'Ficciones'

'Ficciones', Chanarin and Broomberg’s first solo show in South Africa (Goodman Cape Gallery), is another challenging step away from conventional image making. Two series of work are on show, both in tones of elegiac grey; very restrained, severe, minimalist. The show is brilliant, an investigation into the meaning of spectacle to the photographer.

Afterlife presents the photographers’ reworking of a controversial photograph taken in Iran in August 1979. Eleven blindfolded Kurdish prisoners are being shot simultaneously by a firing squad of eleven. One per person. A State photographer had been brought in to record the event, and the moment-of-death photo was subsequently reproduced around the world, winning a Pulitzer Prize. The photographer, however, remained anonymous until recently.

Seeking out the newly-identified photographer, Jahangir Razmi in Tehran, Broomberg and Chanarin found that he had in fact taken a total of 27 photos of the mass execution, circling the group as he clicked his camera. These had never been reproduced. The two received his permission to work with the 26 neglected black and white images, and printing them up, cut out and regrouped the figures in a collage process, so each final image in the Afterlife series represents a single individual photographed from various positions and at different moments in the execution process.

Broomberg talks of the uncomfortable sensation of physically cutting around a photographed figure with a scalpel to isolate it from its background. Sandwiching the small figures between two sheets of glass framed with austere lead beading, the Afterlife photographs are installed on a narrow white shelf, the figures casting shadows on the gallery wall behind. Thus the concept of the single instant of light falling on film to record the photograph has been exploded into a more filmic concept, with each image recording a sequence of events.

The second series, ironically named American Landscapes, appear at first to be abstract photographs of curves and angles in a classic 8 x 10 format. The palette is  reduced, greys and whites. Scarcely visble on the walls beneath the images are names in white. Names like Beyonce. Or the brand name of a car.

In fact, the images were taken in the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States, and the names beneath the images are the last people or products to be photographed in the studio before Broomberg and Chanarin moved in to record the empty space. Thus, they provide a link between the fiction surrounding the celebrity, and the reality of the set-up shot. According to the press release, the artists refer to these spaces as 'scenography for a free market economy’ or simply ‘landscapes’. For just as the American West came to represent unbounded possibility in the minds of early pioneers, so these studio walls act as a blank screen on which any sort of fantasy may be projected.

Starting from two very different branches of photographic endeavour then - the gritty documentary black and white shot grabbed in the moment, often under dangerous circumstances, and the high-end studio shot in which lighting, styling and positioning by the team can take hours - Broomberg and Chanarin’s ‘Ficciones’ raises questions about both, breaking new ground and shifting each into a different space of contemplation.