COLLABORATION AND I
ROBERT DAVIES | CRITICAL REPORT PHO740 COLLABORATION AND PROFESSIONAL LOCATIONS
Fig.1: Davies 2022. Coastal Blueprint, No. 1.
INTRODUCTION
This critical report seeks to explore the importance of collaboration in photography through an examination of historical and contemporary practitioners as well as my own photographic practice.
Chapter one gives context by introducing notions of individualism and artistic co-authorship in the arts and early photography.
Chapter two focusses on contemporary methods of collaboration, exploring relationships between photographers, their subjects, and their viewers.
Chapter three examines forms of collaboration in my current project, Coastal Blueprints [Fig.2].
CHAPTER ONE ME, MYSELF AND I
Early understandings of collaboration in the arts focussed on the co-authorship of works and involved “two or more painters, sculptors, printmakers, performance artists, or video artists gathering together, pooling ideas, and with equal participation creating an object” (McCabe 1984: 15). This act of co-authorship challenges the romantic concept of the artist as a lonely, isolated genius that emerged during the Renaissance with the romantic belief in the uniqueness and inviolability of the individual. This led to the conviction that art is not teachable. As Gustave Courbet proclaimed: “I cannot teach my art nor the art of any school, since I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, I maintain that art is completely individual” (Goldwater and Treves, 1947: 295).
This celebration of the artist as unique and alone is continued by the heroic image of the photojournalist, a lone adventurer recording the wonders and perils of the world at great personal risk.
As Geoffrey Batchen explains, photographic history “privilege[s] the moment of taking over that of
making, the private moment over the public, the origin over the journey, the aesthetic decisions over the social” (Batchen 2000: 105–6). However, celebrated photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams have worked with collaborators, particularly in the printing of their images. The latter famously stated that the photographic film negative is the equivalent of the composers “score” and that the print is the “performance” (Adams 1968: 5). He clearly understood that both stages required skill and artistry and the help of others in order to realize his vision.
The photographic print itself has become indicative of the mediums faculty for both individualism and collaboration. In Alexander Gardner’s Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1865-66), the most famous photograph, A Harvest of Death, Gettysberg, Pennsylvania, is recorded as “negative by T.H. O’Sullivan and positive by A. Gardner”, an early attribution of co-authorship in the photographic process [Fig’s 3, 4 & 5]. Yet modern photographic traditions still bear traces of individualism, as we can see from contemporary large, one-off prints for photographic exhibitions. Very much in the style of classical paintings, they are often displayed alone, communicating a “rarity and exclusivity” (Lugon 2015: 392). Similarly, signed or
Fig.4: Detail view.
Fig.5: Detail view.
limited edition prints also attest to the way in which the individual author is celebrated.
Whilst collaborations between ‘teams’ of conceptual artists such as Gilbert & George, Christo and Jean-Claude, and Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel
Basquiat have been celebrated in popular culture, collaborations between photographers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, or Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, are less popularized. Maybe this is due to photography being understood as a more democratic and deskilled medium with it’s proponents preferring an “image machine” (Sekula 1978: 859-83) over a paintbrush or chisel. Despite doubts over its artistic credentials, many photographers over the past fifty years have undertaking collaborations shifting the “concept of art as something envisioned whole by the artist and placed before the viewer”, to the concept of art as “a process of reciprocal creative labor” (Palmer 2017).
CHAPTER TWO THE COLLABORATIVE TRIUMVIRATE
Wendy Ewald has taught children all over the world to document their lives through photographs and realised at an early point in her career that her own work and her student’s work could be combined rather than happening separately. As she says of the children she involves in her projects: “Their work led me to wonder if I could consciously merge the subject of a picture and the photographer, and create a new picture-making process” (Ewald 2000: 17).
The photographs in her projects such as Portraits and Dreams, in which her own photographs are interspersed with those of her students [Fig 6], blur the lines of authorship, challenging the concept of who actually makes an image and thus questioning the role between photographer and subject. Images such as Carlos Andres Villanueva’s The chickens run behind my mother [Fig 7] could be mistaken for having been taken by established practitioners of the art. In this and many of her other projects, collaboration is utilized to democratise the making of documentary photography by involving communities in their own representation.
