Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, Laura Wexler

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