La photo, une histoire de collaboration(s)

Challenging the dominant narratives about the history and authorship of photography, this book encourages us to consider photography from the angle of the collaboration between the photographer and the photographed.

Led by five leading photographic theorists and practitioners, and including over a thousand photographs and contributions from 120 authors, this vast collective project breaks with the traditional idea of the ‘sole creator’ and highlights the various relationships, exchanges and interactions that occur between all the participants in the making of a photograph, whether they are recognised and consenting or not.

The conditions of this collaboration are explored through 120 photographic projects divided into eight thematic chapters that provide the keys to understanding and decoding the complex politics of the gaze. The fruit of several years’ research, this alternative history of photography tackles the key questions of gender and origins, as well as hierarchies and societal divisions and their role in the construction of identity and conformity to a group.

Summary :

1 – The person photographed has always been there

2 – Reconsidering the author’s position

3 – When collaboration precedes iconisation

4 – The potential of violence

5 – The community at stake

6 – Photography, the archive of an incomplete history

7 – The collective production of archives

8 – The photographic device, between repression and protest