In his War Primer (first published in 1955 by Eulenspiegel Verlag), German playwright and lyricist Bertolt Brecht combined press photographs from Danish and American daily newspapers and magazines with four-line commentaries which he called photo-epigrams. This work, which Brecht began in the 1930s as an exile in Denmark, is both a critical chronicle of the events of the Second World War and a didactic questioning of the supposed veracity and lack of ambiguity inherent in photography.
With their art book War Primer 2 (released in 2011 as a limited edition of 100 copies by MACK; rereleased in 2018), Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin adopt Brecht’s War Primer and transplant it to the era of the ‘war on terror’, which is characterised by the mass media. They found the picture material for their intervention and reinterpretation online and mounted it onto the 85 panels of the original British edition (War Primer, released by Libris in 1998). Their adoption not only multiplies Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’, it also thematises the complexity of the contemporary use and dissemination of images of conflict.
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