by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford and Laura Wexler
288 pages, hardcover, $85
Published by Thames and Hudson USA
thamesandhudsonusa.com

In simple terms, collaboration is the act of making something together. But in the extensive world of photography, multiple combinations of factors can contribute to the creation of images. Five great proponents and theorists of photography have tackled this broad thesis in Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, examining what is achieved when disparate elements combine forces to create something new. To define these relationships, the authors employ eight “clusters” in an approach that organizes this premise’s major themes and applies an almost encyclopedic platform to achieve a cohesive overview.

The output of such disparate artists such as Joel Sternfeld and Taryn Simon—who drilled into the societal ramifications of public violence or wrongfully accused citizens—are paired in a cluster titled “Photography Preserves Sovereign History As Incomplete” with the project Border Film Project: Migrants and Minutemen, an intertwining of cultures where two groups on different sides of the border were given disposable cameras to document their viewpoints of an ongoing crisis. In another unique pairing, the radically different photographs of Georgia O’Keefe by Alfred Stieglitz and Irving Penn are shown to be effective collaborations from another side of photography, where carefully selected examples are put in play to support the narrative.

Through this ambitiously elegant, logically designed volume, what comes through most clearly is that, as respected curator and writer David Campany states, “the viewer is a third collaborator, witting or unwitting. It is the viewer who makes the interpretation and shapes the meaning and is in turn affected.” —Max Hirshfeld