Artist, Adam Broomberg: Hi. My name's Adam Broomberg.
Artist, Oliver Chanarin: My name is Oliver Chanarin, and I work with Adam Broomberg. We've been working together for over 15 years. War Primer was originally a book published by Bertolt Brecht in 1955. We've taken his original book and we are inhabiting it with our own images.
Adam Broomberg: Whereas Brecht looked at images that came out of the press during World War II, we looked at our remit as the war on terror—so beginning with 9/11 and ending with the assassination of bin Laden. The metanarrative is really about how photography—and particularly photographs of conflict—have changed over the last 60 years.
Olivier Chanarin: Brecht's original book combines photographs of the Second World War with poems that he's written. His aim was to somehow use the poem to decode or explain or demystify or problematize images of conflict.
In the back of Brecht's War Primer he listed notes about all the pictures that he had collected. And as a response to that, we also put notes in the back of the book screen-printed over his notes. Instead of page numbers and magazine names, we put Web links. These are the Web sites where we stole these images from. And when we were putting this book together, we had a moment of anxiety about the copyright of these images.
One of the pictures, for example, is from the famous Abu Ghraib torture images. We discovered that most of the images are actually licensed by AP. We contacted them, and they asked us to pay a hundred pound licensing fee to use these pictures in a public lecture, which we refused to do.
Adam Broomberg: The Abu Ghraib images being licensed by Associated Press was particularly astounding for us. How on earth does a multinational media provider get hold of images made by U.S. military operatives while in service of images of torture, and then make money each time those images are reproduced? That's the kind of meditation this War Primer work is about.