Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanaran

Two of the industry's leading photographers only stumbled into their vocation when asked to lead Benetton's Colors magazine.

“Life just happens,” says Oliver Chanarin of how he came to be in a photographic partnership with Adam Broomberg. They met while on holiday in Wuppertal in South Africa when they were both 21. At this point they had no intention of pursuing photographic careers. Then “a very strange series of accidents” occurred.

Broomberg went to work for Oliviero Toscani at Fabrica. When he was asked to edit the Benetton-funded magazine Colors, he asked Chanarin to work with him.

“We weren’t photographers and we weren’t editors,” says Broomberg. But they suddenly found themselves at the helm of the magazine. They decided to take it in a different creative direction. Where Toscani and his founding partner Tibor Kalman had used library images, juxtaposed to make sardonic commentaries on issues of race, sexuality, AIDS and multiculturalism, Broomberg and Chanarin wanted to develop the use of indepth photo-essays to create on the same topics.

They soon taught themselves the tricky art of taking striking photographs, and after having a year out, they returned to edit the magazine on condition that it would be illustrated with their own photography. The subsequent body of work produced – which included stories on African refugee camps, Cuban psychiatric hospitals and Californian retirement communities – established their reputation as photographers capable of making sensitive portraits of people on the cusp of society.

Their background in magazines is still apparent in their work to this day: each story is meticulously planned and discussed, and text and design are integral to the composition of the image. The physical act of taking a photograph is almost incidental to the process – they take less than a shot an hour, they explain, and spend most of their time interviewing their subjects.

“With our portraiture, it’s quite a meditative process,” says Broomberg. “It’s not about catching a moment of honesty, it’s actually about creating a moment. It’s much more about directing somebody.”

Part of this effect is created by the use of a 5 x 4 camera which, with its cumbersome weight and expensive film and materials, tames the temptation to fire off rapid shots in the hope of capturing a decisive moment.

Much of their work since leaving Colors has centred on a deliberate deconstruction of the role of the photojournalist. Their latest project, Fig, (on show at the John Hansard gallery in Southampton and due to be published as a book by Steidl in the autumn) explores the British colonial obsession with collecting exotic objects and archiving them in cabinets of curiosities.

A decade spent visiting the war-torn regions of the world might make some feel that their way of working would make them unsuitable for advertising, but they believe their experiences in war zones have worked in their favour. “There are certain skills that we have learnt from 10 years of witnessing conflict,” says Broomberg. “We’ve become known as the people who can do street cast jobs. We’ve honed those skills, so it’s become second nature to us – and the industry has picked up on that.”

They have worked regularly for clients such as Yellow Pages, HSBC and Sony in campaigns that fit in well with their editorial work. Their photographic career may have begun accidentally, but chance has had little part to play since.