FIG [Hardcover]

Julian Stallabrass (Author), Gordon McDonald (Editor), Adam Broomberg (Photographer), Oliver Chanarin (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 12, 2008

Fig. features over 80 still lives, portraits and landscapes by London-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Tracing connections between photography and British colonial acquisitiveness, they unearth and document weird arcana from Victorian collections in various public museums. As Broomberg and Chanarin themselves have observed: "the history of photography is intimately bound up with the idea of colonial power. Documentary photographers today have a worrying amount in common with the collector/adventurers of past eras. As unreliable witnesses, we have gathered together 'evidence' of our experiences and present our findings here; a muddle of fact and fantasy." The items photographed range from bizarre objects found at the Booth Museum of Natural History, Brighton, such as a merman's body and a unicorn's horn, to ancient waxworks and a dodo skeleton; or from floral arrangements found in the rooms of Hotel Rwanda to a single leaf blown from a tree in Tel Aviv by a bomb blast.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Steidl (December 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3865214754
• ISBN-13: 978-3865214751
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,060,971 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am a writer, curator, photographer and lecturer. I teach modern and contemporary art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and you can find a lot of my writings online at the Courtauld website, and quite a few of my photographs on Flickr. I am currently working on a book about war photography, particularly of the Iraq War, and I am taking photographs of suburbia, and the places where forest and houses meet.

In 2008, I curated the Brighton Photo Biennial, 'Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images'. I am hoping to publish the retrospective catalogue of the Biennial soon; it contains some remarkable interviews with photojournalists, some insightful critical essays, and--of course--many amazing photographs.