Paris Photo LA 2013: –Paradise Row

Paradise Row (London) is displaying a selection of Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s key series of works, creating a succinct overview of their unique practice. Broomberg and Chanarin are amongst the most compelling artists working conceptually with the photographic medium, interrogating the documentary and ethnographic traditions of photography with great subtlety and respect. By exploring the relationship between photography and race in their latest series of works, ‘To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light’, they continue to interrogate the documentary and ethnographic traditions of photography, leading viewers through a complex history lesson; a combination of unstable new photographic works, rescued artifacts and found images. The title of this new body of work was originally the coded phrase used by Kodak to describe the capabilities of a new film stock developed in the early 80’s to address the inability of their earlier films to accurately render dark skin. In response to a commission to ‘document’ Gabon, Broomberg and Chanarin recently made several trips to the country to photograph a series of rare Bwiti initiation rituals, using only Kodak film stock that had expired in the late 1970’s. Using outdated chemical processes the artists succeeded in salvaging just a single frame from the many colour rolls they exposed during their visits. This is presented alongside an array of black and white photographic test, originally printed as test strips. ‘People In Trouble’ continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of the limits and possibilities of photography in a historical moment when both ubiquity and technology have rendered the production and use of documentary images intensely problematic. The work is the result of an engagement by the artists with Belfast Exposed, a photographic archive founded in 1983.The archive houses images taken by both professional photo-journalists and ‘civilian’ photographers. Broomberg & Chanarin’s work has been to attempt to re-present something of the emotive totality of these contested images, of the moving collision of accident and intent in the images, the marks upon them and the bathos of the historic undercut by the quotidian. ‘American Landscapes’ takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally “made.” In these occasionally abstract photographs the surfaces of walls, floors, ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. Artists refer to these spaces as ‘scenography for a free market economy’ or simply ‘Landscapes’.