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Uğur Çetin, Hacettepe University, TürkiyeAbstract
Although photography has long involved multiple participants, collective and collaborative photographic practices are frequently discussed as if they constituted a relatively coherent field. In practice, however, such projects are organised through markedly different forms of participation, editorial dialogue, responsibility, and temporality. This paper examines how collective photographic practices actually work by comparing three documentary photography projects developed in Türkiye: Visual Stories from My Homeland, Photography in the Time of Corona, and Documentary Stories from the Anthropocene. Rather than treating collectivity as a stable organisational model, the study approaches it as a dynamic process shaped by what this article terms the mechanics of the collective. Based on a comparative qualitative case study, the analysis examines each project through four analytical dimensions: participation, editorial dialogue, responsibility, and temporality. These dimensions make it possible to compare projects that share collaborative characteristics while operating through different documentary objectives and historical conditions. The findings show that collective photographic practices cannot be adequately explained through shared authorship alone. Instead, each project organises collaboration differently, producing distinct forms of pedagogical learning, collective witnessing, and long-term documentary responsibility. Rather than proposing a universal typology, the article offers an analytical framework for understanding how different mechanics of the collective shape collaborative documentary photography. In doing so, it offers a comparative analytical vocabulary for examining collaborative documentary photography across different historical and institutional contexts.
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Conference: ECAH2026Stream: Arts - Visual Arts Practices
This paper is part of the ECAH2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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