Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Figure 1. Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, and Susan Meiselas,

in association with graduate students in the Modern Culture
and Media Department at Brown University and the Rhode
Island School of Design, Collaboration: Revisiting the History of
Photography, 2013. Installation at Aperture Foundation, New
York. Courtesy of the artists. Photo by Nathan Lee, New York

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

I N P R A C T I C E

Photography Consists of
Collaboration: Susan Meiselas,
Wendy Ewald, and Ariella Azoulay

Ariella Azoulay

Photography is usually practiced in the presence and with the

assistance of several individuals, but its history and theory have
been written as the story of single heroes — the photographers — 
and the technology and instruments they use. For decades, the
common figure of the photographer was identified as a male fig-
ure roaming around the world and pointing his camera at objects,
places, people, and events, as if the world was made for him. And
when he is done with his camera, he can vanish from people’s
worlds in the same way that he appeared in them: at once. It is not
a coincidence then that Susan Meiselas and Wendy Ewald — t wo
female photographers whose contributions to the contempo-
rary redefinition of the figure of the photographer cannot be
underestimated — have especially helped us to understand the
many dimensions of the photographer’s complex relationship
with others participating in the event and act of photography.
As young photographers in the mid-­seventies, long before
they met, Meiselas and Ewald had started to question the position

Camera Obscura 91, Volume 31, Number 1

doi 10.1215/02705346-3454496 © 2016 by Camera Obscura
Published by Duke University Press

187

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

188  •  Camera Obscura

of the photographer in their work, and they each invented explicit

collaborative methods through their work with others. They were
not the first to engage in collaborations, but they were certainly
decisive in foregrounding the collaborative dimension of their pho-
tographic work and making it an explicit topic. Part of this involved
identifying similar interests, gestures, and procedures among their
peers and predecessors. When Meiselas and Ewald approached me
to collaborate with them on a book and exhibition project dedi-
cated to the question of collaboration, our conversations evolved
at the intersections of their interest in photographers deliberately
engaged in collaborative practices (and in projects that they val-
ued for featuring collaboration in a distinctive way) and my inter-
est in the unavoidable collaborative dimension of photographic
practice, regardless of the photographer’s intention or success in
engaging with others in a just or hospitable manner. For collabo-
ration becomes a weapon in the hands of an oppressive political
regime, since it is transformed from an assumption — about the fact
that people necessarily act on other actions and interact with one
another — into a choice to act or not act with others, as if one could
withdraw completely from the realm of human affairs.
Thus, instead of studying collaboration as a particular type
of photographic practice, we assumed its existence and started to
study the different forms of being together that are practiced by
different people under different circumstances. We studied col-
laboration in relation to other forms of being together, such as vio-
lence, contractual interactions, and participation. We also exam-
ined its distinct manifestations: as more or less friendly; idyllic,
antagonistic, or agonistic; hostile, liberating, or oppressive; gen-
erating knowledge or disseminating ignorance; empowering or
intimidating; involving assistance and solidarity as much as abuse.
Collaboration, in the expanded sense in which we use it here, is
therefore the negative form of collectivity — it describes a mode of
working together without implying a collective or aiming to form
a collective. With this in mind, over the past five years we have met
for a few days every couple of months to discuss different photo-
graphic projects; to study and juxtapose these projects in order to

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Photography Consists of Collaboration  • 189

account for similarities and differences, modalities and aspirations;

