In the late 1940s Egypt’s surrealist group dissolved, and several of its members left for France. The painter Al-Talmesany abandoned the plastic arts for film, arguing that cinema belonged to the people while surrealism served nothing. His feature The Black Market is described by the publisher as a foundational work of social realism, made three years before Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves. The film survives, in the account that accompanies this book, only as a single VHS cassette.

Black Market, published in 2012 by Chopped Liver Press as a paperback, is credited to Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The book takes shape around an attempt to recover that film. The two spent months locating a copy; when one appeared it was transferred to DVD, and nobody viewed the result until the disc was already installed and playing in a gallery. The first half was gone. The transfer company explained that it could not copy that section for ethical reasons: the tape had been recorded over with 1970s pornography.

What reaches an audience, then, is a work of social realism interrupted by footage of a wholly different order, and a recovery project that cannot be completed. Black Market belongs to a mode of practice in which existing images and documents are treated as material rather than illustration. Its subject is less a lost film than the conditions under which films survive at all: the cassette, the transfer, the judgement about what may be copied, the market that decides which artifacts are kept.

That argument is what a collector is buying. The volume is modest in format—a paperback issued by an independent press in 2012, in English—and its interest lies in the structure of the work rather than in production detail. Placed beside the artists’ other archive-based projects, it shows the method plainly: find the compromised document, decline to repair it, and let the damage carry the meaning.