Contemporary Photography as Collaboration
Résumé
This book explores a spectrum of contemporary photographic practices across
the fields of image-making, curating, archiving, teaching, community development
and activism that have envisioned photography as ontologically and ethically
collaborative. By looking specifically into the contexts where collaborative
projects are produced and shown, and into the dialogical relation to the people
they engage with –in hospitals, in prisons, in working-class neighbourhoods, with
indigenous people, refugees, women, persons experiencing homelessness, young
people– the contributions from practitioners, scholars, and curators show participatory
practices to create the conditions for building new subjectivities, or making
visible a multiplicity of identities, thus opening up a new politics of visibility.
Therefore, this book specifically addresses the political, counter-cultural dimension
of collaborative projects, but also their subversiveness in relation to dominant
practices within the field of photography: this includes a reinvention of the
position of the photographer –in turns facilitator or project leader– of curating
and exhibition models, of archiving methodologies, of photographic education
and of market practices.