Collaboration?

Week 3 asked us to consider forms of collaboration, how it influences our own practice, and to collaborate in a small group to produce a zine.

The zine collaboration asked us to form small groups and produce within 5 days a zine with a topic of our choosing. My group, formed after a colleague suggested a topic and the rest of us jumped on board, worked fairly quickly to put together images and turn them into a pdf of a zine. Due to time constraints for some members, the work could be better described a participatory rather than collaborative, as some involvement was mainly submitting images to be used.

The activity gave me a new enjoyment of zines, and I would like to explore this a bit more in my current project. It also reminded me that working in groups can be interesting and creatively stimulating. However, I think the short time frame meant true collaboration was harder to achieve. Better collaboration would involved a more structured approach to the workload, separating out various jobs and dividing them amongst the group. This would also allow for people to be in charge or the point-people for certain aspects, which can help conversations flow more productively rather than going in circles or becoming  bit ‘I don’t mind’.

The final zine we created is strong in terms fo its layout and style, and a number of the images. Given more time and with more images to chose from, we may have become stricter in editing in order to present a strong group of images.

In terms of forms of collaboration within my own work, I’ve done quite a bit as my project focus during the last module was entirely reliant on participation from members of the public. It asked people who live or have lived in London to choose a building or structure they feel strongly connected to and describe the connection. I then photographed the structures and combined them with the participants’ texts.

I decided to do this after being encouraged during our first module to branch out and collaborate more with others. Doing this helped my progression as it forced me to focus clearly on both what I’m interested in and asked me to develop an aesthetic that would tie the images together in a form of typography. It also forced me to open up more about the work I am doing and ask for participants through word of mouth and social networks.

Though I got a lot out of the project in terms of my own development, the work I produced was lacking in some way. In trying so hard to make the participants’ voices come through in the photographs, I lost my own voice somewhat. The images I included in my work in progress portfolio were lacking on as a certain level because I, the photographer, was missing from them. This is something I am now keen to address and focus on in the next stage of my research.

For more on this, see New Direction, New Work.

I realise that I will have to continue to collaborate as my research projects develop and I eventually head towards the Final Major Project. As Daniel Palmer suggests in the introduction to Photography and Collaboration, there are many stages to photography that open the way for collaboration.

The practice of photography conventionally involves at least four fundamental stages of which the act of seeing and recording an image is only the first. The other stages include the selection of the latent image through a process of editing, the translation of that negative (or digital file) into a finished print (or viewable image), and its circulation through physical or virtual display. Each of these stages can and often does involve other people. (Palmer 2017 p.5)

I have traditionally, in my practice, performed most of the roles in these stages myself, alone. However, I feel that collaborating more when it comes to areas like editing and deciding on prints will really help me to broaden my horizons and learn a lot more in the process. This is one of the reasons I chose to do an MA rather than do independent research on areas of interest, I felt it would force me out of my comfort zone and into more collaborative idea sharing. I believe it is working. I hope it continues to.

References

Palmer, D. (2017). Photography and collaboration. London: Bloomsbury.