Collaboration presents a groundbreaking and multifaceted history of photography which explores photography through the lens of collaboration, challenging the dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship. In a vast, collaborative effort led by five of the great thinkers and practitioners in photography that includes more than 550 photographs and over 80 text contributors, this book breaks apart photography's 'single creator' tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration - the various relationships, exchanges and interactions which occur between all participants in the event of photography.

This book will provide the keys to understanding and decoding the complex politics of seeing. The conditions of collaboration in photography are explored through over 100 photography projects, divided into eight thematic chapters. The photographs from each project are presented non-hierarchically alongside quotes, testimonies, and short texts by guest contributors. These networks of texts and images provide perspective on a vast array of photographic themes, from Araki's provocative portraits of women to archival files from the Spanish Civil War.

Collaboration is not an ultimate account of what photography is, does, or means. Rather, the book is an inspiration for teaching and an open invitation to scholars, activists, photographers and others to practice always with and alongside others and participate actively in this engagement and enquiry.

Contents:
Cluster one – The Photographed was always there
Cluster two – Reshaping the Authorial Person
Cluster three - Iconozation is preceded by Collaboration
Cluster four - Potentializing Violence
Cluster five - When a Community is at Stake
Cluster six - Photography preserves sovereigh history as incomplete
Cluster seven - Co-archiving
Cluster eight - Sovereign and civil power of the apparatus

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Wendy Ewald is a photographer who has long collaborated on art projects throughout the world.

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and member of the cooperative Magnum Photos.

Leigh Raiford is professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Laura Wexler is a professor of American Studies, Film & Media Studies and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University.