Galerie Gabriel Rolt present their first solo exhibition of works by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The work of this internationally renowned, UK-based duo interrogates the documentary and ethnographic traditions of photography.

Poor Monuments, a series of 85 works on paper, is a contemporary re-working of The War Primer, a book by Bertolt Brecht published in 1955. The War Primer comprises of images clipped from newspapers, each accompanied by a four-line poem. The title of the book deliberately recalls the textbooks that were used to teach elementary school children how to read. Brecht’s book is a practical manual into how to ‘read’ photographs.

For each image that Brecht originally chose, Broomberg and Chanarin have found an equivalent from our present age. However, where Brecht’s War Primer was concerned with images of the Second World War, Broomberg and Chanarin are concerned with images generated by both sides of the so-called “War on Terror”.

“Don’t start with the good old things but the bad new ones” Brecht famously said, and in this spirit Broomberg and Chanarin have gathered their material from the internet—compressing, uploading, ripping, squeezing, reformatting and re-editing often anonymous images—rather than sifting through newspapers with a pair of scissors.