In his early career, Griffin introduced a bold new visual language to corporate photography, going on to create truly audacious campaigns that went well beyond any normal brief. Meanwhile, his work was exhibited in galleries, museums and festivals, starting with some key shows in Britain in the 1970s that were milestones in the acceptance of photography into the mainstream art world. 

The 1980s were his peak years, when he produced some of his most famous images and he came to wider international attention. (The Guardian named him “the photographer of the decade” in 1989). In 2003 he returned to image-making after a 12-year segue into music videos and TV commercials. The photography landscape had changed, and there weren’t the riches of before, but there were garlands. 

“He had a completely unique vision,” says Martin Parr, who met Griffin at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1970s, establishing a lifelong friendship. “The kind of portraits he did, no one had seen anything like them before. He was a real innovator.”

Life in light 

Born in Birmingham in 1948, Griffin had grown up in Lye in the Black Country, leaving school at 16 to work as a trainee pipework engineering estimator for British Steel. He remained there for four years, later saying that the clash and flash of nearby metalworks was a major influence on his imagery (the symbol of the heroic worker would figure throughout his 50-year career). At Manchester, Parr recalls that the pair “immediately connected and became friends.” Alongside Daniel Meadows and others, they formed a kind of salon, challenging each other in photographic games and studying the work of a new wave of self-styled documentary photographers such as Tony Ray-Jones.

Griffin moved to London to pursue a freelance career, and taking a portfolio of black-and-white photographs of ballroom dancers to Roland Schenk, the celebrated creative director of Management Today, proved crucial. “It was an important meeting,” says Anne Braybon, who years later was art director of the magazine, and later still would commission Griffin for the National Portrait Gallery. “Schenk was the first to commission Brian, seeing in his work a new Robert Frank. He also introduced Brian to fine art and film, and those influences continued.”

Griffin repaid Schenk’s faith with extraordinary, theatrical, subversive portraits of otherwise nondescript business leaders. This bold approach formed the basis for an multi-award-winning and lucrative career that flourished in the boom years of the 1980s, working for design and advertising agencies while shooting cutting edge imagery for the music industry.

He was a virtuoso when it came to lighting, but the basis of Griffin’s imagery was observation, finding some small detail in his subjects to magnify and playfully twist. Perhaps his most famous album cover, Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp! (1979), was one of his quickest to shoot, capturing the singer’s bright white winklepickers in a shaft of sunlight while trying to find a location to make a portrait on London’s Southbank.

“He took chances, he pushed the envelope,” says Paul Hill, a leading figure in British photography by the 1970s who selected Griffin’s work (alongside Parr and Thomas Joshua Cooper) for Three Perspectives on Photography at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1979. It proved one the most important UK institutional shows of the decade at a time when the mainstream art world began waking up to photography.

“As well as having a great eye and an extraordinary sense of things coming together within a single frame, he used lighting in a very original way,” Hill explains. “Brian’s mission was to make unique images. Whether he was photographing Depeche Mode or Margaret Thatcher, he wasn’t trying to make a likeness or do a PR job. He was trying to make an important, unique photograph.”

Another key exhibition was at the 1987 Rencontres d’Arles photo festival. The festival’s director, François Hébel, had shown Parr’s The Last Resort the year previously, and Griffin’s former college mate suggested his work for the next edition, where it was exhibited alongside Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The festival opened new opportunities for Griffin to exhibit across Europe, and he worked with Hébel again many times over the years in different guises.

“He was one of my closest friends in photography,” says the Frenchman. “I really admire his work, and I don’t think he gets the recognition he deserves. He had a way to get his subjects to do anything he wanted. There are very few photographers that have this ability to create signature images in the very short time [you have to shoot a portrait]. You instantly recognise a Brian Griffin picture. There is a consistency, even though he changed over the years, moving from black-and-white film to colour digital.

“I have seen him shooting, and he had such concentration in front of the people he was taking pictures of. I think that’s why they would always do what he wanted them to do; here was this guy in front of them with his eyes so intense.”

