From Theaters of War to Image Wars. Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer Revisited by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (original) (raw)
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From Theaters of War to Image Wars Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans
2015
If there is a book that invites re-appropriation, it is Bertolt Brecht's relatively little known War Primer (1955), composed of photographs clipped from daily press accompanied by enigmatic epigrams. In a witty act of mimicry, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin composed War Primer 2 (2011) by superimposing a heterogeneous selection of images pertaining to the so-called War on Terror onto the original pages of Brecht's book. By focusing on images in which the photographic act is made the explicit theme of the photograph, their book reflects on practices of making and disseminating images of violence. On the one hand, War Primer 2 aims to disrupt the firmly entrenched imaginative geographies of the War on Terror. On the other, it casts a different light on the performative character of photographic imagery. The confrontation of the two photographic collections seems to suggest that there is still much to be learned from the current traffic in images. Résumé: S&#...
Humanities
This essay intervenes in debates about the depiction of conflict since 1945, by comparing two highly significant photographic 'hacks': Brecht's War Primer (Kriegsfibel) 1955; and Broomberg & Chanarin's War Primer 2, 2011. Kriegsfibel is a collection of images, snipped from wartime newspapers and magazines, which Brecht selected and situated alongside the four-line verses that he used to comment upon and re-caption his pictures. These acerbic 'photo-epigrams' captured Brecht's view, firstly, that photography had become a 'terrible weapon against truth' and secondly, that by repositioning the individual image, its political instrumentality might be restored. When, more than half a century later, Broomberg & Chanarin decide to rework Kriegsfibel to produce War Primer 2, they effectively crash into and redouble the Brechtian hack; updating and further complicating Brecht's insights; re-animating his original concerns with photography as a form of collective historical elucidation and mounting, literally on top of his pictures of wartime conflict, images from the 'war on terror'. This essay argues that the redoubling of War Primer performs multiple critical tasks. It explores the Kriegsfibel as a dynamic confrontation with images of war and stages the enduring need to interrogate and actively re-function images of conflict from WW2 to the present day. It reexamines debates about images as weapons of war in themselves, and finally, it situates the Kriegsfibel assemblage in relation to contemporary understandings of 'post-truth'.
From Theaters of War to Image Wars
Image & Narrative, 2015
If there is a book that invites re-appropriation, it is Bertolt Brecht's relatively little known War Primer (1955), composed of photographs clipped from daily press accompanied by enigmatic epigrams. In a witty act of mimicry, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin composed War Primer 2 (2011) by superimposing a heterogeneous selection of images pertaining to the so-called War on
Contradictions are our hope! -Bertolt Brecht, "Der Dreigroschenprozess: Ein soziologisches Experiment" As cultural critic Susan Sontag mused in her 2004 essay on the images from Abu Ghraib prison, we may be able to ban words like torture from our vocabulary when speaking of the horrors and scandals of war, but we can never prevent the photographs of the events from telling the story. 1 In its response to the outrage the photographs caused around the world, the U.S. government did not explicitly use the word torture, and in fact, no one really had to; the photographs did this by themselves. As a result of the saturation of ineffective media in the public sphere, the very concept of war today has become just as disconnected and abstract on the battlefield -think of "shock and awe" -as it has to those looking at the images from their living room couches. Effective images not only describe or simulate a situation; they analyze and require analysis. The visual representation of war is in constant flux and will continue to evolve to keep pace with technology, global interconnectedness, and the blurring of meaning.
The common understanding of war is strongly influenced by cogent but codified visual narratives. “Images of war” is a complex photographic genre impregnated with emotion, which unsurprisingly carries enormous power in determining reality. Departing from the emotion-focused debates on the representation of war/wartime, photo-journalism and questions of photos’ authenticity, the present chapter looks at how images shape both what we know and how we learn about contemporary war, its landscapes, actors, actions, and causes. It aims to contribute to the debate on the fragility of war representation in a time when we are saturated with images of violence.
Conference: Pictures of War: The Still Image in Conflict since 1945
2018
Since the end of the Second World War, the nature and depiction of geopolitical conflicts have changed in technology, scale and character. The Cold War political landscape saw many anti-colonial struggles for liberation and national identity become proxy battlegrounds for the major powers. Wars continue to be waged in the name of democracy and terror, and in the interests of linguistic, theological and racial worldviews and migration and displacement are again at the top of the agenda.