and to reconstruct the particular mode of collaboration involved
in their production. The repertoire we assembled was constantly
challenged by additional case studies that each of us introduced
from her own world.
The growing literature and catalogs on photographic col-
laboration, participation, and collectivity, which are part of the
proliferation of artistic projects that assert collaboration as their
goal, are still mainly focused on photographers who initiate col-
laborative projects. Our repertoire includes many such projects,
but we put them side by side with projects in which, for example,
the relationships between the different protagonists are less clear,
the intentions behind the acts of photography are less favorable
for the photographed person, or the motivation to initiate cer-
tain projects is troubling or even coercive. Our work is based on
the assumption that collaboration always already lies at the basis
of the event of photography. Collaboration is the photographic
event’s degree zero, as photography always involves an encounter
between several protagonists in which the photographer cannot a
priori claim a monopoly over knowledge, authorship, ownership,
and rights. With this in mind, we gleaned our projects from differ-
ent sources, including police archives, documentation of political
movements like the suffragist movement, communal activism, art
projects, and so on.
Meiselas’s and Ewald’s paths first crossed in the mid-­1970s
when they collaborated on a project involving the use of Polaroid
instant cameras with self-­developing film in educational contexts.
The Polaroid camera, one may argue, epitomized their search at
the time for a common ground and a basis for partnership with
those they were photographing, because all the participants in the
event of photography were waiting together for the Polaroid camera
to send forth — to vomit, so to speak — the visual outcome of their
encounter. In a sense, at this moment the participants all shared
the positions of both spectator and potentially photographed per-
son, learning from each other how to see as well as how to pose
in front of a camera. Meiselas’s book Learn to See, to which Ewald

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

190  •  Camera Obscura

contributed, includes numerous photographic projects that were

produced in collaboration with students and experimented with
these options.1 For the young photographers, the commercialized
instant technology opened for them different modes of interaction
with others; Polaroid cameras thus offered a valuable means of col-
laboration. Yet at the same time — and without Meiselas and Ewald
being aware of it — the same camera company was engaged in the
mass production of mug shots used in the identity papers for the
black population in South Africa. The Polaroid workers’ strike in
the US in response to the implication of Polaroid in the apartheid
regime, as well as a series of other projects in which collaboration is
practiced against participants, encouraged us to think about other
moments of duality when sovereign and civil uses of the photo-
graphic apparatus coincide. In their own practices, both Meise-
las and Ewald were constantly aware that the camera is not a tool
whose control and operation can be taken for granted. Acknowl-
edging the power that one gains when holding a camera in front
of others or behind their backs, directing it at others or away from
them, Meiselas and Ewald never ceased to explore ways of sharing
it differently with others.
For Ewald, this learning process has become a whole
project — in fact, her life’s project. In many of her ventures, she
teaches photographic literacy while learning what photography
can be from those she teaches. At the core of this project is an
attempt to use the camera, the act and the event of photography,
and the relations that they create in order to teach people to reposi-
tion themselves in relation to others in their community; to appre-
ciate the value of one’s own experiences, culture, and dreams; and
to recognize the value of sharing these things with others through
photography. In her collaborative work around the globe (in Lab-
rador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mex-
ico, Palestine, and the US), which she has coproduced alongside
children, women, and whole families with whom she spent long
periods of time, Ewald has shown that photography is not about
the world, nor does it function outside of the world’s constraints,
but rather it is part of the world. In other words, photographs teach

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Photography Consists of Collaboration  • 191

Figure 2. Wendy Ewald, Harshad, Hasmukh, Chandrakant,

and Dasrath, 1992. B/w photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
© Wendy Ewald

us not merely about the world represented in them but also, and
often primarily, about the ways in which photography is practiced
and shared with others and about the complex web of relations that
are sustained by photographic practice.
As both Meiselas and Ewald have shown in their work, col-
laboration in photography cannot be limited to the question of
how to engage others in the event of photography but must also ask
how the photographer herself engages with the act of photography.
In Kurdistan, a monumental archive of an endangered community,
and in Encounters with the Dani, an exploration of a documented his-
tory of contacts with people who were exposed to imperial explora-
tion, Meiselas questions the conditions of possibility for her prac-

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

192  •  Camera Obscura

tice as a photographer.2 Instead of producing more photographs

from the preestablished position of the photographer acting in
places marked by imperialism and taking photos of communities
that bear its violent legacy, she researched and assembled existing
photographs and created archives not of presumably already sub-
jugated indigenous people but of the encounters through which
they were constituted as such. In these two books, Meiselas offers
visual reconstructions of imperialism’s history as a way of making
this history critically available to people who were compelled to col-
laborate with it and who now, with and through the photographs,
can negotiate with their past. Through these photographic reper-
toires and the unique archives they constitute, a variety of modes
of positioning and repositioning oneself in relation to imperial
gestures is available. Kurdistan  is composed of photos from various
sources, including colonial archives, which are viewed, studied, and
interpreted by members of the community so as to produce their
own counterhistory. Since her early projects (Carnival Strippers  and
Nicaragua), Meiselas has insisted that the communities where these

