time.