exhibitions
exhibition archive 2007

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin 6 February - 31 March 2007 artist's interview email a friend Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Heather, Models 1, London, UK. Courtesy and copyright the artists.

 

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The project will be published as a bookwork by Photoworks and Steidl in Autumn 2007.

Fig. installation view, John Hansard Gallery. Photo: Steve Shrimpton.

Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg have been photographing together for more than nine years. Their work has been exhibited internationally and they are the recipients of numerous awards including a Royal Photographic Society award in 2005. Publications include Trust (2000), Ghetto (2003), Mr Mkhize's Portrait (2004) and Chicago (2006).

This project was funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Arts Council England.

Artists’ Talk:
Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg in conversation with Julian Stallabrass
Thursday 15 March / 7.30 – 8.30pm

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin will discuss their Photoworks commission with the art historian and writer Julian Stallabrass. The talk will focus on the links between photography and colonialism explored by the exhibition, and the ways this has prompted the artists to reflect upon their own photographic practice. Click here for more information.

 

 

 

Filmed Discussion

Following the opening of the exhibition visitors can watch a filmed discussion between Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin and Stephen Foster, Director, John Hansard Gallery, displayed in the gallery Project Room.

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Video produced by e-media, University of Southampton.
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Transcription

Abbreviations: Stephen Foster: SF / Oliver Chanarin: OC / Adam Broomberg: AB

SF: This is Stephen Foster on the occasion of the exhibition Fig. by Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg at the John Hansard Gallery.

Oliver and Adam, you’ve been working together now for 10 years, what brought this collaboration together in the first place?

AB: I think it started as a friendship really. But then we began to edit Colors Magazine together, so our photographic career really started as editors of the magazine.

OC: I think that’s really important for us because we both started doing photography – not really taking pictures but looking at pictures, collecting pictures and editing and rearranging pictures for Colors.

SF: And your photographic practice has been fairly ruthlessly political in the way it uses photography to investigate issues. Has this come through that practice with the magazine?

AB: I think partly that - it probably goes back a bit further - I mean both of us have Jewish roots, Eastern European roots, kind of Holocaust survivors and also landed up in South Africa. So I think just because of you know, where we come from and our experience of growing up in South Africa I think, by default, we became kind of very politicised.

OC: But I think working at Colors opened our eyes really to the possibility of using photography as a way to talk about and debate certain political issues.

SF: Perhaps it might be as well to talk about Colors Magazine just briefly, because it’s a very important background I think.

AB: Colors was started – sponsored by Benetton and started by Oliviero Toscani and Tibor Kalman, and it was started in the early ‘90’s and it was kind of dubbed as this new kind of media, you know, for the MTV generation magazine. And eventually Toscani and Benetton kind of split ways and then invited us there to kind of regenerate the magazine and come up with a new formula.

SF: Was this the beginning of your collaboration?

OC: We actually started working on Colors before that, and Oliviero Toscani so we were making the magazine in the traditional way that it had been made, like Adam says, it was constructed by buying images and juxtaposing images and when we took over the editorship of Colors we changed the methodology that the magazine was made. We actually went out and took pictures for the magazine, and we made it a kind of rule that everyone in the magazine was going to be people that we’d actually met and interviewed and spoken to. And that was quite a fundamental change in the way it was produced.

SF: Now neither of you had a formal training in either photographic practice or theory. How do you think that’s affected the way in which you’ve approached your work?

AB: I think it’s quite important. I think it allows us quite a lot of freedom really, and each time we went to one of the communities, we kind of investigated for Colours, we would take a photographer that we admired with us, so we kind of learnt that way.

SF: So you had an intensive year as editors of Colors –

BOTH: - Three years.

SF: - three years – but have been working on it since?

OC: Well since we worked there for three years, and at the end of that we published our book ‘Ghetto’ and that kind of put an end to that whole period and we moved back to London and we started working on new projects. The next thing we did after that was a book called ‘Mr Mkhize’s Portrait’ which is about South Africa 10 years after Apartheid.

SF: Most of your work is – well all of your work is project based. You engage in project and a series of work emerges as a result, usually a publication and an exhibition and so on. Is that related to your kind of original journalistic (put it that way) background or your publishing background?

OC: I’m not sure it is, I mean, our work’s a mixture of commissions and it’s a mixture of us commissioning ourselves really. And I think an issue just suddenly seems to rise to the surface and becomes important to both of us and really we get curious about it, and so we seem to kind of tackle that then until it feels like it’s understood in a way.

But I wonder if it’s got something to do with the fact that we work together as a team that we kind of start a conversation about something, and start exploring it and kind of get buried in it, and then these things kind of grow into a project.

