ON COLLABORATION
From ‘Defensive Tactics Manual’ published by the Northamptonshire Police, 2011
RAKE was formed out of a desire to retain some connection within our dispersing MA group, the wish to build something bigger and more important than ourselves, and also a joke that got out of hand.
It can sometimes feel, or appear, like pure luck that the four of us work easily together without too much friction, having never collaborated together before. But reflecting on the work we’ve undertaken, and in which ways our dynamic has changed or stayed the same over the last year, has provided some insight. It’s both our similarities and differences that make RAKE’s collaboration work; a shared interest in research and investigation-driven projects, alongside a range of different knowledge, skills and ideas, has allowed us to keep the work going to new and exciting places.
The image of the lone genius, once epitomised as the individual intrepid (white, male) photographer, and sustained by the invisible action of countless fixers, drivers, translators, couriers, printers, editors and many others is now fading. Practitioners are recognising that all stages of creative practice - from the making, through critique and experimentation, to exhibition - is a process involving more than any one person. And more than that, that this process itself, whether visible or not, informs work at all stages.
Collaborative/ cooperative/ collective work is built on many different structures; occurring between individuals or groups of artists, between individuals across different disciplines or between an artist and their subject. A shift to socially engaged work, including participatory photography and community interaction, raises further questions of how and when to define collaborations. Many of these structures may also overlap with the existing daily minutia of an artist’s practice, and deciding whether these interactions gain the collaboration label is generally left up to whoever’s holding the pen.
If the lone genius never relied on fearless independence, but selfishness, claiming the support, influence and even work of others for themselves, then the collaborator needs selflessness to put the work and purpose of the collaboration above themselves. How we collaborate matters; how we answer the questions of ownership, authorship and representation that collaboration raises are integral pieces of the process, particularly when working with social or political subject matters. Without answers, collaboration for the sake of collaboration may easily become just a convenient mask for the lone photographer’s last admirers, obscuring whatever power structures remain in place.
RAKE’s collaborative work creates something separate from our individual practices and has allowed us each to relinquish ownership and control, while exploring new subjects and mediums we would not have previously explored in our individual practices. This framework similarly provides the opportunity to move past perfectionism, while leaving the space to openly question and critique the works, visualisations and representations we make. RAKE Community too is an attempt to create and facilitate new instances of this framework, balancing each individual’s skills, ideas, goals, egos and time.
Our collaboration is guided by a joint motivation to push the boundaries of photography and storytelling, to explore the interactions between the visible and invisible, and democratise research and investigation methods. And like investigation, like research, like a camera, or like photography itself, collaboration is a tool. One that we’re still learning to use and still learning about.
RAKE has provided us each a space to keep moving, not only while managing the de(com)pression after the end of an intense MA, but also during the barrage that was 2020. And ultimately, it’s just good to know that even if this shit-show of a government response (apply to your own government where necessary) continues trying to doom us all, at least we can still make some art with our friends... Cue The Beatles.