The work of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin interrogates the documentary and ethnographic traditions of photography with great subtlety and respect.
In The Day Nobody Died, the pair joined the British Army in Helmand Province to make a series of photographs of the Afghanistan war. In response to each event they witnessed, they unpacked a fresh part of a 50m roll of photographic paper, exposed it to the light for 20 seconds, and then put it away again. The resulting searingly beautiful, abstract, camera-less photographs are in one sense the antithesis of war photography as photojournalism delineates it. But the work does communicate the impossibility of representing the pain and horror of personal tragedy. The more recent series People in Trouble again casts an oblique glance at a site of intense, long running conflict: the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They have meticulously researched the archives of the Belfast Exposed photography workshops. Very often the same contact sheet that record bombings, riots and burning cars, also reveal the ordinary stuff of life: kids playing on the street, girlfriends posing naked for their boyfriends; families at home, in bed or in the bath. Because the archive has always been available to the public, faces are scratched out. The artists isolate and illuminate this blow-by-blow history of how this archive has been read and continues to be reread. The critic David Campany cites their work as being exemplary of 'late photography': excavating ever deeper their supposedly limited medium of choice to find new visual challenges and possibilities.
