Oliver Chanarin & Adam BroombergScarti

Ghetto was published by Trolley Books ten years ago. It documented twelve contemporary gated communities, and was photographed by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin entirely on large format colour negative. The book took three years to produce and is now out of print.

'Scarti di avviamento' is the technical term for the paper that is fed through the printing press to clean the drums of ink between print runs. This by-product is usually destroyed once the book is printed. But in this case the 'scarti' – Italian for scraps - were saved and safely stored away by publisher Gigi Giannuzzi. Following his untimely death in December 2012 this box was discovered.

In these scraps the layering of the original images from Ghetto appear almost purposeful. The twice-printed sheets reveal uncanny and often beautiful combinations, both compositionally and contextually. In one the arm of a South African prisoner drops casually into the scene of young Tanzanian refugees perched in a tree, whilst in another an American octogenarian from ‘Leisure World’ retirement home sits almost perfectly atop the knee of a Kurdish lorry driver.

Yet in truth they are nothing more than a series of little accidents.