Fig.6: Ewald, Shepherd 1976-81. I dreamt I killed my best friend.
Fig.7: Ewald, Villanueva ca. 1982-3. The Chickens Run Behind My Mother.
We should also consider instances at the opposite end of the collaborative spectrum, when the participation and involvement of subjects has been coerced.
Working as a military photographer during the Algerian War (1954-1962), Marc Garanger was ordered to create photographs that were destined for the fabrication of identity cards that native Algerians were required to carry for purposes of classification, control and surveillance [Fig. 8]. Garanger was sympathetic to their plight, stating: ”I saw that I could use what I was forced to do, and have the pictures tell the opposite of what the authorities wanted them to tell.” (Garanger quoted in Naggar 2013).
Photography proved to be a reliable scientific tool whose optical reality provided a means of collecting information and was used during western colonial rule “to identify and classify human diversity in an attempt to prove the superiority of the west over other peoples” (Howell 2010). The Algerian identity cards were intended to deny citizenship rights to colonial Algerians who were not of French descent and were a “final attempt at French signature or authorship within the receding colony” (Eileras 2003: 813).
Through literally capturing defiance in the face of the enemy, Garanger expresses his disdain for “the authoring (and authorizing) functions of the colonial gaze” (Eileras 2003: 814).
Fig.8: Garanger 1960. “Femme algérienne”.
Just as military archives can be created for the purposes of political knowledge and power, photographers have also used archives to highlight the plight of marginalized groups in society.
Physical collaboration with such groups remains important to artists like Anthony Luvera, who seek to create a ‘public’ archive about groups such as the homeless. As he states: “in order to expand the possibility of providing a more replete representation of people who might otherwise be forgotten, excluded or spoken for, the archival record must be supplied with a greater diversity of sources, accounts and representations of those individuals” (Luvera 2010: 238-40). In his view the archive is always partial and incomplete. Devised to provide a representation of the contributors to the archive, the series Photographs and Assisted Self-Portraits [Fig. 9], blurs the distinction of subject and author. Luvera’s participatory, collaborative process aligns with Marxist writings such as that of Walter Benjamin in his 1934 essay “The Author as Producer”, in which he advocates modes of mass participation amongst artists, turning “readers or
spectators into collaborators” (Benjamin [1934] 1999: 777).
The significance of this essay can be seen in Luvera’s work where the ‘spectators’ are required to work as active agents, intervening in the production process. As Luvera describes: ‘Ultimately I am interested in how involving participants as contributors to the process of representation can inscribe a different, more nuanced view, or otherwise complicate commonly held perceptions of their lives” (Luvera 2019: 351–363).
Both Ewald’s and Luvera’s work mark a shift in the concept of art as something envisioned whole by the artist and placed before the viewer, to an evolved idea of art as a process of reciprocal creative endeavour (Kester 2011: 7). Larry Sultan’s and Mike Mandel’s book, Evidence shows how this collaboration can involve photographers and the viewers of their work as much as photographers and their subjects. The book, “a visual conundrum of incalculable mystery” (Parr and Badger 2006: 220), consists of elusive and poetic photographs Sultan and Mandel had found in the files of local corporations, government agencies and research institutions, decontextualising the presentation of photography, especially photographs made for the purpose of record [Fig.10].
With a lack of captions that conventionally serve to “anchor” an image’s possible meanings (Barthes 1977: 39), the photographs require viewer engagement. As no form of explanation is offered for why this particular group of images has been collected they become indecipherable visual puzzles conveying Sultan and Mandel’s interest in ambiguity and the important role of the audience interpretation in their work. The book
Fig.10: Sultan and Mandel 1977. Untitled Evidence. questions the role of the author through its collaborative invitation to viewers to make sense of the evidence. It is through that irony, that the viewer also becomes the author forming the collaborative triumvirate of photographer, subject and viewer.
CHAPTER THREE. NATURE AS AUTHOR.
