1+1=3
For almost 20 years, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s work as photographers and artists — while it demonstrates a collection of concerns around the role of photography in the digital age, the responsibilities of photographers and the role of archives in shaping our ideas about history — has also been notable for the variety of ways in which they have presented their investigations.
As Broomberg observes in his still recognisably Johannesburg Jewish manner: “We’re restless in that way, we don’t have a shtick.”
Broomberg was born in South Africa. Chanarin was born in London but lived part of his childhood in South Africa before returning to England. The two met in their early 20s in the Western Cape town of Wupperthal. After a call from Broomberg to Chanarin to help assemble a piece of Ikea furniture, the rest has been art history.
Over the past two decades they’ve developed a working relationship that Chanarin describes as being guided by “a sense that we don’t really know who makes our work — it’s not Adam and it’s not me — it’s some sort of third personality and so the authorship is divested into this collaborative space”.
Trinity of two
The trinity that is Broomberg and Chanarin was in Johannesburg last month to open their new show, Bandage the knife not the wound, which takes its title from a work by conceptual artist Joseph Beuys.
For a long time the artists have been thinking of what to do with their personal archives of images collected over the course of their careers — first as more traditional documentary photographers working extensively for the now-defunct Benetton Colors Magazine, and later as exhibiting artists showing work across the globe.
For years the pair lived in London, working out of a studio in the city’s East End. Broomberg has since moved to Berlin and they both work as professors of photography at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg.
It was there, in the school’s analogue lab, where the delivery of chemicals and paper has resulted in cardboard boxes lying everywhere, that Chanarin experimented with the idea of printing an image on a foldedout box using a UV printer.
Although the two teach at the same place, they’re not often there at the same time, but Broomberg saw Chanarin’s image and responded with his own, and so a game of ping-pong between the two began, each using images from years of shared and stored digital images on their hard drives.
For Chanarin, “it was quite accidental the way they intersected and we really just fell in love with the way the cardboard resonated through the image so that you have this sepia coming through. It kind of brought the collage together as one image.”
Through their teaching, Broomberg and Chanarin have become fascinated with the disposability of images in the digital age of Instagram where “likes” trounce the actual experience of standing in front of a piece of work.
As Broomberg sees it, “in a funny way there’s been a kind of reverse in art history from the time when an art object was normally this kind of very precious, authentic piece of material that had the aura of the artist and the handprint of the artist. Now it’s kind of the inverse, where the value of this object comes through how many times it is liked or repeated on the internet.”
It is estimated that more than a trillion photographs were taken in the world last year, so the artists’ choice of a suitably disposable material that Chanarin describes as “essentially detritus” seems perfect for a show that seeks to raise questions about the photograph in the digital age.
Because the images were selected from their personal archives, stored over years of working together on various projects, the resulting work displays some familiar tropes. As Chanarin points out: “You can see as you walk through that there are images that repeat themselves — masks, contrasts, hand gestures, people falling over. It was quite enjoyable for us that these themes came out of the process rather than us beginning with them.”
The works are not titled and have been displayed unframed with the folds of the cardboard providing a sculptural element. This, while it may leave collectors puzzled as to how to display the images in their homes, makes for a satisfyingly three-dimensional viewing experience in the gallery.
The cardboard artworks make up the bulk of the exhibition, but they are not the centre of the show. That place belongs to a series of abstract canvases in which the white spaces created by the removal of the boxes after printing are the focus of the frame.
These works, Broomberg notes, “are not only about whatever is outside the frame, which is something we’ve spoken about quite consistently for 20 years . . . they also highlight the idea that all photographs are abstract in their nature — there’s no such thing as a non-abstract picture — but suddenly we were able to make a very clear reference to everything except what information is contained in the frame, and that’s of value in itself.”
They may have revelled in the freedom to create images offered by the disposability of their chosen material, but the show is now up and so the works have entered a new phase of life, one in which the pieces of cardboard, as Chanarin observes, “become pieces of art and go from being these things that you chuck around to suddenly being these things that are handled with white gloves”.
Their previous collection, Divine Violence — in which the artists made visual interventions in the Old Testament of a copy of the King James Bible — is currently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
The new work has debuted at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery. For Broomberg in particular, “it’s quite important that this show is happening here. I’ve spent many a sleepless night wondering whether two middle-aged white men who left the country at varying degrees of their adolescence have any entitlement to show their work here.
“For me it’s really important to come here and stand in this room and talk about it and face the music in a way — to understand how I feel about it in my homeland, because this is still home. I think it’s not accidental that we happen to have a show here and it’s so personal for me.”
Back to making images
Although they often finish each other’s sentences, the pair don’t always agree. For Chanarin, the personal elements of the show are less important but, as he points out, “this is the first conversation that we’ve ever had about this work. As you talk it over and over again you kind of develop a spiel and at the moment we don’t have a spiel. The weird thing is: can we avoid the spiel? Do we need to talk about it? Essentially it’s a digital dig of an archive . . . it’s not bound by some kind of conceptual framework and I don’t really know how to talk about it.”
The inscrutability of the work also appeals to Broomberg, who says if you’re the kind of viewer who “might demand absolute conceptual rigour and political awareness, there’s something else here that we can’t actually explain and that’s interesting”.
Compared with their earlier work, there is a visibly looser presentation. Chanarin sees that as a reflection of the fact that they “both felt very vulnerable in producing this work and actually that feeling of vulnerability is essential”.
It’s a vulnerability that comes through in many of the images, but there is also a typical Broomberg and Chanarin sense of play and impishness in evidence. Both the vulnerability and the playfulness are perhaps the result of the process, in which, Broomberg says, “there was no judgment and we actually let each other do what we wanted. In a way we’ve spent 20 years reducing our work down to what passes the Adam-and-Ollie censorship board and this is a time when we’ve had to let go of that.”
Finally, there’s another ironic way in which this collection of images reflecting on the ethereal self-flagellations of social media photography signals a departure for “Adam and Ollie”. That is, in Chanarin’s words, “a return to photography, because although these ‘canvases’ are very abstract, if you walk around the show there’s a real joy in the images and an embracing of image-making, and that’s something we’ve been agonising over for many years — what does it mean to be a photographer, especially in an age where everybody’s taking photographs?
“Here I think we find ourselves coming back to making images.”
Broomberg & Chanarin’s exhibition, Bandage the knife not the wound, is at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until May 26