AB: For instance our last book ‘Chicago’ and the show at the Stedelijk Museum was – it happened by chance. We were invited to the West Bank to attend the First International Film Festival and we were so shocked by the kind of state of affairs, and what it means to be under siege in the West Bank, that we felt that we wanted to tackle that issue. And so the next two years we just spent working out ways to use, you know, access we could gain as Jewish people and researching and working with academics and new historians and just to try and tackle it until we felt we understood what was going on.

OC: But I think one of the things that we realised when we got to the West Bank was how similar Israel is (or was) to South Africa during the Apartheid era.

SF: In what sense?

OC: Just in the sense that Israeli society is very much cocooned and –

AB: And kind of oblivious to what is going on, very much as our experiences as white South Africans was.

SF: Well you’ve referred to your background several times. What particular – you were both Jewish South Africans in some form or another, in what sense has that been an important influence in the way in which you work?

AB: That’s a huge question. I actually moved to England when I was seven years old, so I spent most of my life living in London, and I suppose that had all sorts of psychological effects on how I’ve turned out. But I think it’s – I don’t know it’s a difficult thing to answer really.

SF: You’ve done work related to South Africa specifically.

AB: Well that was really problematic really and we found that very difficult, that project. We went back to South Africa after having done this work at Colors, and we’d spent three years travelling the world, going to these incredibly exotic places – psychiatric hospitals in Cuba and military bases in Russia and all these kind of very exotic places, and it was an opportunity for us to go back to somewhere really familiar.

OC: But that was very difficult you know, to go in as a kind of documentary practitioner and suddenly be familiar with the people and the place and have a kind of a more acute sense of responsibility in a way. It was very difficult. Along with a kind of sense of guilt that we had both (certainly I because I only left when I was 20). I left with and hadn’t quite cured or got rid of, you know.

AB: And also the context of that commission. We were being commissioned by the Government basically to make a document of South Africa to hang in the Constitutional Court. And we were pulled in all sorts of directions in terms of the outcome of the project. And I think it’s very interesting to compare that to something like this ‘Fig.’ where this is funded by Photoworks and in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery, and it’s a much freer kind of commissioning process.

SF: It’s still a commission but it gives you the opportunity to do – build the subject matter as you move along rather than…

AB: And also to be more self conscious about documentary practice and about the responsibility and the politics and how images work and how they’re constructed.

SF: Moving on to this exhibition and this project, that has a rather intriguing title of ‘Fig.’. I wonder if you would just like to say a little bit about the title and how it relates to the project itself.

AB: Well I mean if you go up close to any of the pieces in the show, you’ll see that there’s a little fig dot and a number attached to each picture. We’ve used the kind of language of museology to indicate each different picture.

SF: So this is a very close relationship to museology as a result of the project that you’ve engaged in. You said at some stage during all of this that for a start the idea of collecting in museums has a very much colonialistic, imperialistic background. I wonder if you would say a bit about how the images in this exhibition relate to that?

OC: Well this kind of project started standing on the top of Fell Beacon really. We went to visit a friend in the Sussex Downs and we went for a walk. They took us for a walk, and we got to the top of Fell Beacon and there was this big basket where they light these beacons to warn of invasion, and something lodged in both of our minds when we saw that, and that was actually was about a year and a half before we started the project. But we kind of returned to that when this commission began.

SF: You then go on to say that in many ways what you’ve done in this project is a critique of your own practice, because you’ve likened documentary photography to the same kind of colonial plundering that museums have engaged in for hundreds of years. Is that the correct understanding?

OC: Yeah, I think there is something very strange about the idea of being commissioned to go to a place, for instance like Rwanda, which we’ve covered a bit in this show, and come back with evidence of a genocide. And essentially there is a number of factors. One is you come back with this very brittle evidence. This millimetre thick negative that is mean to kind of embody and you know, transfer this whole kind of emotional experience.

The other thing is how it is such a kind of fiction. And what we’ve tried to do here is just talk about how fictionalised documentary process is, and how subjective it is.

AB: I think also the way that words are used here are really important and critical because none of this makes any sense without the little booklet that you’re given when you come.

OC: You know we’re thinking if you go into a museum, when you see an object in a display cabinet, there’s a sign there that tells you what it is. But if you replace that sign with something else, suddenly that object becomes something else. So the way that the picture is formed and contextualised by words is critical to documentary images.

SF: What came first and how did the relationship (because there is a continuous narrative, which we’ll move on to in a second) but how did the thing emerge? Did it emerge through this narrative text with images linking it together or did the pictures come first and the narratives get hung on to them or -?

AB: I think the pictures are an accumulation of the last kind of six or seven years of our work, so it’s really been about almost just constructing this kind of poem that’s very accurate, but a poem that just takes you through our practice, and our experience which is often, you know, so kind of schizophrenic; to shoot from different countries, you know Rwanda going to a whole other place with a whole set of different experiences.

