War Primer 2 By Adam Broomberg | Oliver Chanari... Apr 2026

Brecht used poetry to "lay bare the device" of the image. In War Primer 2 , the interaction between Brecht's historical text and contemporary visuals (e.g., a biometric camera reading a dead man's iris) creates a "ping-pong relay" that forces the viewer to become a critical observer rather than a passive consumer of spectacle. War Primer 2 [paperback] - MACK

Drawing on Hito Steyerl’s concept of the "poor image," the work utilizes compressed, pixelated screengrabs to represent the "War on Terror". War Primer 2 by Adam Broomberg | Oliver Chanari...

A central theme is the democratization—and simultaneous weaponization—of the camera. Brecht used poetry to "lay bare the device" of the image

Bertolt Brecht viewed press photographs as "hieroglyphics" that obscured rather than revealed the truth of war. His original War Primer sought to demystify these images by pairing them with four-line quatrains. Broomberg and Chanarin’s sequel "inhabits" the physical pages of the 1998 English edition of Brecht’s work, replacing his newspaper clippings with low-resolution digital screenshots culled from the internet. This physical layering serves as a "metanarrative" on the evolution of conflict representation over sixty years. mobile phone footage

This paper analyzes War Primer 2 (2011) by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, a contemporary "hack" of Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 Kriegsfibel (War Primer). By overlaying images from the "War on Terror" onto Brecht’s original plates, the artists transition Brecht’s critique of WWII press photography into the era of the internet, mobile phone footage, and biometric surveillance. This study examines how the work re-functions the "photo-epigram" to expose the political economy behind modern conflict imagery.

This draft explores the intersection of Bertolt Brecht’s Marxist theory and the contemporary digital landscape in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s .

The artists highlight the monetization of tragedy, such as the licensing of Abu Ghraib torture images by the Associated Press , questioning how multinational media entities profit from military-produced "trophy" images. 3. Critical Pedagogy and "Poor Images"