ART TO SEE THIS WEEK: Broomberg and Chanarin’s ‘Bandage the Knife Not the Wound’
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin challenge notions of photography in the throwaway digital era with their latest exhibition
We’re constantly told we live in an image-saturated age but the truth is we’re nowhere near saturation point. Our capacity for consuming images seems limitless and more and more of them are produced — and discarded — every day. So, while photography is ubiquitous, the value of each individual photographic image has changed. If you’re a serious photographer wanting to put on an exhibition, how do you respond to this culture of the image? What is the point of displaying a perfectly printed, carefully composed, high-quality, framed image on a gallery wall? It was one of the first questions Oliver Chanarin, one half of Broomberg and Chanarin — the duo whose exhibition Bandage the Knife Not the Wound is on at the Goodman Gallery in Joburg until 26 May — raised while taking me around the exhibition the morning after the opening night, before jetting back home to the UK. “You can go and grab a low-res David Goldblatt off the internet and put it on your desktop,” he says. “What is the relat...
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