{"id":322,"date":"2015-04-08T12:02:47","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T10:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=322"},"modified":"2015-04-08T12:02:47","modified_gmt":"2015-04-08T10:02:47","slug":"the-vandalism-of-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=322","title":{"rendered":"The vandalism of photography"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BC_Bible_04\"<\/a>As with the news, it\u2019s easy to fall into the trap of thinking photography represents objective fact.\u00a0It\u2019s an image produced by a machine; how can a machine be subjective? But consider how Kodak film was standardised to Caucasian skin back in the 1960s, showing some of our best friends as indeterminate black blurs.<\/p>\n

Teju Cole wrote about this in The New York Times<\/a> recently, but South African-born London-based artists Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg explored this in an exhibition back in 2012.<\/a> These questions of how ownership, curatorship, technology and power frame a photographic image have remained at the heart of their work.<\/p>\n

Divine Violence<\/em>, their newest exhibition showing at the Goodman until 11 April<\/a>, constitutes cabinet frames with the pages of The Bible pinned like butterflies \u2013 one chapter per frame. On each page, phrases and words are underlined with a red ballpoint pen and an image from the Archive of Modern Conflict<\/a> is attached. These were the original collages the duo put together to print their book Holy Bible<\/em>, which won them the International Centre for Photography Infinity Award last year.<\/p>\n

The Archive of Modern Conflict collects photographs from wars as far back as the Crimean. However, it\u2019s \u201cnot interested in the big iconic images of these battles that we all have in our minds. What they\u2019re interested in are the unofficial stories.\u201d Chanarin explains that an entire shelf is dedicated to family albums of Nazi soldiers, for instance, an unnerving expose of their everyday humanity.<\/p>\n

Yet, even though the pictures are not of guts and napalm, the expectation given by the exhibition\u2019s title, as well as seeing the sacrilegious dissection of \u201cthe holy book\u201d splayed and pinned, created a heightened adrenal state, my heart pounding in my chest with the promise of spectacle, sensation, shock. The works are the literal embodiment of \u201cusing spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle\u201d \u2013 philosopher Guy DeBord\u2019s definition of detournement, described in his iconic Marxist critique of mass marketing, Society of the Spectacle<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images,\u201d Debord writes. And elsewhere: \u201cThe society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this society, Christians are not outraged, freaking out on the front page of the newspapers about what Chanarin and Broomberg have done to their book. Of course, we could never get away with such a \u201cvandalisation\u201d (their word) of the Koran. Yet, in a post-Charlie Hebdo world, there\u2019s no need: we\u2019re all thinking that. Beneath this dismemberment of The Bible lies the spectre of the Koran. Just as the spectre of minorities, multiplicities and terrorism lies beneath the Western hegemony in which it is \u201cThe Bible\u201d not a bible. As Debord writes: \u201cThe story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive\u2026 compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Holy Bible<\/a>, the contents of the frames have been rescanned, printed and bound to form a bible-simulacra \u2013 replete with red-rimmed tissue paper, a black embossed cover and ribbon bookmark.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can buy it and take it home to read on the toilet, which is by the way the best place to read it,\u201d says Chanarin who, with Broomberg, came upon the idea when they saw socialist poet and playwright Bertoldt Brecht\u2019s bible, scrawled with notes and filled with press clippings.<\/p>\n

This is not the first of Brecht\u2019s books to inspire Chanarin and Broomberg\u2019s detournement. Winning them the Deutsche B\u00f6rse Photography Prize in 2013, War Primer 2 (that you can download free here<\/a>) entailed them hand-screenprinting images appropriated from the internet in 100 copies of Brecht\u2019s original War Primer. Published in 1955, Brecht\u2019s book was an interrogation of photos of World War II being a \u201cshortcut to empathy\u201d, that stops us thinking about what they really mean.<\/p>\n

Recasting this in the 21st century, what does a picture of a torture scene inside Abu Ghraib mean, after the initial emotional response? As Chanarin and Broomberg discovered in attempting to republish the image legally, Associated Press, a commercial news agency, owns the right to charge for and distribute every single photo of the notorious prison. \u201cHow the hell does a photograph taken in a prison by an American soldier of torture end up belonging to a news agency who are then trading on that picture?\u201d asks Chanarin.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe role that photography plays in the theatre of war, how images have a life in terms of recording other people\u2019s suffering and what happens to those images after they\u2019ve been made?\u201d are the types of issues that have prevented Chanarin and Broomberg from themselves reaching for a camera in years. Nonetheless, many South Africans will always remember them as being the creators of the first photographs we saw of the numbers gangs in Pollsmoor, back in 2000.<\/p>\n

— Nadine Botha<\/p>\n

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s\u00a0<\/em>Divine Violence\u00a0is on exhibit at The Goodman Gallery in Cape Town until 11 April.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As with the news, it\u2019s easy to fall into the trap of thinking photography represents objective fact.\u00a0It\u2019s an image produced by a machine; how can a machine be subjective? But … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":324,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}