My recent project, Coastal Blueprints, is concerned with political geography, the physical authorship of the land and how we connect to fragmented landscapes of extraction and reclamation. It involved both collaboration and non-collaboration in its making.
I collaborated with the National University of Singapore’s Department of Geography - specifically their archive of digitised historical maps of Singapore in order to uncover the original coastline in the east of Singapore [Fig. 11], before the “prosthetic territory” (Jamieson 2021: 3) of reclaimed land along Singapore’s east coast was developed. This archive consists of maps commenced by the British in 1846 with their colonial “fever” for accumulating knowledge. As Thomas Richards states in The Imperial Archive: “From all over the globe the British collected information about the countries they were adding to their map…In fact they often could do little other than collect and collate information” (Richards 1993). The creation of these maps, as with Garanger’s Identity card portraits, was a representation of power.
Fig.11: Davies 2022. Reconstruction of the old coastal road on the east coast of Singapore before reclamation.
The imagery I subsequently created [Fig. 12, 13] deconstructs what has been so meticulously organised. Throughout the project, I visually deconstruct my own photography as well as the graphic elements I found in archival maps such as signatures, dates, measurements, titles and reference numbers, challenging authorial attempts to classify, order and control.
Where the lack of captions in Sultan and Mandel’s Evidence leave the book open to audience interpretation, the re-appropriated graphical annotations in Coastal Blueprints add a degree of “anchorage”, referencing the authors of Singapore’s political geography and making us question the treatment of land
Fig.12: Davies 2022. Coastal Blueprint, No.3.
Fig.13: Davies 2022. Coastal Blueprint, No.4.
as a political and economic commodity.
This anti-authoritarian stance also manifests itself in my project with an intended non-collaboration with technology. Vilém Flusser describes a need “to create a space for human intention in a world dominated by apparatus” (2000: 75). He posits the camera as a programmable apparatus that, paradoxically, programs the photographer who uses it. Charlotte Cotton also recognizes that to a certain degree “technologies themselves are ‘authoring’ the images we see” (2015: 4). My use of a large format pinhole camera in this project was a deliberate attempt to avoid the automated character of digital technologies and cliches it can set in place.
In favour of technology I have embraced collaboration with nature. Alphonse de Lamartine declared photography “is better than an art, it is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun” (quoted in Gernsheim 1962: 65). Photographers have always sought “an almost supernatural alliance” with light (Alexander: 2015: 36) and the cyanotype process provided the chance to work with it beyond just the moment of capture. Starting with pinhole camera images on direct positive paper, I contact printed
Fig.14:
Fig.15: Davies 2022. Coastal Blueprints ‘Zine’.
cyanotypes from transparency film, combining additional transparencies of archival maps. This was done under direct sunlight and then washed, with the images being scanned mid-development. Using the sun in this way, I fulfilled the literal definition of ‘collaboration’ being: “to work together,” in “conjunction with” another, and to engage in a “united labor” (Kester 2011: 1–2). By allowing nature itself to become a co-author of my work I was able capture fleeting moments of development, symbolising the impermanence and ever-changing coastal boundaries of Singapore [Fig. 14].
The choice to produce Coastal Blueprints as a forty-eight page ‘Zine’ on newsprint [Fig. 15] was intended to reflect the disposable and commoditised treatment of Singapore’s coastlines. With the grid as a rudimentary cartographic gesture, the design and layout has a disregard for boundaries and borders, alluding to how capitalism nonchalantly ‘reads’ and ‘writes’ spaces.
‘Zines’, like photobooks, involve a collaboration between photographer, editors, designers and publishers. Working with newspaperclub.com, albeit remotely, provided an opportunity to further my design and editorial skills and join a new community of publishers looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible in print.
CONCLUSION
As we saw in chapter one, photography’s history was shaped by the modernist concept of the artist as individual author. However we have seen examples of co-authorship between artists and subsequent collaborations between photographers and their subjects. Whereas Susan Sontag stated that photography is “an acute manifestation of the individualized ‘I” (1977: 119), contemporary theorist Ariella Azoulay states: “Contrary to the presupposition that photography can only be discussed through its product and a photograph can only be seen as the creation of the photographer, I say that photography is the act of many and a photograph is a sampling or a trace of a space of human relations.” (Azoulay 2010: 251). Azoulay’s position is that the photograph belongs to no one, certainly not to the photographer; therefore, it belongs to all of us.
