A Collaborative Turn in Contemporary Photography?

Abstract

This paper addresses emerging forms of collaborative photographic practice, including those enabled by digital networked technologies and by contemporary artists. I argue that although histories of photography invariably privilege individual figures, contemporary developments should be understood in terms of important precursors such as community photography in the 1970s. The paper concludes with some observations about artists Stephen Willats and Simon Terrill, who have sought to establish a relationship between authorship and community in their photography, and whose work can now be viewed in light of networked photography.

Notes

1 Geoffrey Batchen has recently reminded us of this fact in a series of entries written on the subject of photographic reproducibility published on the Still Searching blog hosted by the Winterthur Fotomuseum in October 2012. Unfortunately this paper was originally written in March 2012, and I have been unable to incorporate his arguments here. See especially his entry on photography and authorship: http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/10/4-photography-and-authorship

2 The exceptions, where collaboration is part of photographic history, are almost exclusively concerned with commercial and artistic partnerships. Indeed, from nineteenth-century portrait studios (e.g. the painter-photographer team Hill and Adamson) to contemporary artists (e.g. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg) the history of photography reveals important examples of photographers working in partnership.

3 The rejection of the Pictorialist aesthetic and the embrace of “straight” photography by modernist photographers like Paul Strand was rarely accompanied by a critique of subjectivism. On the contrary, the various formalisms that emerged in the US (f64 and so on), based on the supposed purity of the technical medium, exalted the individual vision of the photographer. Ironically, as Solomon-Godeau has observed, the “art photography” that emerged in New York following World War 1, which “posited a modernist aesthetic that insisted on photography as a medium of subjectivity”, emerged precisely at the moment when:

radical practice in both the Soviet Union and in Germany rejected absolutely the notion of the artist's function as the expression of a privileged subjectivity. This repudiation of subjectivity, personality and interiority was linked not only to revolutionary tenets of collectivism and utilitarianism but to the widespread reaction against expressionism. (56)