[expressive piano music evoking a contemplative mood]
Female Narrator In 1955, the playwright Berthold Brecht published a book called War Primer. After he collected images from the second World War, he didn’t trust they would be readable. He felt that photographs were a form of hieroglyphics that needed to be decoded.
Oliver Chanarin His solution was to write these short poems that acted as a kind of a lesson to explain, but also to complicate the meaning of images of conflict. A primer is something you use to teach with, and Brecht thought about this book as being a kind of lesson book, or primer, on how to read photographs of war.
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Female Narrator Oliver Chanarin, and his partner, Adam Broomberg made their own war primer, appropriating Brecht’s book and inserting their own images of the more recent war on terror. Oliver Chanarin.
Oliver Chanarin I think the first thing the book demonstrates is that everything has changed and nothing has changed. Brecht was very concerned with the life of images, and the ability of images to speak to us about human suffering, and I think Adam and I have the same concerns. Yet, we felt that if we were going to make a response to his book, that we needed to think about the present, and also about the future of images, so we turned to the internet. All of the images in the War Primer 2 are stills from video that we downloaded from the internet.
Female Narrator The artists have taken Brecht’s original text and images and placed new images over them, many of them images we have seen many times—a female soldier giving the thumbs up next to a charred corpse in Iraq, a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, the faces in the situation room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Oliver Chanarin History sort of coagulates around these moments in time, and gradually, as we move further and further away from an event, the number of photographs for that event kind of evaporate. And very often, what we’re left with is a very singular and iconic image.
[expressive piano music evoking a contemplative mood]
War Primer 2 is really an invitation to the viewer to create their own relationship between these extraordinary poems, and the images inside their own head, to make their own War Primer 2 or their War Primer 3.
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