Photography and Collaboration offers a fresh perspective on existing debates in art photography and on the act of photography in general. Unlike conventional accounts that celebrate individual photographers and their personal visions, this book investigates the idea that authorship in photography is often more complex and multiple than we imagine â involving not only various forms of partnership between photographers, but also an astonishing array of relationships with photographed subjects and viewers. Thematic chapters explore the increasing prevalence of collaborative approaches to photography among a broad range of international artists â from conceptual practices in the 1960s to the most recent digital manifestations. Positioning contemporary work in a broader historical and theoretical context, the book reveals that collaboration is an overlooked but essential dimension of the medium's development and potential.
Announcing the invention of the daguerreotype, in a speech to the French parliament in 1839, the noted astronomer and member of the French legislature François Arago famously praised its simplicity and proposed that it could be performed by anyone, since it âpresumes no knowledge of the art of drawing and demands no special dexterityâ ([1839] 1980: 19). Arago was establishing what has become a recurring idea in the discourse of photography, namely, that the medium is democratic and deskilled. Indeed, one of the factors that makes photography so interesting and problematic for the historian is that this quality is viewed as a virtue in some contexts and a problem in othersâdepending on the writerâs investment in the dominant ideas around authorship that are in play at any given moment. This chapter seeks to make a link between the various ideologies of photographic authorship that have historically sustained the medium and the devaluation of collaborative labor that I touched on in the introduction. For while photography historians and theorists have had until very recently almost nothing to say about collaboration, the issue of authorship has long been a central fixation. Bound up with the construction of the modern author more generallyâ and related anxieties around originality and intentionalityâit is difficult not to read this fixation as stemming from the idea that photography can be performed by anyone. Unease about photographyâs democratic promise has, particularly in the hands of art historians, been overcompensated for in the figure of the bloated author.
This book is concerned with collaboration in photographic art since the rise of conceptual art in the 1960s. However, to appreciate the significance of the practices I chart in the chapters that concern these past fifty years, it is necessary to contextualize them in relation to a longer history of ideas around authorship. Most particularly, we need to understand the emphasis, in the modernist art histories of photography that still dominate the way photography is understood, on the formal qualities of individual images taken by individual photographers. As a multitude of writers since the 1970s have demonstrated (Sontag [1977]; Sekula [1978]; Phillips [1982]; Tagg [1988]; Solomon-Godeau [1991]; Batchen [2000]), this emphasis has prevented a better understanding of how photographs circulate and operate in the world, and severely limited the type of photographs considered worthy of study. Less obviously, it has fuelled the powerful stereotype of the solitary photographer. One of the reasons is that photographers themselves, eager for their own activities to be viewed as art, have often contributed to the writing of those histories. Another reason is that major art museums such as New Yorkâs Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) have played an important role in reaffirming these histories, helping to fuel the emergence of a serious art market for photography in the 1970s (as I have already argued, the art market demands scarcity through limited and vintage editions, reinforcing the idea of the individual âvisionaryâ). In this chapter, I conceive of seven dominant ideologies of photographic authorship: nature, law, subjectivity, worker, medium, cultural codes and software. I approach these ideas historically and chronologically, although they overlap. Like all ideologies, they are often drawn upon unconsciously. My purpose is to give a broad sense of the competing ideas fuelling authorshipâparticularly for readers who may not be so familiar with the history of photographyâin order to better understand the conspicuously collaborative work I examine later in this book. I conclude with the productive account of authorship offered by the contemporary theorist Ariella Azoulay.
Inventors who wanted to celebrate the miraculous possibilities of nature spontaneously reproducing itself understandably downplayed human effort, or the workings of the human hand. Crucially, within this âfantasy of autogenesisâ (Edwards 2006: 42), it was precisely photographyâs apparently objective quality that made it such a powerful medium. Indeed, the âmechanical objectivityâ of the camera was recognized as valuable in the nineteenth century as part of an âinsistent drive to repress the wilful intervention of the artist-authorâ (Daston and Gailson 2007: 121). In all sorts of contexts outside of artâin science, criminology, industry, medicine, surveillance, and other instrumental usesâthe suppression of individual authorship continues to give photography its authority. In the nineteenth century, even dramatic landscape âviewsâ were often presented anonymously, such that âthe natural phenomenon, the point of interest, rises up to confront the viewer, seemingly without the mediation of an individual recorder or artistâ (Krauss 1982: 314).
By the same token, photographyâs mechanical nature, and the associated claim that it represented the objective manifestation of nature, prevented it from even being confused with fine art in the eyes of many influential nineteenth-century commentators. For the poet Charles Baudelaire, as for others who conceived of art as an expression of human imagination, photographyâs seemingly objective nature was found fundamentally lacking. Photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, both too technical and too easy to ever resemble fine art. Later, in the 1920s, the Surrealists and other avant-garde artists exploited photographyâs mechanical and automatic qualityâin, for example, the embrace of the photogram as a route to the unconscious. The photogram in fact continues to offer a profound metaphor for the complications of photographic authorship (Batchen 2000: 161). And yet, as Rosalind Krauss observes, the photogram âonly forces, or makes explicit, what is the case of all photographyâ (1977: 75), namely that it is âthe result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface.â All this is to come. In his salon review of 1859, Baudelaire memorably dismissed the new class of pseudo-artists flocking to the camera as âsun-worshippersâ ([1859] 1980: 87). But there was already a more generous way of thinking about the sunâs role. The nineteenth-century French poet and political minister Alphonse de Lamartine initially accused photography of plagiarizing nature by optics (quoted in Gernsheim 1962: 64). However, he later publicly changed his mindâdeclaring that photography âis better than an art, it is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sunâ (quoted in Gernsheim 1962: 65).