Figure 3. Susan Meiselas, Assistant Laura Hubber with

translator As’ad Gozeh developing and processing Polaroid film,
Sulaymaniyah, Northern Iraq, 1993. B/w photograph.
Courtesy of the artist. © Susan Meiselas

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Photography Consists of Collaboration  • 193

projects were created would be the first context for their display.3
She was not simply trying to honor the communities; she wanted
to show that photography is made up of the practices of looking at
photographs and archiving them as much as the act of taking pho-
tos, and that engaging in these practices with and in the presence
of the photographed persons makes a great difference.
In 2013, Ewald, Meiselas, and I were ready to share with the
public a first draft of our research, which was organized in clusters,
with each cluster focusing on a different mode of collaboration. In
order to be able to work on this project full-­time, I decided to teach
a seminar on photography and collaboration. This was a challeng-
ing endeavor since our work so far was more like that of a private
laboratory where we experimented with our speculations and stud-
ies. I had to present to the class the repertoire we assembled and
defend it as both a plausible narrative of the history of photography
and a possible way to theorize it. As part of the seminar, we invited
the students to search for additional moments of photographic col-
laboration, and their research enriched our repertoire with eight
additional projects that represented their interests.4 The projects
that they introduced were not only fascinating but also demon-
strated that the model we created for revisiting the history of pho-
tography was operational in a doubly collaborative sense: appar-
ent both in the photographic archive and in our very methods of
accessing and interacting with materials assembled in this archive.
In other words, they confirmed that additional projects, originat-
ing in different contexts and addressing different problematics,
did not refute the assumptions we had made regarding the history
and theory of photography but rather enhanced and embodied
them, making it clear that collaboration is a sine qua non of the
photographic encounter.
Ultimately, our repertoire included almost one hundred
projects. In our presentation of the different projects, we sought to
include photographs in which traces of collaboration were visible
as well as first-­person quotations from the different participants
in the photographic encounter. We developed generic categories
to sort our clusters — such as “the intimate face-­to-­face encounter

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

194  •  Camera Obscura

between photographer and photographed person,” “collabora-

tions recognized over time,” or “collaboration as the production
of alternative and common histories” — but the final delineation of
each cluster was decided closer to the time of the repertoire’s dis-
play (first exhibited at the Aperture Foundation in New York City
and later at the Granoff Center at Brown University in Providence,
Rhode Island).5 I wrote a short introduction to each cluster, and
even though each of these introductory blurbs was no longer than
one paragraph, I rewrote them dozens of times until I was able to
find the right language to account for the actions initiated by one
of the protagonists as well as the way they simultaneously involved
interactions with others. For example, in the cluster in which we
included projects that articulated sovereign uses of photography,
I refrained from foreclosing in advance that this sovereign power
could possibly be reversed at any moment through the participa-
tion of the many. In other words, I aimed to show that such sover-
eign uses should not be acknowledged as given and should be jux-
taposed with and challenged by the civil potential of photography.
The eight clusters that we devised are as follows:

1. The photographed person was always there.

Despite the fact that multiple individuals are involved in the prac-
tice of photography, its history and theory have been written as
the story of single heroes. Looking at these series of photographs,
one can see that this multiplicity is not merely a theoretical
assumption but a reality that can hardly be denied once the pres-
ence of the photographed person is acknowledged. The modes
of their participation in the act and event of photography are as
varied as the photographers’ practice.

2. Iconization is preceded by collaboration;

collaboration is potentially iconoclastic.
A certain degree of iconization is implied in the very act of
designation — “this is X” — so therefore photographs are always

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Photography Consists of Collaboration  • 195

susceptible to being reduced to a delineated, nameable object.

