Luca Guadagnino at his apartment, part of a restored 17th-century palazzo, in northern Italy.

Photo: Broomberg & Chanarin

Amy Winehouse by Broomberg & Chanarin 2006

Amy Winehouse photographed by Broomberg & Chanarin, 2006

scarti, adam broomberg & oliver chanarin

POLITICAL 1 SHEET 19 3: “PEOPLE IN TROUBLE” // 2011 ADAM BROOMBERG & OLIVER CHANARIN [chromogenic print | 49 x 62 1/2″]

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin.

Photo Art: The New World of Photography エリナ・ブラザウス、タシタ・ディーン、リュック・ドゥラヘイ、アレック・ソス、イェンス・ウルリッヒ、マイケル・ヴェズリーなど、写真の最前線にいる約120人の国際的アーティストの作品を、豊富な図版でわかりやすく紹介。短いエッセイで各アーティストを紹介し、4ページにわたって作品を掲載。写真家・コレクター・写真愛好家にとって、貴重で前向きな参考書。

ISBN-10: 0500287112, 13: 978-0500287118 p.520, 27.2 x 22 x 4.2 cm 2008/3/24

Photo Art: The New World of Photography

"Where do you think my grandmother spent the Second World War?"

"Adam Broomberg, a prominent Jewish artist and Berlin-based photographer, asked this of the police after they grabbed him by the neck, threw him to the ground, beat him on the back then led him away in handcuffs."

(later in the article...)

"The justification for a pre-emptive ban on a child-friendly afternoon action to hold up watermelons, the fruit associated with Palestine, would almost be comedic if it weren’t quite so cynical—’antisemitic watermelons’. On Nakba Day itself, police vigilance was so extreme that police at one point stopped people from dancing the dabke on the basis that this traditional Palestinian dance potentially amounts to ‘political expression.’ All literature about BDS and any flyer containing the word ‘Nakba’ was seized."

Benjamin und Brecht beim Schachspielen

Fotos sind kein Film. Aber man kann einen daraus machen. Es gibt drei Fotos von Walter Benjamin und Bert Brecht, wie sie in Svendborg sitzen und Schach spielen. Die Fotos zeigen, aus unterschiedlichen Winkeln, drei räumliche Konstellationen des Schachbretts. Raumverhältnisse, in denen die Schachfiguren auf dem Brett zueinander stehen, jeweils in Relation zur Perspektive des Fotoapparats. Es sind Momentaufnahmen. Zeitliche Ausschnitte, aber auch räumliche. Gerahmt durch das Schachbrett. Das Drumherum des Schachbretts ist auch zu sehen: die Hütte, Bäume und Büsche, ein Rasenstück, Brecht Zigarre rauchend, Benjamin auf den Tisch gelehnt. Der Fotoapparat belauert die Situation, er wandert um den Tisch, wird beobachtend zurückbeobachtet. Einige Figuren stehen außerhalb des Spielfelds. Sie wurden geschlagen, subtrahiert, wie das Foto selbst subtraktiv verfährt. Es löscht Dinge durch seinen Rahmen, wobei der Rahmen selbst anzeigt, dass er ›löscht‹.

Die drei Fotos indizieren eine Sequenz: Man könnte sie am Stand von Brechts Zigarre ablesen, am Wandern der Schatten, vor allem aber an der Differenz der Aufstellungen auf dem Schachbrett. Broomberg & Chanarin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drf4OhNGxgE) ›lesen‹ die Fotos dergestalt und transponieren sie in ein Kontinuum. Sie füllen die Lücken. Lassen sie füllen. Sogenannte ›Künstliche Intelligenz‹ ›rekonstruiert‹ in ihrer Installation die Züge, die Benjamin und Brecht gemacht haben müssen. Die ›KI‹ zieht sie nach und vollzieht sie nach. Anders als im Falle KI-gestützter Videogeneratoren à la Runway scheint der Beitrag dieser ›Künstlichen Intelligenz‹ jedoch nicht darin zu bestehen, dass sie wahrscheinliche Bildkombinationen errechnet, dass sie den wahrscheinlichsten Übergang eines Bildes zum andern vorhersagt. Auch das könnte man tun. Vielmehr handelt es sich hier um eine Schach-KI. Sie kennt die Regeln, sie berechnet Züge. Sequenzen ohne Dauer. Da ist keine Unterbrechung, kein Räuspern, kein Zögern, keine Mücke auf dem Hemdkragen, kein Rascheln im Geäst. Maßgeblich sind die Regeln des Schachspiels und der virtuelle Film, der die Unterstellung stützt, hier sei regelrecht gespielt worden.

