War Primer 2 By Adam Broomberg | Oliver Chanari... 💯 Deluxe

A central theme is the democratization—and simultaneous weaponization—of the camera.

Brecht used poetry to "lay bare the device" of the image. In War Primer 2 , the interaction between Brecht's historical text and contemporary visuals (e.g., a biometric camera reading a dead man's iris) creates a "ping-pong relay" that forces the viewer to become a critical observer rather than a passive consumer of spectacle. War Primer 2 [paperback] - MACK War Primer 2 by Adam Broomberg | Oliver Chanari...

Abstract

Bertolt Brecht viewed press photographs as "hieroglyphics" that obscured rather than revealed the truth of war. His original War Primer sought to demystify these images by pairing them with four-line quatrains. Broomberg and Chanarin’s sequel "inhabits" the physical pages of the 1998 English edition of Brecht’s work, replacing his newspaper clippings with low-resolution digital screenshots culled from the internet. This physical layering serves as a "metanarrative" on the evolution of conflict representation over sixty years. War Primer 2 [paperback] - MACK Abstract Bertolt

Drawing on Hito Steyerl’s concept of the "poor image," the work utilizes compressed, pixelated screengrabs to represent the "War on Terror". This physical layering serves as a "metanarrative" on

This paper analyzes War Primer 2 (2011) by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, a contemporary "hack" of Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 Kriegsfibel (War Primer). By overlaying images from the "War on Terror" onto Brecht’s original plates, the artists transition Brecht’s critique of WWII press photography into the era of the internet, mobile phone footage, and biometric surveillance. This study examines how the work re-functions the "photo-epigram" to expose the political economy behind modern conflict imagery.