London calling

Griffin was also a pioneer in the field of photobooks. Parr reckons he was the first photographer in the UK to go the self-publishing route as an act of creative independence, collaborating with his great friend and “soul brother”, the acclaimed graphic designer, Barney Bubbles. There would be many more books throughout his career, and one of them, Work, marked a highpoint and in some senses a closure to the first half of his career. It was published in 1988 alongside a one-man show at the National Portrait Gallery, and went on to be awarded the best photography book at the Barcelona Primavera Fotografica in 1991.

Much of it was drawn from his best known corporate commission to photograph the new Broadgate development in the City of London. Typical of Griffin, he chose to elevate not the new buildings or the financiers, but the workers who built it. “Rosehaugh Stanhope, the developers, were erecting sculptures around Broadgate but none of them paid heed to the workers building the project,” Griffin wrote in his 2021 self-published biography, Black Country Dada. “So, Peter [Davenport, the designer who commissioned him] and I decided to create our own sculpture. However, this was a living sculpture using one of the project workers, Eric Foster, a steel erector.”

Griffin spent the 1990s shooting music videos and TV commercials, co-founding his own production company. In 2003, he was invited to support Birmingham’s bid to become the European Capital City of Culture. His return to photography after 12 years away sparked newfound interest in his back catalogue. Art Museum Reykjavik staged a retrospective in 2005, followed by large-scale exhibitions focusing on various aspects of his practice in Arles, Birmingham and Bologna, along with dozens of smaller shows. Griffin became a patron of Derby’s Format Photography Festival in 2009 – the same year he was honoured with a major retrospective in Arles – and four years later received the Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society and an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University.

A ‘rare’ generosity

Yet his hunger to make unique images never diminished, and he remained prolific as both a photographer-for-hire and an artist in his own right. His personal projects were more tightly conceptualised and yet more varied in their focus, ranging from Gary, a series on his neighbours in Rotherhithe, where he lived and worked for more than 40 years; The Black Kingdom, based on his early years in the 1950s and 60s; and Spud, inspired by a residency in Béthune-Bruay in Northern France, marking the centenary of the end of World War I.

There were more major commissions too – notably for Reykjavik Energy, another for HSI and the opening of St Pancras station, and best of all, to his mind, for London’s Olympic Games Road to 2012, which he was determined to shoot, and was commissioned by Braybon for the National Portrait Gallery. “He was bold. He always went his own way,” s he recalls. “At the opening, Nadav Kander walked in to see Brian’s work, naming him ‘the master.’”

Hyman, who had planned to work with Griffin on a new retrospective this year, is certain of his importance in the story of British photography. “He’s got a central place in that history. He was also a very individual voice.” Like everyone else contacted for this article, Hyman mentions Griffin’s vivacity and generosity of spirit. Magdalena Shackleton, who supported Griffin’s work for years and showed two solo exhibitions at her MMX Gallery in South London, fondly remembers exhibiting his work at art fairs – and Griffin surrounded by friends in their local pub. “He always met people on the same level, whoever they were, and wherever they fitted into the business world or the art world,” says Hébel. “He would pull out a little something of his subjects so you would understand their role. But there was no hierarchy. And that is incredibly rare.”

The young Critchlow took a different path, joining the merchant navy at age 15. “By the time I was 18 I’d been around the world a couple of times,” he remembered. “The Med, Australia, India, the USA. The furthest north was Baffin Island.” While travelling, Critchlow developed his interest in drawing, pursuing a correspondence course in art history through the Seafarers Education Service. Upon returning to the North East in 1977, he signed up for a foundation course in graphic design and art history at Ashington College.

“They thrust this 35mm camera in my hand and told me to take pictures,” Critchlow remembered. One exercise in the photography module was to go out and take images of the angles of local buildings. But Critchlow’s eye was drawn to the people who inhabited these spaces – the passers-by and varied characters. His photography lecturer “hated his stuff,” Critchlow recalled, complaining that he had veered from the brief. But his art history teacher recognised his ambition. “You’re doing social documentary photography here,” he told Critchlow. Almost by accident, he had found his form. His subject was all around him, and Coal Town, his long-term project about Ashington, was born.

