With the reading of its last will and testament in the exhibition The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin at Fabra i Coats in Barcelona on 20 February, the artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin will announce itself economically, creatively and conceptually dead. Having both been brought up for periods in South Africa, Adam Broomberg (b. South Africa, 1970) and Oliver Chanarin (b. Britain, 1971) started their collaboration when editing COLORS, the magazine published by Bennetton. “We weren’t photographers and we weren’t editors,” said Broomberg. But suddenly they found themselves at the core of the magazine. The series they produced in the early 2000s – stories of closed communities like refugee camps, mental hospitals, prisons or old people’s homes – established their reputation as photographers capable of making investigative portraits of people on the margins of society. It paved the way for a blossoming art practice in which they deliberately started to deconstruct the role of photography and of the photographer.