Afterlife

The "Afterlife" series of images by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is a re-reading of a controversial photograph taken in Iran on 6 August 1979, just months after the revolution, recording the execution of 11 blindfolded Kurdish prisoners by firing squad. The image was immediately reproduced in newspapers and magazines across the world and the following year it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Broomberg and Chanarin sought out the photographer, Jahangir Razmi and, based on their discussions and along with an examination of the neglected images on the roll of film Razmi produced that day, they present a series of collages - an iconoclastic breakdown or dissection of the original image - that interrupts our relationship as spectators to images of distant suffering. Dislocated from any specific sky or terrain, the blindfolded figures of "Afterlife" appear at first to float free of historical and cultural context. Now standing, now prostrate, cut out and pinned against a stark white ground, details of clothing, shades and guns begin to fill in the blanks - somewhere in the Middle East, sometime in the late 1970s - an execution. Then and now, facing violence and death, what are the politics of looking, of watching, or turning the page/changing channels/turning away? Published here in a collection of essays marking the 40th anniversary of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" (1972) the image sequence endorses his observation that "the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled". What do we see now - how are we blinded - and what do we know? (Quotes from original text)