Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Published in 2013 and styled after Bertolt Brecht’s personal bible, which he annotated and illustrated with photographs, Holy Bible is Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s tenth publication together. While physically resembling the King James Version, two divergent elements set it apart from the Church of England’s translation of this Christian text. For one, various passages have been underlined in red, and the book is also collaged with cryptic photos, all drawn from the London-based Archive of Modern Conflict, depicting dancing, sex, conflicts, murder, suicide, magic tricks, Nazi propaganda, genocide, and picnicking. The relationship between the images and the underlined texts varies from the causal to the oblique, a conundrum this exhibition amplifies rather than resolves.

Presented as a sundered version of their Holy Bible, all sixty-six chapters of the duo’s illustrated codex are shown chronologically here in fifty-seven discrete frames, closely mirroring the appearance of the piece during its production. This project extends these artists’ method of appropriating images from diverse sources and reconstituting them within their own work as a critique of documentary photography. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s 1977 book, Evidence, is a precedent for such a practice, but Broomberg and Chanarin’s volume draws from an omnivorous archive of four million photos that includes pictures by well-known photojournalists such as Ian Berry, Robert Capa, and Ernest Cole. Capa’s picture of a slain Spanish militiaman from 1936 appears twice in Genesis—albeit uncredited, like all of the other five hundred and eleven photos—with an underlined verse reading “let it be for a witness.” Without any contextualizing captions, witnessing becomes subsumed by spectacle and horror.