The Day Nobody Died

Last Spring I went a little crazy on ebay purchasing all kinds of photographic oddments at rock bottom prices. One of these items was a 156 metre x 15.6 cm roll of Kodak Royal colour paper. I was itching to do something with it , but was unsure how I could process it. Well, as is the way of the world someone else used this technique already.

In June of this year Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin traveled to Afghanistan to be embedded with British Army units on the front line in Helmand Province. In place of their cameras they took a roll of photographic paper 50 meters long and 76.2 cm wide contained in a simple, lightproof cardboard box.

They arrived during the deadliest month of the war for the British army. Ignoring events that normally would be recorded by a photographer, they instead ufurled a seven-metre section of the paper and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds.

The evacuation of content and the strange abstract nature of the resultant image present the viewer with more questions than answers.

It is on exhibition at Paradise Row, London - The Day Nobody Died

Now what am I going to do with that roll of paper?