Collaborative Portraiture

Collaborative portraiture is a way of making photographic portraits in which the person depicted shares decisions usually reserved for the photographer, such as pose, setting, role, the selection of images and the words that accompany them. It turns the negotiation present in every portrait from a hidden condition into an explicit method. Commercial studio portraiture long relied on such exchanges, with paying sitters choosing clothing, props and roles, even as nineteenth-century manuals instructed photographers to keep sitters under firm direction. As a deliberate strategy, the approach took shape in the 1970s, when photographers began to question the outsider's authority over the people they depicted. Jim Goldberg asked the subjects of Rich and Poor (1977–1985) to write by hand on their own prints, so that each portrait carries the sitter's response to how they had been seen.

Collaboration can enter at any stage of a portrait's making. Before exposure, sitters may propose locations, clothing, gestures or scenarios, or take up roles the photographer suggests and reshape them in performance. Photographer and subject may also appear together in the frame, so that the image records their relationship as well as a likeness. After exposure, sitters may help edit contact sheets, choose which images circulate, or add captions. Such projects often unfold over years with family members, partners or a small circle of people rather than in single sessions. LaToya Ruby Frazier made The Notion of Family (2001–2014) with her mother and grandmother, whom she taught to photograph, and many of its black-and-white images show the women side by side, their figures merging in the frame.

Debates around the practice concern authorship, credit and the limits of shared control. Ariella Azoulay's The Civil Contract of Photography (2008) treats every photograph as an encounter among photographer, photographed person and spectator, none of whom can fix its meaning alone. The term overlaps with Participatory Photography, but the two divide the process differently. Participatory projects transfer a stage of image-making to participants, so that the photographer designs a framework, such as a self-portrait booth, a camera given out or a sign to fill in, and then steps back while participants act on their own. In collaborative portraiture the sitter shapes the image together with the photographer. Unlike the Directorial Mode, in which the photographer alone stages the scene, it divides that staging between both sides of the camera.