When the photograph stands for what it allegedly designates, one
can assume that a certain degree of violence or control has been
involved in reproducing its iconicity. When the photographed
person resists this iconicity and appears as a claimant who is nego-
tiating her transformation into an icon, an iconoclastic process
has already begun.

3. The sovereign and civil potential of the apparatus

The traditional history of the invention of photography focuses
on a series of tools and procedures and their male inventors,
while ignoring the community in which photography took shape.
Photography cannot be reduced to a camera as an instrument in
the hands of a single person; it is rather an apparatus that involves
a more or less contingent group of participants (photographed
persons, distributors, curators, etc.) as well as the state and the
market. Photography can be used to wield power, but it can also
be used to restrain power and to imagine, sometimes even to
create, new forms of sharing the world.

4. The photographer seeks to reshape the traditional authorial

position through the photographed person’s collaboration.
Some photographers have explicitly used collaborative methods
and acknowledged them as such. By inventing collaborative strat-
egies, platforms, and modes of engagement, they have enabled
new types of relationships among participants in the event of
photography and, in doing so, have created a variety of aesthetic
forms. Thus, capturing an image — t he mythological decisive
moment — has emerged as only one aspect of photography, which
should be considered alongside other procedures such as shar-
ing the camera; collecting photographs; sorting, sharing, show-
ing, viewing, and archiving them; as well as writing on them and
through them.

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

196  •  Camera Obscura

5. Potentializing violence
Since its invention, photography has been used to police and
persecute people, oppress and shame them, and violate their
rights. Although the cameras used in such situations have been
operated by the oppressors or by their proxies, they have often
betrayed their operators’ intentions and recorded enough of
these violent situations so that they can be recognized and
potentialized. A violent past cannot be forgotten, but its memory
can be transformed into a way of imagining different forms of
life. The spectators’ participation is necessary for releasing those
situations from the power relations imposed on them and for
allowing a belated alliance with the oppressed, whose resistance
or repugnance and harm or injury could not be voiced when the
photograph was taken.

6. When a community is at stake

Sometimes photography is involved in the coming together of
a community that warrants change, restitution, or justice. The
use of cameras, the production of images, and the constitution
of archives are sometimes necessary for sharing experiences;
articulating claims for change; describing abuses, violations,
and injustices; revealing marginality; performing power; and
empowering groups and individuals.

7. Photography makes sovereign history incomplete.

Photography is often used — when photographs are taken as well
as when they are shared — to undermine sovereign regimes as pre-
sumed facts, as given. Sovereign power announces and imposes
a new beginning, and, while doing so, it makes this beginning
incompatible with a past that, we are told, from now on should be
forgotten and renounced. The new beginning makes past experi-
ence and claims for reparation and compensation politically obso-
lete and helps institute sovereignty as a fait accompli. Yet photog-

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Photography Consists of Collaboration  • 197

raphy can be used to restore past and present dreams and models
for potentially different forms of being together.

8. Coarchiving
Photographic archives undermine the top-­down and exclusivist
logic that has characterized official archives from the beginning.
Wherever cameras are present, a piece of history is recorded and
potentially archived, allowing communities to invent and materi-
alize their self-­image, to valorize their ways of life, or to make pres-
ent that which classified documents mean to hide. The persona
of the archivist, traditionally identified with the guardian of the
law or its delegate, is replaced by a community that performs its
right to the archive. This right becomes an essential feature of the
archive.

In the display of the first draft of this project, we taped the pho-
tographs and descriptions of the clusters to the walls as if they
composed a large modular desktop. We wanted the different
photographic projects to be introduced as quotations in a larger
visual essay that was processed in a laboratory context, now open
to public scrutiny, exploration, and intervention. We sought to
reconstruct the material, practical, and political conditions of col-
laboration through photography, and of photography through
collaboration. We were guided by the assumption that if collabo-
ration is inherent to photography, we should be able to find ways
to foreground — and to create — the tension between the collab-
orative process and the photographic product (which does not
necessarily bear visible traces of this process) by reconstructing
the participation of others, usually the more silent participants.
We tried to do this through the presentation of a large repertoire
of types of collaborations: those that take place at the moment
when a photograph is taken and others that are understood as
collaborations only later, when a photograph is reproduced and
disseminated, juxtaposed to another, read by others, investigated,