Critchlow’s photographs show industrial life in the half-light, the shadows of welfare clubs and pubs, back alleys and church halls providing space for his characters to go about their business. The variety of settings in Coal Town speaks not just to Critchlow’s photographic appetite, but also to the trust that existed between him and his subjects. Women allow him to photograph them having their hair done; men barely look up as he captures them playing dominoes; others laugh in the changing room baths after a match at Ashington Football Club. His photographs of children are particularly well-observed, documenting their playtime at school and in the streets with a genuine belief in the importance of their lives.

“They showed me that ordinary people’s lives could be important and could be seen as art”

Critchlow was initially inspired by The Ashington Group of artists (also known as the Pitman Painters), having seen an exhibition of their works at Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool in 1977. The collective was made up of local miners who came together in 1934 to pursue artmaking, mainly through sketches and vibrant, detailed paintings. “They recorded their lives with such honesty, painting the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday,” Critchlow recalled. “They showed me that ordinary people’s lives could be important and could be seen as art.” It was a philosophy Critchlow lived by for his whole career. When local people would query why he was photographing them, he would tell them that they had created the wealth in Ashington; that they were an important part of its history. “Every frame’s like an act of remembrance, for future generations,” he said. “People trusted me. I was part of the tribe.”

Around the same time, Side Gallery in Newcastle was developing its programme, having shown photographs by Graham Smith, Chris Killip, Homer Sykes and August Sander in 1977, the year of its opening. Critchlow visited an exhibition of works by Henri Cartier-Bresson the following year, a travelling archive from the Victoria and Albert Museum organised by Killip. He became friendly with the gallery team, gratefully receiving their mentorship and recalling the impact of Tish Murtha’s Juvenile Jazz Bands at Side in 1979. His work was exhibited at the gallery for the first time in 1987, and then several times thereafter, most recently in 2019 in Work & Workers alongside Daniel Meadows, Graham Smith, Walker Evans, Nick Hedges and a long list of renowned documentarians. 

When Killip had trouble accessing the seacoaler community of Lynemouth Bay in the late-1970s, it was Critchlow who introduced Killip to his cousin, Trevor, who in turn gave Killip access to shoot there for two years from 1982. Fourteen pictures from Killip’s Seacoal series were included in his book In Flagrante in 1988, while Critchlow’s own Seacoalers photographs show the toil – and beauty – of the workers and their daily rhythms. Using horses and carts to transport the coal, they represent a different time, caught between tradition and impending modernity. “They were suspicious that anyone with cameras worked for the Social Security,” Critchlow remarked. But they trusted Critchlow, his liaison and artmaking based upon respect and resolute aesthetic judgement.

Coal Town was published as a photobook in 2019 by Bluecoat Press, and an exhibition ran in 2022 at Woodhorn Museum on the site of the old colliery, which closed in 1981. The book reveals Critchlow’s strengths as a portraitist – the ability to lift subjects momentarily from their surroundings without entirely erasing their livelihoods and social contexts. Colin Wilkinson, founder of Bluecoat Press, remembers Critchlow’s sensitivity in particular. “Tom Stoddart called me shortly after its publication to ask why the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 had not been included,” Wilkinson says. “Mik was unequivocal in his response: even after 35 years, memories of the strike were so bitter, he knew that inclusion of photographs would only cause great pain.”

It is natural that several of Critchlow’s photographs would transcend his vast archive, becoming emblems of the period he witnessed. ‘Last Man Out’ shows colliery deputy George Miller Davison leaving the mine for the last time in 1981; his photograph of his father “crying into his beer” on the day of his redundancy is perhaps the most poignant. “My father always said he’d been left on the scrapheap,” Critchlow observed. He died of emphysema, a result of years of dust inhalation. “There was such an incredible sense of belonging,” Critchlow remembered of the mining communities in Coal Town. “It was a shared existence, everybody had nothing, they all had nothing, yet it was rich in humanity.”

An accomplished blues guitarist and, later in life, a music shop owner in Ashington, Critchlow’s legacy is secured through his images – and the fondness with which he is remembered in the North East and beyond. The testimony of artist Narbi Price, who studied the Ashington Group of painters, reflects Critchlow’s achievement in emulating the group’s humanity. His photographs are “more than just social documentary,” Price says. “They are beautiful time capsules that elevate the everyday into something else, something that speaks intensely of what it is to be human.”

