War Primer 2 (Paperback)

Originally published in 2011 as a limited edition hardcover book, this paperback edition is a facsimile of the book that earned Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013. War Primer 2 appropriates the first English-language version of the remarkable Kriegsfibel by 1955 by Bertolt Brecht in which Brecht combined press photographs world wars with four-line poems. Compiled by Intermittently spanning three decades, Brecht's book was a visual assault and lyrical against war and its propagandists under modern capitalism. By shifting the critique to contemporary narratives perpetuated by the so-called 'war on terror,' Broomberg and Chanarin superimpose strategically pages of Brecht's War Primer with images extracted from the Internet and generated by the actors, propagators and reporters of the contemporary conflict. Underlying this junction of two visual stories There is a deep skepticism about media images. War Primer has particularly drew attention to the didactic role of photojournalism in service of the senseless profiteers of war. The title deliberately recalls textbooks used to teach reading to primary school children, and the book, which uses razor-sharp words to dismantle the visual messages, actually serves as a manual, showing how to “read” or “translate” press photographs - images that Brecht called hieroglyphics requiring decoding. In War Primer 2, Brecht's concise poems and the selection of 20th century images - bombed cities and battlefronts, Hitler and his henchmen, and wounded soldiers and refugees, among others - take new implications when judiciously juxtaposed with images digital and video screenshots of the attacks on the Twin Towers, torture in Abu Ghraib prison, the execution of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush proudly offering a Thanksgiving Day Turkey. When When the artist's book was first published, it raised relevant questions concerning the historical, political and social currency of media images generated by conflicts. Now, in the era of "fake news,” War Primer 2 probes the power of images not only for to tell but also to create the story.