Broomberg and Chanarin circumvented the rules imposed on war reporters by addressing the subjects of conflict, truth and photographic documentation in such a way as to produce a predominantly abstract and formalistic kind of representation. The artists exposed a six-metre strip of photographic paper to the sun for twenty seconds every day, thus creating a non-figurative and highly pictorial surface of light and colour instead of the conventional images of conflict and their slavish compliance with the western perspective. The second part of the work, namely the video, shows soldiers loading and unloading the box containing the roll of photographic paper, which is never actually seen. Through the constantly repeated action of transporting an object of no meaning for them, the soldiers involuntarily play the leading role in a performance encapsulating the repetitive nature of military life.
What Broomberg and Chanarin seek to demonstrate with this paradoxical work of “anti-documentation” is that their images are equivalent in terms of truth content to the photographs of embedded reporters approved by military censorship. Their abstract painting of light bears witness to the reality of the conflict in the same almost paradoxical way as the work of the war photographers, which in any case does not present the truth.

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were in Afghanistan as embedded photo reporters with a front-line unit of British army in June 2008. This experience gave rise to The Brother’s Suicide, a photographic work up made of coloured lines, patterns and structures that stretches for a length of six metres, and The Day Nobody Died, a video shot, as the title suggests, on a day when there were no casualties. (A BBC fixer was hanged on the day the two photographers arrived and three British soldiers were killed the day after.) The task of these embedded reporters is to take photographs of what happens in the war zones but in accordance with the rigid directives of military command. The images that do not comply are eliminated and only those that make it through the strict censorship process are published. The results thus no longer meet the standards of documentary photography, the purpose of which is to supply visual testimony of reality characterized primarily by impartiality and objectivity.