Having re-visited the Day Before Christmas, I decided to look again at the Flickr archives.
Towards the end of 2005, a group entitled ‘Manipulate This!’ was formed – it still exists though seems to have changed tack a bit.
Originally, the idea was to post an image, and let other’s manipulate it as they saw fit. Often several images would get combined.
In March 2006, I posted the picture of the picture of the Morris Minor, above.
Here are some of the results:
Oddsock
Gianita
Oddsock
Photoni
Oddsock
Mr Bultitude
Lamerie
Lamerie
Collaboration, creativity, participation, trust.
It was a fantastic group. It is also interesting to see how the original image was appropriated and manipulated.
In some, it was re-worked as new art but from the original perspective collaboration. In others, details of the car were changed, such as the numberplate.
Some images combined the car with one or more images that the group had previously worked with, making it a multi-collaborative (collective?) end result.
And in others, the Morris Minor was repositioned, into new contexts to tell new stories.
Daniel Palmer, in Photography and Collaboration (2017), reflected on notions of photographic ownership. He also allowed the influence of software, in the sense of image creation and processing, a never ending process. However, he missed, I think, the influence of social sharing platforms which facilitate the collaborative and collective production of imagery.
To note Ariella Azoulay (2010):
‘… a photograph is never merely a product of material in the hands of an individual creator. A photograph is the space of appearance in which an encounter has been recorded between human beings, an encounter neither concluded nor determined at the moment it was being photographed.’ (pg 252)
See my notes on Azoulay’s writing, here.
…………….
Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books.
Azoulay, Ariella. 2010. Getting Rid of the Distinction Between the Aesthetic and the Political. Theory, Culture & Society, 27 (7-8): 239-262.
Palmer, Daniel. 2017. Photography & Collaboration. London: Bloomsbury Academic.