« Joel Meyerowitz Interview (Part 2) | Home | Kodak Slashes Film(s) »

Slideshow Perfection = Chopped Liver

I don’t know much about Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. (They edited COLORS.) I saw them make a brief appearance in “Genius of Photography“, so I checked-out their pictures and soon moved to something else.

Their latest work, “FIG“, stopped me in my tracks. It’s a slideshow, of sorts, that can be viewed in its entirety on their site choppedliver.info. It landed in my RSS reader via the Host Gallery, a small photojournalism gallery I was lucky to visit twice this summer, in London.

“Fig 1″, Broomberg and Chanarin

On the Host podcast, Broomberg and Chanarin read quick, flat descriptions of the pictures that comprise “FIG”, and as the slideshow progresses, threads of narrative emerge. Not capital-N narrative, but the more eliptical, quicksilver kind.

I can’t even tell you exactly what FIG is about. It’s a specific kind of encyclopedia. While watching it, I thought, “this is the Museum Of Jurassic Technology of slideshows.” In fact, one of the themes of FIG is collecting and organizing and typologies, as seen in the Booth Museum, in Brighton. Unlike nearly everything I see on the Web, I can’t wait to go back and have a 2nd and 3rd look. FIG reveals the art of the slideshow, as much as it may or may not reveal the art of photography.

Have a look; see what develops. Steidl has FIG slated for publication soon.

Tag: No Street Photography, Tidbits