Bertolt Brecht assembled Kriegsfibel — War Primer — over three decades, setting four-line poems against press photographs of the two world wars so that each picture might be read rather than merely seen. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin took the first English-language edition of that book and worked directly over it, placing images gathered from the internet, along with video screenshots, on top of Brecht’s photographs and verses.

The material they add comes from the conflicts and rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror: the Twin Towers, torture at Abu Ghraib, the execution of Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush presenting a Thanksgiving turkey. Against them sit Brecht’s bombed cities and battlefronts, Hitler and his circle, wounded soldiers and refugees. Brecht attacked photojournalism’s didactic role and its service to war’s profiteers; Broomberg and Chanarin shift that critique onto images made by the participants, promoters and reporters of a later conflict, and onto the appetite for such images.

The title deliberately echoes the primers used to teach children to read. Brecht called press photographs hieroglyphics in need of decoding, and his book worked as a manual for doing so. The second version keeps that instructional ambition while pressing a harder question: in an age of fabricated news, images do not only narrate history, they help to make it.

War Primer 2 first appeared in 2011 as a limited hardback and earned its authors the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize; this MACK paperback, published in 2018, is a facsimile of that book, running to 200 pages at 25 by 30 centimetres, OTA-bound. Broomberg and Chanarin are credited as the artists, while the photographers behind the appropriated images remain, for the most part, unnamed — a circumstance that belongs to the work’s argument about authorship and the circulation of pictures. For a collection formed around appropriation, media critique or the postwar photobook, the volume is a compact case study in how a single photograph changes meaning once its caption, its page and its century are replaced.