Joanna Lumley with models backstage during Jean Muir fashion show. All images © Marilyn Stafford

Curator Julia Winckler looks back at the photographer’s extraordinary life and work following her death earlier this year

The professional career of pioneering photographer Marilyn Stafford (1925–2023) began in New York in 1948. She had moved there hoping to become an actress on Broadway. One day, friends at the Screen Actors Guild gave her an old Rolleiflex camera and encouraged her to take up photography. As a result, she was asked to accompany them for an interview with Albert Einstein to take his portrait. At the age of 23, and with limited photographic experience, Stafford’s first commissioned portrait was of the world’s most famous physicist, whose relaxed and inquisitive gaze she captured so wonderfully and instinctively.

Stafford, who died in January at the age of 97, leaves behind an extraordinary collection of photographs and an extensive archive spanning four decades, reflecting her dedication to social reportage, street photography, fashion and portraiture. I had the pleasure of knowing Stafford personally, and interviewed her on multiple occasions: in 2017, when I curated an exhibition of her early Paris photographs at Toronto’s Pierre Léon Gallery, and in 2020, when I organised an online international photographic symposium at the Sorbonne, Paris, to mark her 95th birthday. Throughout her long photography career, Stafford sought to engage her visual creativity and intuition. As she explained to me in 2016: “I liked to allow things to flow with feeling rather than mechanically.”

Stafford grew up in a secular Jewish family during the 1930s in Cleveland, Ohio, where she performed at the Cleveland Play House before attending drama classes at the University of Wisconsin. Her family’s origins were rooted in Eastern Europe, and her deep affinity for migrants, displaced people and communities living on the margins of society stretched back to childhood. Growing up during America’s Great Depression, she witnessed first-hand people being forced out of their homes. 

She was deeply moved and influenced by images made by Dorothea Lange and other photographers commissioned by the Farm Security Administration of destitute sharecroppers and farm labourers. In December 1948, aged 23, Stafford accompanied a friend to Paris and instantly fell in love with France. She moved to the French capital the following year and for a while performed as a singer at Chez Carrère, near the Champs-Élysées, where she met Édith Piaf and became friends with Robert Capa. Encouraged by Capa, she took her Rolleiflex and discovered the city by bus, immersing herself in her new life. She had a couple of jobs assisting and studying with studio photographers, but much preferred to go out and make street photographs. 

In doing so, she joined an already established tradition of urban street photography in Paris, which stretched back to Eugène Atget’s pioneering photographs of the city at the start of the 20th century, a time when it was undergoing large-scale transformation. Unlike some of her contemporaries, Stafford never posed any documentary street scenes. Instead, she tried to capture spontaneous moments.

By her teens, Robertson knew she did not want the conventional life of a typical young woman from her background. As she later wrote: “If you were a middle-class girl there were [only] three jobs [considered by society as appropriate] – teaching, secretarial work or nursing, just to fill in until you got your man.” She left school early to help care for her mother, who was living with rheumatoid arthritis, and worried she would not be able to get a job or marry. But a chance observation while queuing at a shop proved enlightening, and directed the young Robertson towards a new career. She recalled, “I was standing watching two women talking, it was drizzling, and a bike had fallen over. And suddenly this butcher, whom I loathed, became a picture.”

Although there were a small number of notable women photojournalists active at the time – including Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke-White, Dickey Chapelle, Thérèse Bonney and Sabine Weiss – it was still generally considered to be a male occupation. But Robertson’s father was encouraging when she told him about her interest in the metier, and offered support by buying her a Leica. She began by submitting her work to Picture Post under a male pseudonym, Dick Muir (utilising her mother’s maiden name), which was met with a disheartening response: “Persevere, young man,” was the message on the rejection slip. Persevere she did with the assumed name, but was soon being offered assignments under her own. 

In 1951, her series A Schoolgirl Does Her Homework, featuring her sister, was finally published in the magazine. The same year, she received her first commission, what she called her “idyllic” project, to record the work and lives of Welsh sheep-shearers on a hill farm in Snowdonia. A year later, she took on an assignment whose subject would characterise the rest of her career. It was to document the lives of a group of women, a well-known dance troupe of Parisian cabaret called the Bluebell Girls, on their tour to Italy. She later wrote: “I felt I was an observer of society. I never thought about my presence in it. My driving force in photographing women was to find out what made them tick.” 

