A series of photos, depicting the naked whiteness of commercial photographic studios, neatly lines a wall of the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town.
The series is called American Landscapes. One might have expected the vast open spaces of Obamaland the title alludes to, but here we’re dealing with an imagined reality. The series consists of bare cycloramas, backdrops used by professional photographers.
It’s the work of collaborators Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, two South Africans living in London. They’ve worked together for 12 years.
The bare studio walls trigger playful thoughts when one reads the associated captions. Beyoncé Knowles, Madonna, Eddie Murphy and Jamie Foxx are among the superstars who were photographed in the studio. At the Goodman Gallery their names have become sticker captions below the studio photos.
Imagining the colours and personalities referenced in the captions against the starkness in each photo serves Broomberg and Chanarin’s goal. They refer to the empty white spaces as “scenography for a free-market economy”.
“It’s about a trace of the event rather than the event. It’s the resistance of spectacle. Your head is full of images. We want to access those images in your head rather than necessarily show them again. We’re trying to get viewers to join the dots rather than present everything,” says Chanarin.
American Landscapes is being exhibited alongside another series, titled Afterlife. Together, the two collections complete the exhibition called Ficciones (Fictions). It speaks to the artists’ fixation with documentary photography. The two related series interrogate the “role of representation in places of trauma and conflict”.
Afterlife is anything but make-believe. It is an exploration of the moments when 11 blindfolded Kurdish prisoners were executed. Their killers were a revolution-inspired Iranian firing squad. The day was August 6 1979 and the killing was recorded by a Tehran-based commercial studio photographer, Jahangir Razmi.
Razmi didn’t attach his name to the image. The brutal scene carried an “anonymous” authorship and was published worldwide. A year later it was awarded the American photographic world’s Oscar, a Pulitzer Prize, except Razmi couldn’t reveal his identity. He had been flown in specially to document the event for the state-run media he was working for. Putting his name to the photograph could jeapordise his life.
Thirty years later a journalist investigated the unknown photographer and tracked down Razmi. Broomberg and Chanarin interviewed him and reviewed 26 images that were not published, from the roll of black-and-white film he used.
They created a series of 17 collages, using cut-outs from prints of the Razmi series. Each frame shows the different angles that a spectator may have viewed the victims and their gunman. One frame shows a blindfolded man standing and then lying down — dead. Its the same man depicted in different frames, a series of photos capturing the slaying of neatly lined-up men.
At the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town until November 7