War Primer 2, made by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and published by MACK in 2011, takes the form of a photographic artists’ book built directly into Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer. Brecht’s 1955 volume paired newspaper photographs of the Second World War with four-line poems—“photo-epigrams”—designed to teach readers how to interpret, or decode, images that present themselves as facts. His title’s echo of an elementary reader was deliberate: the book proposed a practical education in the politics of looking.

Broomberg and Chanarin extend that argument into the conflicts and image economies associated with the so-called War on Terror. Rather than treating the earlier book as a historical relic, they reactivate its pages, placing a later body of conflict imagery into conversation with Brecht’s poems and clippings. The result is neither a conventional documentary sequence nor a simple update. Its force lies in the friction between inherited text and contemporary pictures, between the authority of the printed page and the instability of images circulated through modern news and media systems.

The book is especially compelling as an object of photographic design. The catalogue description records text silkscreened into the original Brecht hardback and 85 colour images tipped in by hand, making the act of revision materially visible. The pages do not merely contain a new argument; they bear the marks of an intervention, asking the reader to examine how captions, placement, historical distance, and repetition shape what a photograph can mean. In this sense, War Primer 2 is as much a study of editorial power as of war photography.

Issued in English as a 100-page hardcover by MACK, the book was produced as a limited edition of 100 copies. Its importance for a serious collection rests on the rare convergence of conceptual rigour and physical specificity: a historically grounded reworking, a sustained collaboration between two photographic artists, and a book form that turns the politics of images into an experience of reading and handling. It deserves attention not as a neutral record of conflict, but as a precise challenge to the ways photographs make history appear legible.