Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were commissioned by Photoworks in 2005 to produce a piece of work engaging with some aspect of the cultural landscape of the South East of England. The resulting exhibition and publication are a strange and complex departure from their practice to date, a journey from the dusty museums of Sussex to the far-flung corners of the world and back again. Likening their practice to the Victorian gentleman adventurers who built the collections that they discovered in Sussex, Broomberg and Chanarin identified themselves as unreliable witnesses and began to make Fig. in response to this revelation.

An examination of the evolution of the individual images in Fig. would no doubt be rewarding. But what is more intriguing about the work — and maybe what separates it from Broomberg and Chanarin’s previous pieces — is the way in which the photographs and research have been disseminated and then used to construct the narrative which runs through the project. Sometimes this narrative seems cobbled together; sometimes it is comical and sometimes tragic; sometimes it is close to an everyday experience and sometimes so far outside of the gamut of normal experience as to be impossible to believe. This assemblage of incongruous, decontextualised images held together by text has the effect of both drawing you in and knocking you off your balance — a bit like a novice boxer falling for a Sugar-Ray Leonard sucker-punch. Connections are made solidly or loosely, with short steps or giant leaps — they can cause you to be either enlightened or perplexed and you are left with the strange sensation that Broomberg and Chanarin are playing with your view of the world and how it is held together.

Fig. is either an antidote or a complement to contemporary artists’ fascination with the appropriation — or re-appropriation — of the archival document. Rather than starting with an archival document and subverting its original intention (in the style of Sultan and Mandel’s Evidence for instance) or creating images by mimicking an archival aesthetic or mode (Sputnik by Joan Fontcuberta is a good example of this), Broomberg and Chanarin create a new archive of documents that, when positioned alongside text, vigorously question their own authenticity — the text being constantly in tension with the images and vice versa. This marks Fig. out as a departure from both the conventions of documentary photography and their own practice to date. The tight narrative structure, contrived by Broomberg and Chanarin for Fig., is designed to suggest connections and to confuse them.

Broomberg and Chanarin are offering a new alternative to photojournalism — a place where we are able to consider how little we know about the world and how easy it is to accept a convenient construction when it is presented to us. The world is a complicated place, and Fig. offers neither a claim to make it easier to negotiate nor solace. Genocide, slavery, imperialism, power-mongering, racism, jingoism and all manner of global inequities are indicated and tacitly linked, though never explicitly shown. Poverty and war — two of photojournalism’s favourite topics — are considered, but no photographs of bodies or starving children are displayed. Instead, Broomberg and Chanarin guide us through a collection of acute observations which are connected only by the artists’ own experiences and interests; in the process, they emphatically highlight many of photography’s shortcomings — aiming much of the criticism at their own practice.