In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasised the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.īy practising what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Leopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. Collaboration reconstructs the infrastructure of photography as a collaborative practice and offers a pedagogical tool for practitioners and scholars of photography.In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aisha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Īzoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. The editors introduce each cluster of projects by providing a framework to understand and decode the complex politics, temporalities, and potentialities of photography. The photographs are presented alongside quotes, testimonies, and short texts offering perspectives on the array of themes, geographies, contexts, and events.

Collaboration foregrounds key issues facing photography, including gender, race, and societal hierarchies/divisions-and their role in shaping and reshaping identities and communities, and provoking resistance or conformity.

The book explores themes such as coercion and cooperation, friendship and exploitation, shared interests and competition, and rivalry or antagonistic partnership.

Working with an accumulation of more than six hundred photographs, each entry breaks apart photography’s “single creator” tradition by bringing to light tangible traces of collaboration-the various relationships, exchanges, and interactions that occur in the making of any photograph and in the shaping, undoing and transforming archives. This collection uses the lens of collaboration to challenge dominant narratives around photographic history and authorship.

Collaboration is a groundbreaking publication, by five great thinkersand practitioners in photography, in collaboration with hundreds of photographers, writers, critics, artists, and academics.

Ariella azoulay potential history