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

198  •  Camera Obscura

explored, preserved, and accumulated in an archive to create a

new database.
Reviewing this spectrum of collaboration, we are ready to
move on to the next phase of this ongoing collaborative curatorial
research and to invite people in other geographical and political
contexts to engage in this project, continuing and expanding its
manifold forms of collaboration. The idea is to create an experi-
mental box containing the repertoire of ninety projects — each laid
out in a 35 × 35 cm square that we have already processed — along
with an additional nine empty squares. The venues that will par-
ticipate in the project will collectively work with the nine empty
squares to add, modify, or intervene in the growing repertoire. The
box will enhance the modularity of the project and the possibility
of generating new meanings through the collaborative process of
installing and discussing this material. In this way, we hope, we
can extend the ideas that photography is not a record but a site of
action, and that revisiting its history is not sealing it off but open-
ing it up for others to engage with its findings and pursue them
further.

Notes

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and has been a

member of Magnum Photos since 1976. She is the author of three
books: Carnival Strippers (1976); with Claire Rosenberg, Nicaragua,
June 1978 – July 1979 (1981); and Pandora’s Box (2001). She is the
editor of five collections: Learn to See (1975); El Salvador: Work of
Thirty Photographers (1983); Chile from Within (1990); Encounters with
the Dani: Stories from the Baliem Valley (2003); and Kurdistan: In the
Shadow of History (1997). In 1998, Meiselas created the seminal website
akaKURDISTAN.com, an online archive of collective memory and
cultural exchange. Meiselas is well known for her documentation
of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are
included in US and international collections. In 1992 she was made a
MacArthur Fellow.

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Photography Consists of Collaboration  • 199

Wendy Ewald has for over forty years collaborated on international

photography projects with children, families, women, and teachers
throughout the world. She has received many honors, including a
MacArthur Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Fulbright
Commission. In 2012, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
for Portraits and Dreams Revisited, and her work has been featured
in several solo exhibitions. She has published eleven books; her
most recent book, This Is Where I Live (2015), is a collaboration with
fourteen communities in Israel/Palestine. She currently teaches
at Amherst College and is an artist in residence at the Center for
International Studies at Duke University.

1. Susan Meiselas, ed., Learn to See (Cambridge, MA: Polaroid

Foundation, 1975).

2. Susan Meiselas, ed., Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (New York:

Random House, 1997); Susan Meiselas, ed., Encounters with the
Dani: Stories from the Baliem Valley (New York: International Center
of Photography, 2003).

3. Susan Meiselas, Carnival Strippers (New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 1976); Susan Meiselas and Claire Rosenberg, Nicaragua,
June 1978 – July 1979 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

4. The seminar participants included Nathan Lee, Drew Ludwig,

Nupur Mathur, Rijuta Mehta, Francisco Monar, Tyler Theus,
and Sarah Yahm, graduate students in the Modern Culture and
Media Department at Brown University and at the Rhode Island
School of Design.

5. Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, and Susan Meiselas, Collaboration:

Revisiting the History of Photography, Aperture Gallery, New York,
7 December 2013.

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

200  •  Camera Obscura

Ariella Azoulay is a professor of modern culture and media and

comparative literature at Brown University. Her recent books include
From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State
Formation, 1947 – 1950 (2011), Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of
Photography (2012), and The Civil Contract of Photography (2008). She
has served as the curator of Potential History (2012, STUK, Leuven,
Belgium), Untaken Photographs (2010, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana;
Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Architecture of Destruction (2008, Zochrot, Tel Aviv),
and Everything Could Be Seen (2004, Umm el-­Fahem Gallery of Art,
Umm el-­Fahem, Israel/Palestine). She is also the director of several
documentary films, which include Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47 – 48
(2012) and I Also Dwell among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi
Bishara (2004).

Published by Duke University Press

 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies

Photography Consists of Collaboration  • 201

Figure 4. Wendy Ewald working with a student, Margate,

England, 2005. B/w photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Photo by Pete Mauney, Margate, England

Published by Duke University Press