Anew book looking at the relationship between photographer and sitter is an engaging and complex study, finds Damien Demolder
Collaboration is one of the buzzwords of a social media age in which ‘creators’, ‘influencers’ and ‘brands’ get together to make ‘content’. In its purest sense, each of those parties plays an equal role in deciding how that content will look – though of course that isn’t how it always happens. Nevertheless, the modern concept of collaboration is this idea that each player brings their own skills, imagination and personality to blend with those of the others in pursuit of something larger than the sum of the individual elements. In theory at least, it presents a neat power-shift from the days when the photographer or client would give all the orders and everyone else had to comply. The reality may be slightly different in practice – usually when humans are involved, someone has more power than the others.
This concept of image-making as a collaboration might be alien to many photographers, who consider that they work on their own to produce their own pictures – coming up with the ideas and deciding how to shoot in isolation. And that may well sometimes be true, but there may be many occasions when we don’t recognise that our work is the result of a collaboration or how much of a collaboration it is. The roles others play are often overlooked. That collaboration might be a simple exchange of ideas with a person we are photographing about a pose or a location, or they might be along more complicated lines of how we are influenced by others and the prevailing attitudes of the day.
This book asks us to look again at the way our work is made, displayed and used, to reassess the part played by others in its existence. It wants us to re-look at how we involve, celebrate, exploit, speak for, dehumanise, magnify and are controlled by others. It’s a very useful process that encourages us to think a little bit more about what we do and our attitudes behind the camera, as well as how we use the pictures that we take. It aims to bring into our consciousness all of the invisible lines we can so easily and accidentally cross when we haven’t thought enough about what we are doing.
Collaboration is the work of a group of two photographers, Susan Meiselas and Wendy Ewald, and three academics, Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Leigh Raiford and Laura Wexler, who have come together to produce this gigantic and engaging study.
Narrow road ahead
There are two distinct parts to this book. Firstly we have the introductory comments that open the book, and the small passages of text at the beginning of each chapter written by the authors. Secondly we have the main bodies o
