Published in 2007 by Steidl/Photoworks, Fig brings together more than eighty photographs by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Still lifes, portraits, and landscapes form an intentionally unstable catalogue of things seen, collected, staged, and remembered. Its subjects include uncanny artefacts from Victorian museum collections—among them a merman’s body, a unicorn’s horn, and a dodo skeleton—as well as waxworks, hotel-room flowers in Rwanda, and a leaf blown from a tree in Tel Aviv by a bomb blast.

The book’s central concern is the relationship between photography and the acquisitive logic of British colonialism. Broomberg and Chanarin treat the camera not as a neutral instrument of discovery but as part of a longer history of collecting, classification, and power. The photographed objects are therefore evidence, but evidence of an uncertain kind: the sequence allows fact and fantasy, documentary description and invention, to occupy the same field. The result is less a conventional survey than a deliberately unsettled archive.

That tension gives Fig its particular force as a photobook. Its images move between the museum specimen, the staged arrangement, the incidental trace, and the scene marked by political violence, asking how photographs manufacture authority while appearing to record the world. Julian Stallabrass contributes the text, with a foreword by Gordon MacDonald; their presence situates the photographic sequence within a broader critical conversation without reducing it to illustration.

For collectors, Fig deserves attention as a sustained collaboration between two photographers at a point where documentary practice, archival display, and postcolonial critique meet. The English-language hardcover, published by Steidl in 2007, is a compact object whose conceptual range exceeds its modest scale. It rewards reading not simply as a set of pictures, but as an argument about who gathers images, what gets preserved, and how photographic knowledge is made.