When journalist Mitch Swenson ventured into the north of Syria in September 2013, he witnessed the tragic depths of the war first-hand. Most of the conflict coverage centered around the cities, but Swenson soon found that…
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With our smartphones in our pocket wherever we go, keeping up with world headlines requires just a single tap. But standing in line at the grocery store or distractedly waiting to board a plane aren’t the most convenient times to absorb long-form news…
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Instead of trying to configure print or website content to fit onto iPad screen, a team in London decided to take advantage of the tablet’s capabilities and employ it as a unique medium for sharing stories. …
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Photography isn’t a practice that’s conducive to duos; in fact, from a more general perspective, most contemporary visual artists are solitary figures. Thus, the story of duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is a slightly peculiar…
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A l’instar de l’agence Reuters l’année dernière, voici une compilation des images les plus marquantes de l’année 2012 sélectionnées par l’AFP et proposant de couvrir tous les sujets de l’actualité dans le monde. Des images impressionnantes et très touchantes à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
The fourth iteration of Victory Journal—a sports publication born out of creative agency Doubleday & Cartwright—focuses squarely on Muhammad Ali. With a cover image of the Champ by Thomas Hoepker, “The Greatest” is a large format newsprint issue that commands a hefty presence. The journal is dedicated to sports…
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Local NYC storytelling in a new web outlet for long-form journalism
Dedicated to long-form, local human-interest journalism based around NYC, the web-based publication, Narrative.ly marks a sign of changing times for the medium, where the rift between breaking content and meditated stories is causing outlets to choose sides. As Narratively founder Noah Rosenberg explains, the site is essentially about storytelling….
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British artist duo breaks down contemporary war photos with a set of symbolic blocks
“Portable Monuments” presents the exhibition of a visual code of brightly colored blocks used to decipher the surplus of images accompanying news headlines. The brainchild of artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, the project marks the third installment of their analysis of German poet Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 book, “War Primer.” Brecht felt that because photography was mostly in the hands of the bourgeoisie, images from mass-circulated magazines were not an honest portrayal of capitalist society during WWII, so he compiled 85 “photo-epigrams”, turning his own four-line poems into what he felt were more appropriate captions for the pictures he clipped from publications like Time.
In October 2011 Broomberg and Chanarin created “War Primer 2,” for which they took 100 copies of the original hardback book, added silk-screened text and adhered 85 contemporary images culled from the Internet. Their soon-to-close exhibition at Dusseldorf’s Paradise Row gallery, dubbed “Poor Monuments,” takes the exercise a step further by replacing the substituted images with simple red rectangles, titling each piece with a description of the image not pictured and a URL of where it was sourced.
The “Portable Monuments” lexicon that Broomberg and Chanarin developed in a series of contemplative workshops is designed as an educational tool for deconstructing 21st-century news photos. The pair have reduced the images to a set of ingenuously hued blocks to represent the strangely palatable portrayals of modern conflict. With the majority of photojournalists following war’s rules of engagement, Broomberg and Chanarin aimed to create a code that points out the sterility of the resulting photography, documentation that they feel falls short of the full truth.
“Portable Monuments” is currently on view at Amsterdam’s Galerie Gabriel Rolt, with each original image now represented by a irreverently large-scale photo of the correlating coded blocks—arguably a nod to the fact that the photos on display will likely hold more value as unique works of art than the lives they actually depict.
The month-long exhibition runs through 18 February 2012 at Galerie Gabriel Rolt.
Close-up image of blocks: London suicide bombers (L-R) Hasib Hussain, Germaine Lindsay, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer are captured on CCTV at Luton railway station on 7 July 2005. The Guardian, Thursday April 22, 2010., C-type print, 150 x 190 cm, 2011, Unique Work
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