Law as author: The legal codification of authorship
Perhaps the most important ideology of authorship is that set down by law. As Jane M. Gaines puts it, âHow do we find the author in the photographic work in order to establish that he, rather than the machine, created the photograph itself?â (1991: 44). In France, copyright law had existed since the Revolution, with the landmark law on authorâs rights being enacted in 1793 (Nesbitt 1987: 230). But as the French legal scholar Bernard Edelman observes, âThe eruption of modern techniques of the (re)production of the realâphotographic apparatuses, camerasâsurprised the lawâ (quoted in Gaines 1991: 45). Edelman puts it in the following way: âFor French law, the crucial question was whether or not the mechanical product could be said to have anything of âManâ in it at all. An authored work (it was argued) is imbued with something of the human soul, but a machine-produced work is completely âsoullessââ (quoted in Gaines 1991: 46). Not surprisingly, given this test, photographers who wanted the legal protection offered by copyright law needed to prove somehow that their work was artistic. In other words, the relations of production demanded they set themselves up as artists, since âa soul had to be found in the mechanical actâ (Gaines 1991: 47). What was a machinic act involving the duplication of the world needed to become an original production in the form of intellectual property (Gaines 1991: 47).
Once thousands of people began to depend upon photography for a living, issues around the protection of copyright became paramount. The most famous copyright case pertaining to photography in the nineteenth century involved the preeminent New York studio photographer Napoleon Sarony and his cabinet photographs of the visiting Oscar Wilde taken in 1882. Wildeâs visit to New York was a spectacular success, so much so that his image was widely sought and copied. Sarony sued a printer, Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., for infringing his copyright by reproducing at least 85,000 unauthorized copies of the image (Gaines 1991: 52). The district court in New York in 1883 found the defendant guilty of piracy, but on appeal to the Supreme Court in 1884, Burrow-Giles argued that photographs were ineligible for copyright protection (granted by an 1865 amendment that had specifically added photographs to the list of copyrightable forms) because the Constitution only protected authorsâ writings, while the photograph is a âmere mechanical reproductionâ (Gaines 1991: 55). For his part, Sarony argued, among other factors, that the draperies, light and shade, Wildeâs expression, and above all his pose belonged to an âoriginal mental conceptionâ (Gaines 1991: 54). Indeed, Sarony dissociated himself from the mechanical apparatusâreferring to how he deftly relayed his ideas to the camera operator (Gaines 1991: 72). The court agreed with Sarony that his portrait of Wilde was âan original work of art, the product of plaintiffâs intellectual invention, of which plaintiff is the author, and of a class of inventions for which the Constitution intended that Congress should secure to him the exclusive right to use, publish and sellâ (Tuchman 2004). An author, according to the court ruling, is simply the one âto whom anything owes its originâ (Tuchman 2004). As Gaines (1991: 51) points out, âoriginality is elaborated as a defense of Saronyâs photographic artistry,â but the test of originality is a paradoxical one, rooted in both the Lockean philosophy that âman is the origin of propertyâ (58) and the romantic individualized notion of authorial creation, rather than in the work itself.1 In this model, the rights of the photographed subject over their image are limited to an original contract (there is no evidence that Wilde knew of the court case). In short, in the photographerâs âchoiceâ of subject and style of framing, âwe have the human investment of labour . . . the private property-producing gestureâ (Gaines 1991: 68). This legal codification of photography remains highly relevant to authorship today, as we will see in relation to Richard Princeâs work (Chapter 5).
Subjectivity as author: Pictorialist and modernist sensibilities
In significant respects, the history of photography has been one of applying traditional art-historical categories such as originality and style to the medium, in the face of claims that photography lacks artistic intentionality due to its mechanical nature. As we have already established, photographyâs ease has always been a challenge to its status as art. If so many untrained people can take photographs, how can it be as exclusive as art? The nineteenth century is punctuated by the emergent notion of the artist-photographer, based around subjective response. In France, the landscape photographer Gustave Le Grayâwho studied painting in the studio of Paul Delaroche (the painter who apocryphally claimed, upon first seeing a Daguerreotype, that âfrom today painting is deadâ)âwrote in 1852 that âit is my deepest wish that photography, instead of falling within the domain of industry, of commerce, will be included among the arts. That is its sole, true place, and it is in that direction that I shall always endeavor to guide itâ (Naef 2004: 32). In attempting to establish photography as an art formâmany would-be artist-photographers argued for an analogy between painting and photography.
The English photographer Henry Peach Robinson is arguably the most emblematic nineteenth-century art-photographer. Robinson was influencedâlike Julia Margaret Cameron, who could equally claim this titleâby the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and started with sketches for his pictures, working out elaborate and highly detailed scenes (Figure 1.2). When the Dayâs Work Is Done (1877), like his most famous work, Fading Away (1858), involved the use of models and the seamless combination of multiple separate negatives to...