Fig: Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg

Foster, Stephen and Chandler, David (2007) Fig: Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg.

Abstract

This Photoworks exhibition, produced in association with the John Hansard Gallery, features over eighty still lives, portraits and landscapes by photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Drawing together newly commissioned work made around the south coast of England and internationally, Fig. traces links between photography, imperialism and the colonial impulse to acquire, map and collect. The exhibition’s diverse imagery harks back to an era of Victorian collecting, which resulted in strange accumulations of objects being deposited in local museums throughout the UK. Here, with pictures framed in acrylic boxes that suggest the scientific preservation and display of museum objects, the exhibition has become the photographers’ own questioning take on the ‘cabinet of curiosities’. As Broomberg and Chanarin have observed:
‘the history of photography is intimately bound up with the idea of colonial power. Documentary photographers today have a worrying amount in common with the collector/adventurers of past eras. As unreliable witnesses, we have gathered together ‘evidence’ of our experiences and present our findings in this exhibition; a muddle of fact and fantasy.’ The free booklet available in the gallery, to be read in connection with the photographs, provides titles and texts that draw together this disparate selection of work into the artists’ own interconnecting narrative. Figure numbers beneath each image should be cross-referenced with the corresponding numbers in the booklet. The project will be published as a bookwork by Photoworks and Steidl in Autumn 2007.

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