War Primer 3

(2013 – 2015)

War Primer 3 is a reworking of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s 2011 book War Primer 2, itself a reworking of Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 publication Kriegsfibel. A remarkable critique of the relationship between war and photography, Kriegsfibel combines familiar conflict photographs with short critical poems inspired by the funereal epigrams of the ancient world, designed to tease out what he saw as the politically compromised nature of these images.

In 2012 Broomberg and Chanarin updated Brecht’s book by introducing images from the so-called War on Terror into it, each intended to resonate with Brecht’s original text. While in some respects very clever, many critics overlooked the ways in which War Primer 2 was also deeply problematic, in terms of what it said about these two wars, the way it was positioned vis a vis the art market, and most of all because of the use of unpaid, uncredited intern labour in its production.

In the spirit of Brecht’s playful invocation not to ‘start with the good old things but the bad new ones’ I responded to these problems by reworking Broomberg and Chanarin’s book into a new work primer, a meditation on inequality, labour, capital and power. By restructuring the book around the text of Brecht’s 1935 poem A Worker Reads History, and adding new images and text, I brought a third incarnation of the book into being, one designed as a tribute, and in some cases an epitaph, to the anonymous many who keep the engines of the world turning.

War Primer 3 comprises:
= Custom made scale copy of War Primer 2 with newly inserted prints and texts
= An Algorithm Reads History, a 5 minutes single screen video installation
= The Politics of Appropriation, 2000 word essay

View the War Primer 3 photo book

Order War Primer 3 books and prints