Book Event—Edmund Clark & Crofton Black: “Cosmopolemos”

Join us at ICP for a conversation between artist Edmund Clark and ICP Director of Collections Erin Barnett on the occasion of Clark’s latest publication, Cosmopolemos, co-authored with Crofton Black and published by Loose Joints. Clark and Barnett will speak about the scope of this research-based work and the legibility of visual language in an increasingly militarized and photographed world.

This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and include access to ICP’s galleries.

About the Book

Cosmopolemos, from the Greek for order and for war, refers to the ordered universe of war itself. Across seven years of forensic collaboration, artist Edmund Clark and investigative reporter Crofton Black have scoured publicly available archives to build an index of American military spending from the $6.5 trillion in contracts issued by the U.S. Department of Defense between the attacks of September 2001 and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan two decades later. Cosmopolemos scans across over 43 million recorded transactions that contain, in detail both granular and mighty, everything a superpower might conceivably need to wage war and sustain itself while doing so, with oil reserves and nuclear weapons sitting inside the same ledger as cookies and cleaning contracts.

America spends as much on defence each year as the next nine countries combined, some 40 per cent of the world's total military budget, concentrated inside a system that isn't secret so much as simply too vast, too dispersed, to ever really be grasped. Clark & Black's answer to that illegibility is, quite literally, to read it, as a site of critical inquiry, of speaking truth to power. A modern iteration of the encyclopaedia, Clark & Black's dive into the black box predicates itself on its own unknowability, emphasised by photographic illustrations that reappropriate imagery, both connected and disparate, absurd and clear-eyed, gathered directly from the Department of Defense's own image library. These images, often sanitised or softened through digital compression, reflect awkwardly the visual language a military chooses for itself, recontextualised across two structures: a Gazetteer mapping the countries where this money moved, and a Glossary built from words shared between transaction records and image captions, language doing the work that photography alone cannot.

Cosmopolemos arrives at close to 600 pages, an exhaustive dossier-object whose sheer bulk performs the excess it documents, presenting data, language and image not as separate evidentiary tracks but as a single interlocking system, each illuminating what the others cannot quite show. Published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of American independence, it asks what it might mean to comprehend, or simply to stand before, a power so distributed and pervasive as to appear to be everywhere at once.

Edmund Clark & Crofton Black are an artist-investigator duo who specialise in technology, politics and security topics. Their first collaborative book, Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition (Aperture, 2016), received the Rencontres d'Arles Photo-Text Book Award and the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism.

About the Artists 

Edmund Clark is a British artist whose research-based practice explores the intersections of history, politics, and representation. He has exhibited widely, with solo museum exhibitions at the ICP Museum in New York, the Imperial War Museum in London, and Zephyr Raum für Fotografie in Mannheim. Awards include the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal and honorary fellowship, and the BJP International Photography Award. He holds a PhD by Published Work and is Reader in the Political Image at the University of the Arts London.

Erin Barnett is Director of Collections and Library Services at the International Center of Photography. She spent sixteen years at ICP in two earlier tenures, most recently as Director of Exhibitions and Collections, where she curated Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died (2018), the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition in the United States. Her other ICP exhibitions include Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 (2011), President in Petticoats! Civil War Propaganda in Photographs (2012), and The Lower East Side: Selections from the ICP Collection (2020). Her work returns repeatedly to how photographs function as evidence, as propaganda, and as state record. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts and in the ICP-Bard MFA program. She is an alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and holds an MA in the history of art from the University of Kansas.

Header Image: Pages from "Cosmopolemos" by Edmund Clark and Crofton Black