How Two Photographers & Pussy Riot Subverted Russia’s Surveillance System
A series of portraits, which includes Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich and many other Moscow citizens, was created by a machine: a facial recognition system recently developed in Moscow for public security and border control surveillance. The result is more akin to a digital life mask than a photograph; a three-dimensional facsimile of the face that can be easily rotated and closely scrutinized. Sabine Mirlesse spoke with artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin about the project.
Sabine Mirlesse: [Can you tell me about] your recent project involving Pussy Riot?
Oliver Chanarin: It’s called Shtik Fleisch Mit Tzvei Eigen. It means “piece of meat with two eyes.” It’s a Yiddish insult —
Adam Broomberg: — which my grandmother called my mother every morning.
SM: Can we talk about Jewishness for a moment? How important are your origins to your work?
AB: It’s a big part of our identity. I went to a Jewish school in South Africa in the ‘80s, which was quite an experience.
OC: After the pogroms in Europe in the late nineteenth century, there were a lot of boats from Riga that headed to South Africa, to Durban…
SM: Tell me more about Shtik Fleisch Mit Tzvei Eigen.
OC: It’s about where portraiture is at in terms of photography as a genre. Our project began with the discovery of this camera developed in Russia. It’s essentially a computer for recognizing license plates on cars which was then developed into a facial recognition system. It works in such a way that you’re never aware you’re being photographed.
You’re walking through the city and, as you encounter different cameras, they piece together a seamless portrait of your face. And it’s three-dimensional.
SM: How did you get access to the camera/computer program?
OC: It began with a commission, again. RIA Novosti, the state media agency in Moscow, invited us to produce a series about labor in contemporary Russia. That was shortly before the agency was shut down by Putin. Being very aware that it was a state media company, we wanted to do something that would be pushing back against their agenda. We were looking at August Sander, who documented society in the Weimar Republic period in Germany and categorized people according to labor. So our proposal was to reenact Sander’s entire life’s work in a week, using this specific equipment. Bizarrely, they accepted it and we began casting all the archetypes from Sander’s program — the painter, the butcher, the revolutionary, etcetera. We tried to find contemporaries of all those people. We photographed Pussy Riot because there is a revolutionary in Sander’s book.
SM: Do you intentionally draw from your earlier work to bring things full circle? I see parallels from your earliest projects to your most recent.
OC: There is a connection between Shtik Fleisch Mit Tzvei Eigen and Trust. There are very similar concerns — with the surveillance equipment, the subject is entirely passive in relation to the camera and that was very true of those portraits of people going under anesthesia. With this more recent work, the only way to resist recognition by the camera is to wear a balaclava. The pictures delivered by the machine are quite cold — like death masks, in a way.
There’s one last part to the work: Helmar Lerski was a contemporary of August Sander coming from a completely opposite perspective. Whereas Sander was interested in the subject’s humanism and always placed the person in the center, in this very heroic way, Lerski rejected that. He said that you could never tell anything about a person from a photograph, and that all you see is the surface. He would photograph a subject from like sixty or seventy different angles —
AB: — and just their face. His portraits look remarkably like the collaged portraits made by the surveillance machine.
SM: So wait, with each of the portraits you never actually met the people depicted?
AB: We did, in Russia.
OC: It was the most depressing experience of photographing someone, because they would just walk through the room and that’s it. The surveillance cameras were embedded in the room.
AB: Part of the project is about alerting people to this technology — it is the most insidious threat to our civil liberty. We’ve made a Facebook page and got hold of groups around the world to knit these balaclavas for us. Every day we have another balaclava arriving to the studio.
This is an excerpt from Broomberg & Chanarin’s interview in BOMB130. Read the full interview here.
