Clark & Black build an oblique encyclopaedia of American military power, marshalling public defence data and the Pentagon's own photography into an object whose scale mirrors the very system it scrutinises.

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 a 600-page index of American military spending out of 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, across 43 million line items, 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.

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  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.

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  Crofton Black is a British writer and investigator specialising in technology and security topics. A reporter and editor at the international collaborative newsroom Lighthouse Reports, he has previously worked at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Reprieve. He holds a PhD in medieval and Renaissance philosophy from the Warburg Institute in London and was a postdoctoral Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin.

• 576pp, 200 colour plates, 235 × 330 mm
• Section-sewn softcover
  
  
• Designed by Ben Weaver & Sean Charlton White
  Published by Loose Joints
  
  
• LJ229, October 2026
• ISBN 978-1-912719-82-2

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