One of the greatest examples of Robertson’s work was her series, Mother’s Day Off. In 1954, as she became evermore enamoured with the lives of ordinary, working-class women, she met up with a group of friends, who often gathered in a Bermondsey pub. They were organising a day trip to Margate and invited their new photographer friend along. Robertson later recalled: “I noticed two things – that the women were getting ready for a day trip that weekend, and that around me younger people, ex-soldiers, were talking about new high-rise flats, new estates outside London. I knew at that moment I was capturing a bit of history, and that it was all going to be broken up, the whole area… So I set off on the Saturday with the women in the coach. Their energy was awesome. These women were survivors. These were women in their fifties, sixties and seventies, and they had been through two wars and that depression in the middle. They were incredibly exuberant.” 

The story was a big hit with Picture Post’s readership, and certain images have become iconic Robertson photos. The series’ fame spread as far as the US, and two years later, in 1956, Life magazine commissioned Robertson to repeat the photo story, but on this occasion with women from a pub in Clapham, south London. 

In 1955, Robertson married a fellow Picture Post photographer, Thurston Hopkins (1913-2014) and they had two children, who survive them. Their photography – as with that of many who worked for the magazine, such as Bert Hardy or John Chillingworth – expressed in the postwar era the specifically British version of photographic humanism in a society rebuilding itself after a devastating war. The same year, Robertson’s intimate series about childbirth and young mothers was seen as pioneering, showing a rawness and reality like never before. 

Picture Post folded in 1957, but Robertson’s work remained firmly focused on the lives of women. She continued to take pictures and support many projects designed to bring the medium to the attention of a wider public, such as the British Library’s Oral History of British Photography sound archive (in which she figures as interviewer and as subject). She was awarded an OBE in 1999 for her services to photography, as well as a Wingate Scholarship to fund her ongoing project on Working Mothers in Contemporary Society.

Grace Robertson died in January 2021, age 90. 

For more information about Grace Robertson’s work, click here 

After the war, in 1947 the family moved to Milan. It was there, as a 15-year-old student, that Horvat first took an interest in photography, selling his stamp collection to buy a Kodak Retina 35mm camera. Horvat studied art at the prestigious Accademia di Brera, Milan. Here his affiliation with image-making became more pronounced after a friend convinced him it would help him “get closer to girls,“ as Horvat later revealed. “It didn’t. But it did help me to learn something about composition.” After his studies, Horvat secured a job at an advertising firm and familiarised himself with the Rolleicord, then one of the sine qua nons of being a professional photographer. Soon, he was successfully freelancing for various Italian magazines. 

In the 1950s, Paris was still considered the global heart of photography. Horvat had met Henri Cartier-Bresson, the pioneer of street photography, when he first visited the city in 1950 and developed a deep fascination with his work. Cartier-Bresson advised Horvat to concentrate on photojournalism and swap his Rolleiflex for a Leica. He did so. Then, in 1952, Horvat embarked on a two-year journey across Asia, spending much of his time in India and Pakistan. The young photographer created images that captured everyday life, selling his work to Life magazine (American weekly), Picture Post (UK-based photojournalistic magazine), and Paris Match (French weekly news journal), among others. Notably, in 1954 one of his photographs (Mohammedan wedding: the bride, Lahore, Pakistan), which depicted a Pakistani bride beneath a veil, her face reflected in a mirror on her lap, came to the attention of Edward Steichen, the then director of the Department of Photography at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Steichen exhibited the image as part of The Family of Man (1955), an exhibition ruminating on humanity and life, which remains one of the most successful and renowned international photographic shows of all time.

Although successful as a documentary photographer – he was an associate photographer at Magnum Photos between 1958 and 1961 – by the late fifties Horvat was also becoming a prominent name in fashion. He spent a year in London before settling in Paris in 1955, impressing designers with his down-to-earth, realistic style of shooting couture in the piazzas of Florence, the Parisian metro, and sidewalks of New York. Horvat’s candid ‘slice of life’ style, blending social documentary and reportage, with high fashion, appeared in Vogue, Elle, Jardins des Modes and Harper’s Bazaar. 

