Welkom Today: On Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Photography

Abstract

This article centers on the notion that photography is inherently collaborative. This might not seem like a contested or groundbreaking line of thought but, until quite recently, photography’s history was shaped by the modernist concept of the artist as individual author.[2] Following a century-long debate about the medium’s status, photography was finally embraced as an art form in the late 1960s when conceptual artists started using photography, and photographers, on the other hand, started to edition and sign their work (as “vintage prints”). Although the idea of authorship was instrumental in the legitimization of photography as art, it also led to a highly restricted understanding of the medium.[3] In his recent publication Photography and Collaboration (2017), RMIT University professor Daniel Palmer even goes so far as saying, “Bound up with the construction of the modern author more generally—and related anxieties around originality and intentionality—it is difficult not to read [the fixation on authorship] as stemming from the idea that photography can be performed by anyone. Unease about photography’s democratic promise has, particularly in the hands of art historians, been overcompensated for in the figure of the bloated author.”[4] Roughly put, in order for a photograph to be an artwork (to be exhibited, studied, and collected by modern art museums), curators and historians stressed the original vision and unique eye of its maker. This focus on the photographer as artist—and less on the subject and the sociopolitical conditions that shaped their view—remained persistent long after photography’s emancipation in the art world.