Black market (ONLY 100 COPIES - SIGNED)

Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg
Black market (ONLY 100 COPIES - SIGNED)

Photographs: Olivier Chanarin & Adam Broomberg

Publisher: Chopped Liver Press

101 pages

Year: 2012

Comments: Softcover under glassine paper, 220 x 160 mm. First edition, 2012. Black & White photographs. Text in english. Limited edition of 100 copies with the rare VHS video tape. Copy signed by Olivier Chanarin & Adam Broomberg. Extremely tiny trace of tear to glassine paper (top of the spine). Copy in very good condition.

Black Market has been selected by Le Monde as one of the best Photography Books of 2012. It takes its name from the eponymous film Al Suq al Soda, or Black Market. Directed by the surrealist painter-turned-filmmaker Kamel el-Telmissany, the film was banned shortly after its release in Egypt in 1945, and has since all but disappeared. What is more, this rare copy of the film, a recording from television, has been partially erased by another film – an unknown porno probably made in the 1970s or 80s. The two films share the same strip of magnetic tape, but sit uncomfortably together and transmit inverse aesthetic, moral and political positions.

This chunky VHS cassette, itself an artefact of recent audiovisual history, contains the second half of an equally defunct Egyptian film entitled Al Suq al Soda, or Black Market.