The late photographer’s career always mixed commercial and self-directed projects. He continued to explore fashion editorial work throughout the seventies and eighties but through a more artistic and conceptual lens. Later, he produced notable essays on trees, women, and the city of New York, which he photographed lovingly and intensively. When digital photography and imaging first appeared in the nineties, Horvat quickly adopted the new technology. He was notoriously one of the first practitioners to begin experimenting with Photoshop and employed it creatively as part of his photographic practice. No visit to Horvat’s home in Boulogne, on the outskirts of Paris, would be complete without an introduction to his latest acquisitions for his remarkable collection of prints; his latest online project, usually connected to his image archive or a new book; and a recorded debate about some aspect of his life and work. 

Horvat intended his last major publication, House with Fifteen Keys (Terre Bleu, 2013), to be viewed as an innovative form of retrospective, featuring examples of photojournalism, fashion and documentary photography. And Horvat’s explanation of the work offers a guide to what drove and inspired him throughout his long and fruitful career: 

“Why keys? I am at the age when one looks back and tries to make sense of it all. I had the luck to take photographs for almost 70 years, in a period when the world changed more than in any comparable time span. To live in six different countries and to travel to several more. To think, speak and write in four languages. To photograph many subjects, from different viewpoints and with different techniques. To have other interests besides photography, such as writing and olive growing.

“My eclecticism had its drawbacks. Some questioned my sincerity. Some found that my photos were hard to recognise as if they were by 15 different authors. This is why I went through my work (or through what has been preserved of it), searching for a common denominator. I didn’t find one — but 15. Running (more or less) through all those years. I called them keys.”

Is this not, in one sense, the account of a life well-lived? Rest in peace, Frank Horvat.

Frank Horvat died 21 October 2020, aged 92.

horvatland.com

In March 2008, shortly after serving on the jury of the World Press Photo Contest, they published an essay critical of the award’s blinkered formalism. Photojournalism, they asserted, is a “genre in crisis”. Gesturing to ideas that would preoccupy them over the ensuing years, they pointed to the proliferation of poor images taken by onlookers and highlighted the symbiotic relationship between photography and conflict, leading them to wonder, “Does the photographic image even have a role to play any more?”. Their broadside concluded with a call for a new language of photojournalism, “one that presents images that are more aware of what they fail to show; images that communicate the impossibility of representing the pain and horror of personal tragedy”.

Dismissed as grandstanding villains by some, Broomberg and Chanarin shortly enacted their conviction when, in June 2008, they travelled as embedded journalists to Afghanistan. In place of their medium format camera, the pair operated as handlers for a 50-metre length of photographic paper rolled and sealed in a light proof cardboard box. Responding to a series of events – an execution, a suicide, a visit to the troops by the Duke of York, a press conference, nothing – they exposed seven-meter sections of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds each. In choosing this timeframe, they quoted the practice of early war photographer Roger Fenton, who employed large format glass-plate cameras and the collodion, or wet-plate, process, which required long exposure times of up to 20 seconds or more. From September to October 2008, they exhibited six photos from the series The Day Nobody Died (2008) in the east London gallery, Paradise Row. The exhibition generated only passing notice. La petite mort.

“Death is an awkward business,” wrote anthropologist Michael Taussig after a 2002 visit to the grave of his intellectual hero, philosopher and critical theorist, Walter Benjamin, at Portbou in Catalonia, Spain. “And so is remembrance.” Writing about the dead does nonetheless offer the courtesy of silent indifference: the dead don’t bite back. Reflecting on Broomberg & Chanarin’s career – its rehearsals, lulls, experiments, and bold statements – death emerges as a leitmotif. Its inevitability gave their roaming practice its urgency. A hand-printed poster issued by their publishing company Chopped Liver Press, which features a quote from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961) printed in bold red letters onto a page of International New York Times, is emblematic: “Be furious you’re going to die,” reads the poster.

