Holy Bible is not a monograph in the usual sense. Made by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and published by MACK, it is an illustrated edition assembled from an existing text and an existing picture collection, with the two held in deliberate, unrelenting cross-pressure. The first edition appeared in 2013; the copy under discussion is its second printing.

The images come from the Archive of Modern Conflict, a photographic collection built around war, violence and calamity. Broomberg and Chanarin selected from it with the philosopher Adi Ophir’s proposition in mind: that God discloses himself chiefly through catastrophe, and that the power structures of the Bible correspond to those of modern systems of governance. The King James text itself drove the search. Passages determined what was looked for, and what was permitted to stand as illustration.

Structurally and physically the book follows the King James Version closely — debossed leather flexibound, 22 by 17 centimetres, 768 pages, with an eight-page booklet attached inside the back cover. Bertolt Brecht’s annotated personal bible is acknowledged as an earlier model for reading scripture alongside documentary imagery. What results is less an anthology than an argument carried by sequence and juxtaposition.

For a collector, the interest lies in what the book declines to settle. Its credits name the artists as selectors and the archive as source; the individual photographers whose pictures appear are not enumerated, and that omission is not an oversight but part of the subject. Broomberg and Chanarin use the machinery of a sacred book to examine authorship, the unspoken criteria by which conflict is judged photographable, and the clichés governing how war is pictured. It belongs to the lineage of conceptual artists’ books that treat the found image as material to be re-edited, and it rewards return visits: the same photograph reads differently depending on the verse beside it.