Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin's Afterlife

I recently found Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin's most recent project Afterlife via the new issue of Foam Magazine. In the press release for a recent exhibition at Goodman Gallery, it states:

"Afterlife is a re-reading of a controversial photograph taken in Iran on 6 August 1979. This remarkable image, taken just months after the revolution, records the execution of 11 blindfolded Kurdish prisoners by firing squad. The image, which captures the decisive moment the guns were fired, was immediately reproduced in newspapers and magazines across the world. The following year it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and for the next 30 years its author was simply known as “Anonymous.” Only recently has the photographer’s identity been revealed as Jahangir Razmi, a commercial studio photographer working in the suburbs of Tehran.

The artists sought out and interviewed Razmi, and based on these discussions along with an examination of the 26 neglected images on the roll of film Razmi produced that day, they present a series of collages–an iconoclastic breakdown or dissection of the original image – that interrupts our relationship as spectators to images of distant suffering."


From "Afterlife"
© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin


From "Afterlife"
© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin


From "Afterlife"
© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin



From "Afterlife"
© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin


From "Afterlife"
© Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

Mark Boellaard

Dutch artist Mark Boellaard got in touch a few weeks back to share some of his recent collage work. Below are just a few examples that I particularly liked. You can see more here and here.


© Mark Boellaard


© Mark Boellaard


© Mark Boellaard


© Mark Boellaard


© Mark Boellaard

Ofer Wolberger's Anatomy of a Collage and Collage Portraits

Although probably better known for his series Life With Maggie, Ofer Wolberger's lesser known collage work is some of his most interesting. In the spirit of early 20th century collagists such as Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko, Wolberger's interest in Constructivism, Surrealism and Dadaism is certainly recognizable. However, his collages are not simply derivations of earlier practitioners. Many of Wolberger's collages address 21st century consumer culture by using contemporary advertisements to construct his montages. Perhaps one of my favorite of Wolberger's collages is his clever and indebted nod to photo history, "After Walker Evans, 1998," which pays homage to Walker Evans' iconic photograph "Penny Picture Display, Savannah [Photographer's Studio Window with Portraits], 1936."

Make sure to look at the rest of the collages from both Anatomy of a Collage and Collage Portraits.


From "Collage Portraits"
© Ofer Wolberger


After Walker Evans, 1998 (From "Anatomy of a Collage")
© Ofer Wolberger


Orgy, 2000 (From "Anatomy of a Collage")
© Ofer Wolberger


From "Collage Portraits"
© Ofer Wolberger

John Stezaker

British artist John Stezaker's photographic collages exist in the long, and often socio-political, line of artists whose work defined movements like Surrealism, Constructivism, Conceptualism and Postmodernism. Following this train of thought, Stezaker's work shares many similarities with Joachim Schmid's series Photogenic Drafts (posted on this blog here). As excerpted from the Stills website:



"Breathing new life into photographs salvaged from forgotten film archives and obsolete magazines, John Stezaker intuitively transforms these found portraits into otherworldly, uncanny beings. Playing with our fascination with the face, Stezaker’s subtle yet unsettling interventions toy with the subconscious and the surreal.

Using a manual cut-and paste technique he continues the rich history of collage by dissolving the naturalistic picture plane and constructing a fragmented and dislocated view of contemporary reality. The individual images fuse and separate before our eyes, opening up new characters, relationships and meanings."











All Images © John Stezaker

Ruth Van Beek

I've been thoroughly enjoying Ruth Van Beek's collages lately. There is a fractured, disorienting quality to some of them that recalls some of John Baldessari's collage work.











All Images © Ruth Van Beek

Joachim Schmid's Photogenic Drafts

Joachim Schmid's series Photogenic Drafts divisively undermines conventional studio portraiture by amalgamating portraits of multiple sitters. The results are at once unnerving yet harmonious, producing collages that are rooted in both the traditions of Classical European painting and Russian Constructivism. As noted by an anonymous author on the Saatchi Blog:

"In 'Photogenetic Drafts' (1991) Schmid takes his exploration of the portrait, and in particular the studio portrait, a stage further. Schmid was sent a box of negatives by a Bavarian studio photographer who had deliberately cut the negatives in two so as to prevent them being used again. Initially thrown off guard by this, Schmid then realised that this gave him a chance to question the predictability of the studio portrait . He decided to splice together two halves of two different negatives, creating a series of disturbing 'double' portraits."











All photographs from the series Photogenic Drafts

All Images © Joachim Schmid