apartheid
Adam Broomberg
Born in apartheid-era Johannesburg to a Jewish family, descended from Holocaust survivors, Adam Broomberg's trajectory spans teenage anti-apartheid activism, years embedded in global conflict zones, and commercial collaborations that later became subjects of critique. Across this arc, his work has evolved into a sustained inquiry into power: his own positionality, the complicities of photography, and its potential to be repurposed as a tool for change. In this conversation, the artist and educator traces his own path through images, complicities, and refusals. He reflects on the toxicity of photography, how he engaged with its reproduction and refusal – through projects with large-format cameras, archival excavations, and counter-surveillance. We talk about the olive tree project, about authorship as collective practice, and about his conviction that the personal is always political. Now based in Berlin, carrying the memory of genocide, he offers a lucid reflection on what it means to inhabit Jewishness today — and why, in his view, the greatest threat to the Jewish community no longer comes from the past, but from something more insidious in the present.