Looters

Looters is built entirely from photographs Tiane Doan na Champassak did not take: images of the riots that spread across England in August 2011, pulled from the internet in the days after they occurred.

Self-published in Paris and printed by risograph at Après Midi Lab, the book first appeared in October 2011 in an edition of 150 copies and was reprinted in an expanded second edition of 300 in March 2014, running 52 pages at roughly 15 × 21 cm. Champassak reproduces the found pictures largely without caption or comment, letting the grain and contrast of screen-grabbed and low-resolution source images stand as their own kind of evidence of a moment that unfolded, and was watched, mostly through screens.

The book belongs to a body of self-published, appropriation-based photobooks by Champassak, alongside titles such as Sonagachi and Spleen and Ideal, that treat the accumulation of found or anonymous imagery as a documentary method in its own right. Looters was included in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's survey The Photobook: A History, Volume III, cited for its refusal to editorialize found material, letting repetition and accumulation do the work of argument.