Whilst commonly seen as the product of two independent parties—the photographer and their subject—we have seen in Sultan and Mandel’s Evidence, that a third party, the viewer, can also take role in authorship and that a photograph does not begin and
end with the intent of its makers.
If we consider photography as a social and communicative activity, which unfolds over time, we can see that most photography is collaboratively authored at some level and “often a collective enterprise stretched over a considerable time period” (Batchen 2012). Collaboration is not limited to co-authorship at the moment of taking but in the making too. This can be seen in my project Coastal Blueprints through the use of archival research, involved development processes, collaboration with nature and use of remote publishers.
With their democratic, communal and participatory methodology, standing in opposition to the renaissance notions of the authorial and authorizing ‘I’, both Luvera’s and Ewald’s work in particular exhibits a richness precisely because of its multivocality and shared authorship.
Even the non-collaboration of the subjects in Garanger’s portraits was subverted by the photographer to enforce his stated personal and political desire to contest the French colonial enterprise in Algeria, by symbolizing the collision of Islamic and Western civilisations.
As Roland Barthes states: “every text is eternally written here and now” and that its “unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (1977: 145, 148). This suggests no work is truly finished and that there are other perspectives and relationships to be created in the future that the photographer might never have foreseen or desired.
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FIGURES
Fig. 1: Robert DAVIES. 2022. Coastal Blueprint, No. 1. Private Collection: Robert Davies.
Fig. 2: Robert DAVIES. 2022. Coastal Blueprint, No. 2. Private Collection: Robert Davies.
Fig.3: Timothy H. O’SULLIVAN & Alexander GARDNER. 1863. A Harvest Of Death, Gettysberg, Pennsylvania. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/285644 [accessed 21 October 2022].
Fig.4: Ibid
Fig.5: Ibid
Fig.6: Wendy EWALD & Allen SHEPHERD. 1976-81. I dreamt I killed my best friend. Available at: https:// wendyewald.com/portfolio/portraits-and-dreams. [accessed 12 October 2022].
Fig.7: Wendy EWALD & Carlos Andres VILLANUEVA. Ca. 1982-3. The Chickens Run Behind My Mother. Available at: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/the-chickensrun-behind-my-mother [accessed 19 October 2022].
Fig.8: Marc GARANGER. 1960. Femme algérienne. Available at: http://www.shirleymohr.com/JHU/Sample_ Articles_JHUP/MLN_2003_118_4.pdf [accessed 13 October 2022].
Fig.9: [Left] GYPSY / Anthony LUVERA. Ca. 2002. Assisted Self-Portrait of Gypsy; [Centre] Gary MCLOUGLIN / Anthony LUVERA Ca. 2002. Assisted Self-Portrait of Gary McLouglin; [Right] Charmian EDGE / Anthony LUVERA Ca. 2002. Assisted Self-Portrait of Charmian Edge. Available at: https://talking-pictures.net.au/2022/04/16/anthony-luverathe-art-of-assisted-self-portraits [accessed 2 December 2022].
Fig.10: Larry SULTAN and Mike MANDEL. 1977. Unititled Evidence. Available at: https://www.larrysultan.com/gallery/ evidence [accessed 13 October 2022].
Fig.11: Robert DAVIES. 2022. Fig.11: Davies 2022. Reconstruction of the old coastal road on the east coast of Singapore before reclamation. Private Collection: Robert Davies.
Fig.12: Robert DAVIES. 2022. Coastal Blueprint, No.3. Private Collection: Robert Davies.
Fig.13: Robert DAVIES. 2022. Coastal Blueprint, No.4. Private Collection: Robert Davies.
Fig.14: Robert DAVIES. 2022. Coastal Blueprint, No.5. Private Collection: Robert Davies.
Fig.15: Robert DAVIES. 2022. Coastal Blueprints ‘Zine’. Private Collection: Robert Davies.