"At first, Broomberg & Chanarin wanted to write a farewell letter emulating a suicide note," says Joana Hurtado Matheu, director of Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona, where The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin, the duo's final exhibition, is being held. "Then they changed their mind."
Perhaps it was a matter of definition or taste, or maybe composing a suicide note would have forced them to explain too much, but whatever their reason for deciding against writing one, it didn't stop Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin from killing off the artistic entity they created more than 20 years ago.
Although neither of them has lived in SA for decades - Broomberg was born and raised here, but left to study overseas, and Chanarin spent part of his childhood here; they met in SA in the 1990s when they were both here on holiday - they have always retained some sort of connection to the country. They have exhibited regularly at Goodman Gallery, most recently in 2018.
After Broomberg landed a job at Colors, the groundbreaking photography-driven magazine published by Italian fashion label Benetton, they contrived to work there together and a partnership was born. They eventually ended up as editors of Colors.
Although they took on commercial photography projects, their politicised and philosophical bent led them to question the terms of the medium they were working in.
Some of their work at Colors (and after) did involve a type of documentary, and perhaps didn't quite avoid a degree of sensationalism or voyeurism - the series Ghetto documents encounters with residents of closed communities such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, military bases and refugee camps - even then they were uneasy about photography's claim to represent reality with any neutrality.
They always included interviews, or had their subjects trigger the camera themselves, or tried in some way or other to unsettle a straight interpretation of their images.
They became increasingly interested in questioning the medium itself and its relationship with institutional power and social control. They began worrying away at everything from the role photography played in the colonial project and government surveillance to its relationship with violence (perhaps their most central theme) in conflict photography.
TOO CLEVER BY HALF
Their approach was smart, sometimes punky, sometimes high-minded and intellectual, occasionally a bit too clever by half, but often powerful and poetic.
To cherry-pick a few of their projects: For The Day Nobody Died, Broomberg & Chanarin (B&C) lied and said they were conflict photographers to get themselves embedded with the British army on the frontlines in Afghanistan in 2008.
Rather than take war photographs, however, they exposed lengths of photographic paper to the light at the scenes they wished to mark: a soldier's death, or something more mundane like a military base visit by Prince Philip. The paper strips recorded nothing more than abstract light patterns, like graphs or flames. Do these strange commemorative images - as specific to a place and time as a photo - do a better or worse job of representing the horrors of war than a picture depicting violence?
INITIATION RITUALS
In To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light in 2012, they insisted on photographing a commission to travel to Gabon to document rare tribal initiation rituals using expired Kodak film of a type that had been criticised, as long ago as the 1970s, for being racist because of its inability to register the tones of black skin. (Only one frame actually came out.)
One of the biggest prizes they won, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, was for a sort of intervention or update of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht's 1955 book War Primer, which juxtaposed war imagery he'd collected from magazines and newspapers with four-line poems he wrote to replace the captions. B&C overlayed new images from the war on terror over the book's original images, giving the poems a fresh spin.
The list could go on and on - they've tackled everything from Russian facial recognition technology to the way in which photographs circulating on the internet gather valuable metadata.
OBITUARIES
In short, B&C was a success. Their work is represented in collections including the Pompidou, Tate, MoMA and Yale. Nevertheless, B&C decided to kill off their shared alter ego. "Nowhere have they explained precisely the reasons for their separation," says Hurtado Matheu.
A selection of people who knew the pair, or played some part in their career, wrote obituaries for them in various art publications, run to coincide with the opening of their restrospective exhibition.
Hurtado Matheu explains that it was originally intended to be "an exhibition without curator, because the idea was that the artists came to Fabra i Coats to work with all the material".
The pandemic, however, prevented B&C from travelling, so Hurtado Matheu and archivist Elisabet Rodriguez found themselves responsible for the contents of the 13m truckload of boxes and crates that arrived at the museum.
Hurtado Matheu says she deliberately wanted to unsettle the idea of the museum as an institution that inherits any sort of authority over the material it holds.
"We wanted to undo this idea by exposing the selection/archive process, and show the contingent and performative nature of the work and the institution," she says. "This is precisely what B&C's 'death' has allowed us to explore and teach as an institution: the permeable and changing character of the exhibition hall, its ability to construct statements as well as to open itself to a lack of definition and to multiple ways of meaning, in a way that might be distant from the author's original purpose and closer to the 'reader' or visitor."
So the exhibition has involved a sort of shifting display.
"On one floor you can find the most complete series of the authors' works, which are exhibited in a conventional way; on the other floor, the boxes that the archivist opens for cataloguing as the exhibition progresses are presented together with all the documentation found related to the works on display at that time: negatives, contact sheets, book tests, errors, discards, etc," explains Hurtado Matheu.
She's worked through the material thematically, starting with works involving images sourced from archives or other sources - even the internet - largely to do with conflict photography.
"Then we turn to the confrontation with reality, 'facing' the people they [B&C] met to portray and questioning the act of photographing ." says Hurtado Matheu. Then, in the next few instalments, she will move toward the more abstract works that explore the question of "what is representable . and the impossibility [of] represent[ing] extreme violence".
As much as the exhibition is an opportunity to revisit B&C's remarkable career, the "death of the author" as Hurtado Matheu points out, changes the way we look at their work.
Whatever B&C's reasons for working as a duo, the effect unsettled certain fundamental notions of authorship, artistic originality and individual genius, particularly as it related to authority over the meaning of an image.
Understanding the work was never simply a question of what the artist was saying. They were forever rereading other people's images (and even their own). There were always so many layers, or such a strong sense of what was outside the frame, that ultimately the viewer became implicated in creating its meaning.
PARADOX
The way their "deceased estate" is framed does something similar. Hurtado Matheu says that it's about looking back without nostalgia.
"Our objective was to put the emphasis on the future, on what this work 'can still be'," she says. She explains that "presenting it as something open, participating in the present" is an attempt to undo the idea of the retrospective exhibition as the final word.
The dark humour, confusion and cleverness - even the idea of the death of the author is a paradox: the author didn't exist! - isn't for nothing. It has a political point, too. It's a democratic gesture: who is responsible for B&C's work now? Everyone. You. It's typical of B&C: simultaneously self-important and entirely without self.
• 'The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin' will run at the Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre in Barcelona, Spain, until May 23.