Death also informed their initial association. In 1995 Broomberg, a sociology graduate born in Johannesburg, secured a job as an editorial intern at Colors, an influential photo-led magazine overseen by photographer Oliviero Toscani. Three years later, Broomberg invited London-born Chanarin, a philosophy and computer science graduate with a shared liking for portrait and documentary photographer August Sander, to work with him on an issue of Colors with the theme of death. Something clicked and their incipient creative association shortly yielded a book, Trust (2000), a series of tightly framed colour portraits of gamers and surgery patients, and an invitation to jointly edit Colors.

Working in collaboration with various photographers (notably Stefan Ruiz) and writers, they roamed the planet documenting closed communities: a refugee camp in Tanzania, a prison in South Africa, an asylum in Cuba, a remote encampment in Patagonia. Methodologically, the impudent new documentary style of Louis Theroux and Sacha Baron Cohen informed Broomberg & Chanarin’s early work in the field, especially for Colors and their subsequent book project in South Africa, Mr Mkhize’s Portrait (2004). However, in formal terms, their portraits of subalterns and grandees reiterated the anthropological gaze of Neue Sachlichkeit photography and its many rehearsals in 1990s art and editorial photography. 

I accompanied the photographers to Leisure World, a gated retirement community in Orange County, California, for an issue of Colors. I was tasked with interviewing the dog club and a nude model. We’ve collaborated subsequently. I have frequently been asked about the division of labour between the two, and who did what. The question overlooks a defining action, their identification as a unit, and its relationship to the cultural moment. Collectivity and collaboration, argues art historian Claire Bishop in her book Artificial Hells (2012), is one of the “most persistent themes” in radical contemporary art of the new millennium. A 2011 exhibition project, curating Photomonth Festival in Kraków, Poland, bears this out.

When they were asked to guest curate Photomonth Festival, the photographers invited 23 writers (including Ekow Eshun and Lynne Tillman) to each create a text describing an invented persona. They then assigned these personas to artists and photographers (including Gabriel Orozco, Alec Soth, and the late David Goldblatt) to inhabit. The idea drew on Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s creation of fictional heteronyms for his polyphonic output. The Australian writer and art critic Jennifer Higgie, who was paired with Jeremy Deller on a contribution to the exhibition, described Alias as “one of the oddest, most enigmatic and imaginative shows I’ve seen”. Their personal exhibitions by distinction, particularly after the thickening of favourable opinion around their practice in 2013, were hit-and-miss affairs.

Their 2015 debut with London’s Lisson Gallery included a video of a martial performance accompanied by austere still-life photos of military-grade prisms and bullets that had collided and fused. A follow-up 2017 exhibition included forensic images of hairs and other fibres from the rug covering Sigmund Freud’s couch in the Freud Museum in London. The work lacked the propulsion of earlier projects like The Day Nobody Died, which was included in the Tate Modern’s 2015 exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography, and To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light (2012), an examination of the racial bias in the chemistry and processing of Kodak film products that included new and archival photography, found material and sculpture.

Perhaps given their apprenticeship in editorial, it is their 15 books that distil the energy and arc of Broomberg & Chanarin’s insurgent, but never indifferent practice. Chicago (2006), a series of bland documents of a mock settlement used by the Israeli military for urban combat training presented in book form, marked a crucial pivot. Together with Red House (2006), a suite of photographs detailing marks and drawings on the wall of a political building in Kurdish northern Iraq, Chicago announced their break with the humanist anthropology of their Colors-era. Their practice increasingly became sedentary, retrospective and carnivorous, frequently ingesting other people’s photography, mostly in bits, but sometimes whole.

Issued in a small edition by Mack, War Primer 2 (2011) overlays found photos and other visual data trash from the multi-site War on Terror onto Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer (1955), a compendium of news photographs captioned with biting, four-line poems by the German playwright. Brecht’s anxieties about photography, that it was “a weapon against truth”, as Broomberg & Chanarin wrote in 2011, dovetailed with their own. The Deutsche Börse jury described the resulting book as a “bold and powerful reimagining” of Brecht’s work; art critic Sabrina Mandanici disagreed, describing the updated book as “less precise, rigorous and self-critical than the original”. (Split juries were a hallmark of their career.) Holy Bible (2013), which interpolates strange and violent images from the Archive of Modern Conflict into the King James Bible to argue that photography is congruent with the Abrahamic divine in its commitment to catastrophe, is a continuation of War Primer 2’s essentially parasitic method. Its publication prompted critic Sean O’Hagan to describe them as “the most politically engaged artists working in Britain today”.

