Exercise 2.2

Write 500 words in your learning log on a piece of work by one contemporary artist- photographer who uses the archive as source material. You may focus on any artist you wish here but you may wish to select either:

• an artist who exhibited as part of the exhibition Archive Fever (2008): Link 6
• one of the British artists’ projects produced by UK organisation GRAIN: Link 7

I have chosen to write about he work of Broomberg & Chanarin. I have seen some of their work at the Rencontre d’Arles a couple of years ago and it impressed me.

For the GRAIN project they worked collaboratively, on the Benjamin Stone photographic archive, held at the Library of Birmingham, with the writer, Eyal Weizman. Stone collected photographs, and eventually made his own, from the middle of the 1800s to the end of his life. He classified these into types like Races of Mankind, Feminine Beauty and Criminal Types .  The purpose of these classifications was to distinguish between the superior classes and the inferior, between beauty and ugliness and between criminal and law abiding. Broomberg and Chanarin wanted to investigate the link between Stones images and a set of images they had made in Moscow of ordinary Russian people, a little like Sanders Weimar images.  They used a facial recognition technology to make these images. One such image is that of the imprisoned Pussy Riot singer entitled The revolutionary.

Their collaboration lead to the book entitled “The Spirit is a bone” which comes from Hegel’s essay “The Phenomenology of Spirit”

The subject of remote surveillance and the use of AI to ‘create’ an image of a human is becoming ever more present in our daily lives. The lack of consent and even the lack of awareness of these ubiquitous cameras should be of prime importance to all of us. Broomberg and Chanrin were interested to explore this topic with Weizman.

There are two types of face recognition technology, two dimensional and three dimensional. The latter works on two images from different angles or on laser scans. The skull is used as the basis.

Face recognition technology is an attempt to capture and archive individual likeness(1).

Weizman maintained that the archive that Broomberg and Chanarin had created from the Moscow images opened up the entangled and co-constitutive relation between technology and ideology .

The study of Phrenology was discredited at the end of the nineteenth century but in fact modern technologies are very similar. A person’s movements are  continually surveyed and if it is deemed probably that they will commit a crime they can and may be assassinated by an agent of the state. There is no reliance on judicial process , the state predicts their crime and eliminates them.

Broomberg and Chanarin felt restricted when accessing the Stone collection as it is housed in a temperature maintained environment and was only accessible by certain individuals so they had to work through staff members. This lead them to discuss the idea of the archive as a non static object. Once a photograph has been made and archived it can be re-interpreted by anyone at any time and there is no limit on the number of interpretations.

Weizman felt that the images created by Broomberg and Chanarin hacked into the source code of photography to create something which spoke of the past and also the future. He described the work as hovering between death and life and the crime that separates them.