OC: Well I think also when we went – quite towards the end of the project, towards the end of the commission we went down to Brighton to visit the Booth Museum, and that was quite a critical moment I think in the way everything kind of pulled together because we started documenting the Booth Museum, which is an old 19th Century Victorian Museum, like a cabinet of curiosities, and we started to visualise this project as a kind of cabinet of curiosities, where each photograph was an object in our cabinet. So that was the kind of framework we were using as we built up the narrative.

AB: But like you say, the documentary process does mimic that original kind of colonial impetus to go out and collect and to map and to quantify and to possess, in a way. And there’s this kind of manic energy in kind of documentary photography about going out and seizing your evidence and bringing it back. And I think it’s very much a kind of male practice traditionally, and very much a kind of colonial and European one.

SF: As we said earlier, this is a project that was commissioned originally by Photoworks who are based in Brighton, and we were talking for a long time during the gestation of this project and you were based (not based but spending a lot of time in the area). To what extent did your journeys across the south of England affect the way in which you recognised this relationship between – particularly regional English museums. This is not the V & A we’re talking about, it’s essentially a lot of the kind of curiosities that one sees here are related to regional, small regional museums very often. Is that something that emerged during your developing of the idea for this exhibition?

AB: We started off in the Isle of Wight strangely, and we went to Osborne House. We were interested in Queen Victoria’s collection and the Royal collection. But then on the way back we stopped at a little Maritime Museum in one of the small harbour towns, and we found in there what’s called the Narwel Horn. It’s a very long horn that was though to originally to belong to a Unicorn, and it was just the most extraordinary object. It’s kind of three metres long and it looks like a kind of giant toothpick.

And we took a picture of that, and then we started reading in Granta Magazine about the stories that early adventurers who were going to Patagonia were coming back with these stories of giants that they’d seen, that they’d encountered on their travels. And then it turned out that these giants had never existed. So what was the explanation for these stories?

And the explanation given in this Granta article was about how early explorers going out to the Colonies were actually projecting onto this new world their own fantasies and the stories they were told as children –

OC: - or the fantasies that they were demanded to bring back, by the people commissioning them. And it’s very similar the kind of contemporary experience of doing a documentary project.

SF: You said earlier on what you’re dealing is fact and fantasy, truth and lies. In what way does that reveal itself here?

OC: I think in everything. The relationship between each picture is sometimes very dubious and I think also each piece has an element of fantasy in it.

AB: There’s one picture over there which is a leaf – it’s kind of a cliché image. You’ve seen photographs like that. That almost looks like a real leaf. And what it is actually, is it’s taken from a tree that was nearby the explosion of a detonation of a suicide bomb in Israel. And it struck us, when these bombs explode what happens is the force of the explosion actually forces leaves off the nearby trees and they fall to the ground, so we collected that leaf. And it stuck us this was an interesting way of representing the event of a suicide bomb. I mean you’ve always seen pictures of blown out cars and bits of bodies on the street and blood on the street, and these kind of images that don’t really work any more, don’t do anything. And so part of our investigation as documentary photographers, is how to reinterpret the world and make more effective documentary images that somehow, you know, that somehow cut over the – all the images that you’re used to seeing.

SF: With the few exceptions, like behind us here, they’re all 5” x 4” prints and they are ruthlessly serial, partly because of this contiguous narrative that you have, but also because they’re equally spaced, the same height, in a line, right the way around the Gallery. Would you like to explain a little bit about your thinking behind this?

OC: I think that systematic thing just kind of reinforcing the scientific nature of it. And also the idea that the decision to make everything 5” x 4” is what – we work with a 5” x 4” camera and in essence the world is reduced to that size. So our initial idea was actually to just to show the negatives, playing on the idea of what is the original, you know, and we decided that this would be the most kind of approachable way to do it.

SF: Now the texts that accompany these images, do not appear, so again, one’s first impression on entering the Gallery is purely visual; but there is a rather nice publication that has the text related to each image in a little booklet, so how does the visitor relate to the exhibition? They come in with a book in their hand and they read Fig.1 and they look at Fig.1. Is that how people engage with the exhibition?

AB: I think that’s one way that you could engage with it, but because you are in a room, it’s a three dimensional space, you can go up to any of the pictures and reference the number in the book. So you could also engage with the work in a non-linear way.

I think the way we thought about this show and this piece of work was like a puzzle, and each of these things is one piece of this puzzle really. Somehow it doesn’t quite even fit together, so I think you could engage it in that way as well.

SF: Because also it’s a narrative; it’s a fairly strange narrative isn’t it? It’s almost like a consequences type thing, it’s taking you in a logical route to where you may never have thought you might go -.

OC: - But it’s a very personal one as well, and it’s also in a way, it’s kind of a way of us trying to make sense of our 10 years of work.

SF: Well at the end of the day it’s a very beautiful exhibition and it looks – and as a result of that it is very compelling exhibition. Adam and Oliver, thank you very much.

BOTH: Thank you.

Video and audio recording and interview transciption © Copyright the artists and John Hansard Gallery

 

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