In a 2015 interview, Broomberg, who now lives in Berlin, and Chanarin, who is still based in London, likened the start of their collaboration to two bullets colliding in mid-air. The violence of the collision was catalytic, providing combustible energy for a creative partnership marked by their striking metamorphosis from photojournalists to artists. “Photojournalists make photographs that arrest us and that are hard to argue with,” the duo wrote in 2011. “But they cannot help us demystify the results. It is the role of the artist to interrogate and challenge this system.” 

They are now embedded in this system: since 2016 Broomberg and Chanarin have been professors of artistic photography at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg, and in 2020 both presented solo projects under their new, solo monikers: Broomberg has created an interactive artificial intelligence alter ego, adam.baby, trained by Broomberg’s entire internet history of thirty years, and Chanarin has an upcoming solo exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art inspired by Amazon’s automated distribution hubs and filled with photographs of his wife Fiona Jane Burgess, on which they collaborated during lockdown. News of their deaths, it would appear, is overstated.

The Late Estate of Broomberg & Chanarin, Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre, Barcelona, is on show from 20 February to 23 May 2021.

Jim Goldberg

The curator Philip Brookman introduced Jim Goldberg to Robert Frank 42-years-ago when they were both featured in an exhibition he was curating. Goldberg was working on his series Rich and Poor, and Frank was a great advocate. “Robert was constantly pushing the boundaries of what an image could be and I tried to adopt that approach as well,” says Goldberg, who developed a close friendship with the photographer. Based on opposite sides of the US, the two communicated regularly by post.

“What led me to appreciate his work the most was his kinship with imperfection. Something could be out-of-focus, but it had the ability to make you feel closer to the subject, the situation. Those ‘mistakes’, which he included in The Americans, opened new doors for viewers to take, new places to look out to or look into. I appreciated those possibilities of how one could grow into imaging the world.

“The work that I’ve kept going back to throughout my career is The Lines of My Hand. Robert got more poetic and I grew more attached to his words and use of visual language. He was brilliant when speaking about photography, about photographs within photographs, about mundane moments, in his titles and stories.

“For all his travelling, Robert was a shy and private person. During his last few years on Bleecker Street, he would often sit outside his house and quietly watch the world go by. When it got more difficult for him to go up and down the stairs, he placed cameras, pictures, postcards, and books in different places in his home to continue to catch glimpses of surprise in every corner. In this way, he kept his mind sharp and his interest in the world strong.

“I will admire and miss him always.”

Martin Parr

“The Americans was the first photography book I ever bought,” remembers Martin Parr. “After that, I bought another 13,000. But, somehow, the first one was never beaten. It is probably the greatest photo essay ever produced and as such is a touchstone for all photographers.”

Parr purchased the second US edition after seeing a selection of images in Creative Camera, a British magazine that folded in the early 2000s. “They showed me what was possible,” he says.

Thomas Hoepker

In 1963, Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker embarked on his first extensive road trip assignment across the US, for the German magazine Kirstall. “I had one major guiding star: Robert Frank and his book Les Americains,” says Hoepker, who was deeply moved by the publication when he saw the French edition in a bookshop in Hamburg. “At that time, no publisher in America would touch Frank’s dark and brooding pictures.

“I got quite excited when we drove out West and saw that we were near the town of Butte, Montana, on my map. Frank’s pictures from Butte had stuck in my mind and I just had to go there — quite foolishly, but worthwhile nevertheless. Butte was also good to me and gave me some decent images.

“Robert — I’m standing on your shoulders, but I can’t even reach up to your belt!”

Matt Stuart

“My father introduced me to photography, giving me two books, one by Henri Cartier-Bresson and one by Robert Frank,” says street photographer Matt Stuart. “My life changed from that point forever. My father had effectively introduced me to the Beatles and The Rolling Stones in one hit.”