This is something that really resonates with me as I consider my former practice.
I have to question my role in photography as a white male. What contribution, if any, can I bring? This is fundamental to why collaboration is a vital to photography.
I decided to look at the guest lecture of Clementine Schniederman. I really liked her work as it resonated with my research project ideas on community. She also discussed a way of collaborating with the community by sharing the project in the form of a small magazine distributed in the local paper. This is something I might consider to do at the end of my Carnival series.
Collaboration Mini Project: Adapted Environments
This week, we are being asked to collaborate with our peers on a mini project that we set ourselves. On the forum, I decided to post an image that I shot a few years ago in Canada (Fig. 3), together with some ideas from Geoff Dyer’s book ‘The Ongoing Moment’§ And his discussion about ‘Cultural Signifiers’ and how objects such as hats can inform us of the subject and the context of the image, even when you can’t see that subject completely.
Collaboration
After a brief discussion on the forum, I have teamed up with Ross, and Andy as we had a lot of similar ideas regarding how we could approach this mini project. In particular, Ross discussed the notion of ‘Desire Paths’ and from that we decided to look at how the environment could be adapted in our local areas.
First Shoot 15/10
I headed to out with the intention of capturing adapted environments local to me. I came across some shopping trolleys that were no where near their original intended use and had been used to transport objects away from them. I liked the idea of this being an adaptation of the environment in the sense that the person who moved the trolley potentially needed to transport something that they were unable to do by hand.
2nd Webinar 16/10
Once we had all taken our initial shots, we go together to discuss the project during another conference. We all had overlapping themes even though we were shooting in isolation, which worked quite well for the final edit and sequencing of the work.
We decided to put the images together as a PDF and write a short introduction to the work.
- *Azoulay, A. (2016). Photography Consists of Collaboration: Susan Meiselas, Wendy Ewald, and Ariella Azoulay, 31(1 91), pp.187 – 207.
- †Schneidermann, C. (2018). Falmouth Flexible guest lecture.
- ‡Hill, P. (2015). Man wearing Cowboy Hat waiting to cross the road. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. [Photograph] Online: https://www.philhillphotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/CNV00006.jpg (Links to an external site.)
- §Dyer, G. (2007). The ongoing moment. London: Abacus.