A new, revolutionary history of photography from a stellar team of writers and thinkers that challenges all existing narratives by focusing on the complex collaborations between photographer and subject. Led by five of the great thinkers and practitioners in photography, and including texts by over 100 writers, critics and academics, this groundbreaking publication presents a potential history of photography explored through the lens of collaboration, challenging the dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship. With more than 1,000 photographs, it breaks apart photography’s ‘single creator’ tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration – the various relationships, exchanges and interactions that occur between all participants in the making of any photograph. This collaboration takes different forms, including coercion and cooperation, friendship and exploitation, and expresses shared interests as well as competition, rivalry or antagonistic partnership. The conditions of collaboration are explored through 100 photography ‘projects’, divided into eight thematic chapters including ‘The Photographed Subject’, ‘The Author’ and ‘Potentializing Violence’. The result of years of research, Collaboration addresses key issues of gender, race and societal hierarchies and divisions and their role in forging identity and conformity. The photographs from each project are presented non-hierarchically alongside quotes, testimonies, and short texts by guest contributors. These networks of texts and images offer perspectives on a vast array of photographic themes, from Araki’s portraits of women to archival files from the Spanish Civil War. Each chapter is introduced by the editors, who provide the keys to understanding and decoding the complex politics of seeing.

In Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare , Leigh Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Raiford analyzes why activists chose photography over other media, explores the doubts some individuals had about the strategies, and shows how photography became an increasingly effective, if complex, tool in representing black political interests. Offering readings of the use of photography in the antilynching movement, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement, Raiford focuses on key transformations in technology, society, and politics to understand the evolution of photography's deployment in capturing white oppression, black resistance, and African American life. By putting photography at the center of the long African American freedom struggle, Raiford also explores how the recirculation of these indelible images in political campaigns and art exhibits both adds to and complicates our memory of the events. |Over the past one hundred years, Raiford argues, activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary about black lives. Offering readings of the use of photography in the antilynching movement, the civil rights movement, and the black power movement, Raiford focuses on key transformations in technology, society, and politics to understand the evolution of photography's deployment in capturing white oppression, black resistance, and African American life.

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media-from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels-has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.

The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and 1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over the movement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past two decades. How the civil rights movement is currently being remembered in American politics and culture - and why it matters - is the common theme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection. Memories of the movement are being created and maintained - in ways and for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive - through memorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even street names. At least fifteen civil rights movement museums have opened since 1990; ""Mississippi Burning"", ""Four Little Girls"", and ""The Long Walk Home"" only begin to suggest the range of film and television dramatizations of pivotal events; corporations increasingly employ movement images to sell fast food, telephones, and more; and groups from Christian conservatives to gay rights activists have claimed the civil rights mantle. Contests over the movement's meaning are a crucial part of the continuing fight against racism and inequality. These writings look at how civil rights memories become established as fact through museum exhibits, street naming, and courtroom decisions; how our visual culture transmits the memory of the movement; how certain aspects of the movement have come to be ignored in its 'official' narrative; and how other political struggles have appropriated the memory of the movement. Here is a book for anyone interested in how we collectively recall, claim, understand, and represent the past.