Exam – Research – Photo Book Inspiration – Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin – Divine Violence / Holy Bible:

The Photo book  named ‘Holy Bible’  was produced by the photographers / artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. it is an extended visual rant that pull together 512 bizarre and disturbing imagery that they collected from the Archive of Modern Conflict. It also presents those photograph superimposed, which means that they are on top of something else, on the precise structure and the physical form of the King James Version, which includes snippets of Biblical texts underlines in red on essentially most pages. Something people have to keep in mind when looking through this photo book, whoever that may be is that, this photo book is constructed by and meant to be viewed in multifaceted contexts. When looking through the photo book,  you will be able to pretty quickly come to the conclusion that most of the photographs that have been superimposed over text are striking photographs which show many sensitive subjects topics such as violence, catastrophe, global and regional politics, religion. power, corruption, greed, propaganda, consumer advertisement, human conflict, nature, sex, life, as well as death. It is using photography as a powerful visual language that can be used and may also be abused for multiple purposes, therefore, it is something which in a way or another can relate to everyone at some point or level. The themes of violence, calamity and the absurdity of war were recorded extensively, and are held within The Archive of Modern Conflict. This is the largest photographic collection of its kind globally. When Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were looking through the many photographs included in this type of archive they always kept philosopher Adi Ophir’s central tenet in mind “God reveals himself predominantly through catastrophe and that power structures within the Bible correlate with those within modern systems of governance.”. Something quite unique about this photo book is that, due to its brilliant and unnerving format, the viewer is able to open the photo book at any random page and they will most certainly be confronted with some kind of rather absurd, obsessive phrases that have been extracted from the Bible, which within themselves include a juxtaposition of disturbing images of different cruel realities, or some photographs of magic tricks, hoaxes or visual illusions that we as a connected human race go through. Within the photo book, there is also a brief essay named Divine Violence, which is a small extraction from a Hebrew book written by the Philosopher Walter Benjamin.The format of Broomberg and Chanarin’s illustrated Holy Bible mimics both the precise structure and the physical form of the King James Version. By allowing elements of the original text to guide their image selection, the artists explore themes of authorship, and the unspoken criteria used to determine acceptable evidence of conflict. The format is brilliant and unnerving — open to any page at random and you are confronted with rather absurd, obsessive phrases from the Bible, juxtaposed by disturbing images of various cruel realities (or, one of the repeating motifs, photographs of magic tricks and hoaxes based on hokey visual illusions). Lest there be any doubt, a brief essay glued inside the back cover drives home the intent: its title is “Divine Violence”.Inspired in part by the annotations and images Bertolt Brecht added to his own personal bible, Broomberg and Chanarin’s publication questions the clichés at play within the visual representation of conflict.A few thunderously violent lines from Exodus – “… lie for lie. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth … wound for wound, life for life” – are illustrated by an image of an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud. A black-and-white photo of a couple kissing, meanwhile, refers to “My lips … My tongue … my delight” from Psalms. Each time the line “And it shall come to pass” appears (which is often), it is accompanied by shots of circus performers or magicians.

 

 

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