Guest curated by Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler, along with Kristin Taylor, MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections

This exhibition will feature works in the MoCP permanent collection that are included in the recent and groundbreaking publication titled Collaboration: a potential history of photography. The book was created by a group of artists, art historians, activists, and scholars—Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler—and published by Thames and Hudson in 2024. It is an extension of a project that these five authors have collaborated on for over ten years, in which they reassess a range of photographs and projects that portray stories of humanity and social movements to decenter the photographer as the only author of the image, and to emphasize the act of photographing as an inherently collaborative process in which many parties are involved.

By sharing both artists’ statements and excerpts from interviews with people depicted in photographs, they question whether memories align: Did both sides remember the moment in the same way? How did the photographed feel about the photograph’s life after it circulated through art markets, print media, and online? And what role might the photograph have played in perpetuating harmful or liberatory narratives about specific histories, places, or individuals?

The works—both historical and contemporary—are presented in clusters focused on topics, to highlight and propose questions about photographed moments of coercion, friendship, exploitation, community, and violence. The exhibition will also feature a reflection space for the audience engagement, as part of the project’s ongoing effort to consider the history of photography as a living and evolving entity that is unfixed and expanding as we learn more about the people, communities, and histories that images depict.