This new Photoworks exhibition, produced in association with the John Hansard Gallery, features over eighty still lives, portraits
and landscapes by photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Drawing together newly commissioned work made around the south
coast of England and internationally, Fig. traces links between photography, imperialism and the colonial impulse to acquire, map
and collect.
The exhibition’s diverse imagery harks back to an era of Victorian collecting, which resulted in strange accumulations of objects
being deposited in local museums throughout the UK. Here, with pictures framed in acrylic boxes that suggest the scientific
preservation and display of museum objects, the exhibition has become the photographers’ own questioning take on the ‘cabinet of
curiosities’. As Broomberg and Chanarin have observed:
‘the history of photography is intimately bound up with the idea of colonial power. Documentary photographers today have a worrying
amount in common with the collector/adventurers of past eras. As unreliable witnesses, we have gathered together ‘evidence’ of our
experiences and present our findings in this exhibition; a muddle of fact and fantasy.’

http://www.soton.ac.uk/~hansard/exhibition/current.html

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