Negative Publicity with Edmund Clark and Crofton Black

Join British photographer Edmund Clark and counterterrorism investigator Crofton Black for a conversation about their recently published book, Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition (Aperture/Magnum Foundation, 2016), which explores the unseen and unpublicized aspects of the United States’ war on terror.

Negative Publicity includes previously unpublished photographs and documents that confront the nature of contemporary warfare and the invisible mechanisms of state control, and raises fundamental questions about the accountability and complicity of governments and corporations in acts of torture and imprisonment without due process.

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Edmund Clark is an award-winning artist whose work links history, politics, and representation. The series Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out, Letters to Omar, and Control Order House engage with state censorship to explore the hidden experiences and spaces of control and incarceration in the “Global War on Terror.” The Mountains of Majeed reflects on the end of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. Clark’s work has been published and exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and acquired for national and international collections, including the George Eastman House Museum, Rochester, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and, in Britain, the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, and the National Media Museum. Awards include the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service, the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award, and being shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet for the theme of Power. He teaches at the University of the Arts London. His work is the subject of major solo exhibitions Edmund Clark: War of Terror at the Imperial War Museum, London, from July 28, 2016, to August 28, 2017, and Terror Incognitus at Zephyr Raum für Fotografie, Reiss-Engelhorn Museen, Mannheim, Germany, from January 31 to July 3, 2016.

Crofton Black has spent several years carrying out in-depth international investigations into counterterrorism tactics on behalf of the human rights group Reprieve, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and other organizations. He has a doctorate of philosophy from the University of London on the topic of early modern hermeneutics, and was formerly an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Image: Edmund Clark, Site in north-east Kabul, believed to have been the location of the Salt Pit, now obscured by new factories and compounds, from Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition (Aperture/Magnum Foundation, 2016)