Gallery No1
Photography Books

Between the image of a life and the medium that delivers it there is a void. It is this void that Ghetto describes by illustrating lives lived in societies far from the mainstream. In 12 rarified communities, from a prison in South Africa to a retirement home in California and a gypsy ghetto in Macedonia, the authors spent a month methodically photographing and asking questions. The answers they received were both revealing and absurd, but with powerful and dramatic truths. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are the former creative editors of Benetton's COLORS magazine. Their work has been exhibited at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Africana Museum in Johannesburg, at the Florence Biennale, the National Museum of Film, Television and Photography of Great Britain and at The Photographer's Gallery.
Once again, Trolley books has published several commendable books of social concern. The pitfalls in this type of work are numerous-one must avoid a patronizing voice and the curiosity factor while producing imagery that is compelling as well as informative. Each of the photographers here do just that, supported by brilliant book design. Ghetto was conceived by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, the editors and photographers of COLORS magazine. They take the viewer through 12 modern ghettos, starting in a refugee camp in Tanzania and ending in a forest in Patagonia. In Hermanovce, Jarret Schecter tenderly and unpretentiously documents the lives of a village of Roma (Gypsies) in Slovakia. The Roma have been marginalized for hundreds of years, and the millions that inhabit Europe continue to face wide-ranging prejudice. Open Wound, the last title (not shown) explores the photographs of Stanley Greene of the catastrophic war in Chechnya. The work is riveting, painful, and replete with the cry for change.