I am honored to have Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography receive an award from The Center for Photography at Woodstock for Photobook of the Year! I’m extremely happy to have been present among other awards recipients Nan Goldin, An-My Lê, and Keisha Scarville. Thank you so much CPW for the honor, and gratitude always to  Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, Laura Wexler (who was there with me in person) for their work on our book.

Thank you to James Casebere for the photograph!

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What Does It Mean to Collaborate in Photography?

By Yxta Maya Murray

“As Collaboration reveals, photography is a wide-ranging practice of joint creation. This discipline ranges from the felicitous exchanges between the Countess of Castiglione and Pierre-Louis Pierson to the dominance and opposition that activates Migrant Mother, Napalm Girl, and Marc Garanger’s arrogations; to the communal imaginings of Ewald, Dixon, Stallard, the Fraziers, Public Lab, and Southern Gulf community members—and also to the viewers and writers who insist on cocreating photographs with their perceptions and critique.”

Read more here

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A radical new history of photography from a team of esteemed writers and thinkers that focuses on the complex collaborations between photographer and subject.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography  is a groundbreaking publication, by five great thinkers and practitioners in photography, in collaboration with hundreds of photographers, writers, critics, artists, and academics. This collection uses the lens of collaboration to challenge dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship. Working with an accumulation of more than six hundred photographs, each entry breaks apart photography’s “single creator” tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration—the various relationships, exchanges, and interactions that occur in the making of any photograph and in the shaping, undoing and transforming archives.

The book explores themes such as coercion and cooperation, friendship and exploitation, shared interests and competition, and rivalry or antagonistic partnership. Collaboration foregrounds key issues facing photography, including gender, race, and societal hierarchies/divisions—and their role in shaping and reshaping identities and communities, and provoking resistance or conformity.

The photographs are presented alongside quotes, testimonies, and short texts offering perspectives on the array of themes, geographies, contexts, and events. The editors introduce each cluster of projects by providing a framework to understand and decode the complex politics, temporalities, and potentialities of photography. Collaboration reconstructs the infrastructure of photography as a collaborative practice and offers a pedagogical tool for practitioners and scholars of photography.

Available in English from Thames & Hudson on February 6th, 2024 and available now in French from Delpire & Co

“[An] excellent challenge to the ‘single creator’ view of photography… The collection also astutely illustrates how photography—even when ostensibly deployed to oppress—can subtly critique power structures and dominant cultural narratives… Enriched by the volume’s incisive social commentary, these striking images leave a mark.” –  Publishers Weekly

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This book brings together Ewald’s original project with new work made in collaboration with fifteen young Mexican Americans living in Chicago, coordinated with the help of Centro Romero, an immigrant service organisation. These images respond to many of the same subjects as those by Ewald’s 1990s students, with an emphasis now on capturing inner lives and dreams as a way of reckoning with the unvoiced experiences of immigration. The themes of restriction and self-reflection that emerged from this new work were intensified by being made in part under COVID lockdown. Together, the Chiapas and Chicago projects trace the differences between growing up in different Mexican geographies with diverse histories, while reflecting on to the joys and sorrows of childhood.

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A revised and expanded edition of Portraits and Dreams, published by MACK Books, offers access to a different and broadened view of the rural south over the span of 35 years, and includes contemporary pictures and stories by eight of the students from the original publication.

“A unique vision of the rural south: one where imagination is uninhibited, aspiration is untainted by economic realities, and where the adults — tired, covered in coal dust, distinctly not Dolly Parton — seem to live in a parallel universe.” – The Financial Times

“Encouraged by Ewald to delve into their dreams, the children return from sleep with visions as dark as as a Grimms’ fairy tale: of killing a best friend, or of a brother buried under a woodpile. But it’s the revelations of waking thoughts that truly disturb.” – Andrea K. Scott, The New Yorker

“This new version […] brings new life to what is already considered to be a masterpiece.” – The Washington Post

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A companion book has been published by MACK Books.

Portraits and Dreams, “revisits photographs created by Kentucky schoolchildren in the 1970s and the place where the photos were made. The film is about the students, their work as visionary photographers, and the lives they have led since then, as well as the linkages of personal memory to the passage of time.”

Watch the trailer below.

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• The New Yorker: “Israel and the West Bank, Through the Eyes of a Dozen Visitors” by Vince Aletti

“For ‘This Place,’ [Ewald] worked with sixth graders in a kibbutz and a Bedouin village, the owner of a market stall in Jerusalem, students at a military academy, and Gypsy children in the Old City, among many others. Their snapshots of ceremonies, meals, landmarks, animals, friends, and family gatherings combine for a fragmented, random, and disarmingly intimate view of a place far more multicultural than its politicians care to admit.”

• New York Times: “Capturing Human Moments Amid Chaos in Israel and the West Bank” by Roberta Smith

“Infused with the casual precision of intimacy, these images could be excerpts from exceptional scrapbooks or Instagram feeds. Weddings and other rituals take place, old friends meet up, meals are shared, newborns are shown off, teenagers turn the cameras on their friends and themselves. Whatever the time or place, the heart of the matter is regularly reached here — and throughout this moving and insightful show.”

 

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