War Primer 2

‘Broomberg and Chanarin’s intervention serves to unravel the manner in which contemporary conflict is imaged and disseminated with due diligence and intelligence ... It throws out traditional notions of authorship ...‘ A-N News

Originally released in 2011 as a limited edition hardback, this paperback edition is a facsimile of the book which earned Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. War Primer 2 appropriates the first English-language version of Bertolt Brecht’s remarkable 1955 Kriegsfibel in which Brecht combined press photographs from the World Wars with four-line poems. Compiled intermittently over three decades, Brecht’s book was a visual and lyrical attack on war and its propagandists under modern capitalism. Shifting the critique to contemporary narratives perpetuated by the so-called 'War on Terror', Broomberg and Chanarin strategically overlay the pages of Brecht’s War Primerwith images culled from the internet and generated by the actors, propagators and reporters of the contemporary conflict.