Die Installation von Broomberg & Chanarin ist radikal subtraktiv. Und doch ist es eine Subtraktion, die quersteht zur Subtraktion des Fotos. Kein Benjamin, kein Brecht, nur Geisterhand und Geisterstimme der KI. Eine Apotheose menschlicher Intelligenz ins Museum. Das Außerhalb des Spiels wird hier zum Raum, in dem die Installation steht und ausgestellt wird. Fotografien der Schachfiguren sind wie Reliquiendarstellungen über die Wände verteilt.

alias, da dupla adam broomberg & oliver chanarin

Spirit is a Bone, 2013

It’s a strange title but familiar if you know a little philosophy – taken from Hegel’s 1807 book The Phenomenology of Spirit, the phrase “the spirit is a bone” sums up his thinking on how the spirit is expressed in the physical world. Heaping scorn on the contemporary ‘science’ of phrenology, which measured the lumps and bumps of a skull to find out something about its owner, Hegel nonetheless believed that “the spirit, forever elusive, can thus only be captured in the inertia of a rigid, dead, debased kind of object”. Or at least that’s how Eyal Weizman puts it in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s latest book, in a text recording a conversation the three had on 27 September 2015.

Tackling difficult concepts in an approachable way, this text touches on Hegel, contemporary facial profiling, and classic photographic projects such as August Sander’s Citizens of the Twentieth Century or Sir Benjamin Stone’s anthropological archive, to explore how images of flesh and bone have been taken as indicators of character.

In albums such as “Album number 50, Types and Races of Mankind”, Stone classified images of individuals in terms of their ethnicity and social standing, for example, while in Citizens of the Twentieth Century, Sander labelled portraits in terms of the sitter’s position in society – starting with farmers and bakers then moving through more marginalised individuals to a final chapter on “Idiots, the Sick, the Insane and Matter”. Creepy, subtly totalitarian, this systematic labelling and categorisation might put you in mind of the Nazis and their murderous take on eugenics – and Weizman’s best-known work is a book called Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, co-authored with Thomas Keenan, which traces how Mengele’s cadaver was identified by literally fleshing out his skull, marking the start a new ‘era of forensics’ in images.

In Spirit as a Bone it’s contemporary facial profiling that’s foregrounded though, in particular the use of 3D images by the Russian government, which are assembled from multiple photographs to allow individuals to be identified no matter what the angle, expression or disguise they assume. Using the same technique, Broomberg and Chanarin have made a series of 3D ‘portraits’, labelling them, like Sander, in terms of the individuals’ jobs: ‘Industrialist’s Wife’, ‘Public Prosecutor’, or ‘Railway Official’, for example. Reducing individuals to their employment, they’re weirdly impersonal names – as weirdly impersonal as the images themselves, in fact, which Broomberg and Chanarin argue are not portraits as we traditionally understand them.

"There is never a moment in the capturing of the ‘image’ when human contact is registered; the subject’s gaze, or any connection between photographer and sitter that we would ordinarily rely on in looking at a portrait, is a complete fiction in this space,” they state. “What we’re seeing is the negation of that humanity: the digital equivalent of a death mask.”

As such, Spirit is a Bone is, in its understated way, deeply unsettling – a palpable insight into how each and every one of us can be recorded, classified and filed without our consent, or even our knowledge, be it visually, as in this example, or in terms of our online habits, our shopping preferences or our journeys around town. Recorded and tucked away into algorithms we become data, stripped of spirit and therefore capable of being processed as such. “Schtick Fleis Mit Tzvei Eigen” ends the book, a Yiddish insult rendering the recipient a “piece of meat with two eyes”; if not understood in terms of our individual personalities, that what our bodies become – and, all too easily, we as well.

scarti, adam broomberg & oliver chanarin

A New Era: CliffCentral Pivots to Birth Two New Podcasting Platforms

After a groundbreaking decade at the forefront of podcasting in South Africa, CliffCentral.com founders Gareth Cliff and Rina Broomberg are embarking on an exciting new chapter.  One on One  Productions, the visionary force behind CliffCentral, is proud to announce two strategic pivots which marks the launch of Podcast Party and The Real Network. The Real Network, utilizing the CliffCentral…

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Artist: Broomberg and Chanarin

Illustration

Painting

Digital/Photorealistic

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin - The Story of my Death.

same anon as before-- thanks for your replies! i will definitely do more research, but what you posted was super helpful. it wasn't my intention to distract from the genocide of palestinians. among certain people i know rim abdellatif (and accounts like badtakespali) is framed as like, the voice we should listen to, and something about her felt off after i saw your post on my dash. i didn't even know she isn't palestinian

also you'll find her comment about shoresh here:

https : // www . instagram . com / p/C0S3eqJOEvv/?img_index=1

Hi, thanks for your message.

I'm curious about your experience. To you, who exactly is treating them as authorities? What age/country/religion as far as you know? (My assumption is young teens but I wasn't sure.)

Also, badtakespali is awful. Don't give them attention. Issa Amro has been repeatedly tortured by the IDF for his activism. Adam Broomberg is an incredible ally and both of them have been doing Palestinian activism since before the curators of that Instagram were even born.

I didn't think you meant to distract but didn't want any non followers to mistake where I stood.