Photo project collaboration ideas
Have you ever considered teaming up with another person to make photographs together? What about working in a team? Does the thought fill you with dread (introverts: I see you)?
Benefits of collaboration
new perspectives
different ideas
a jolt out of complacency
move off a plateau you’ve been stuck on
learn from each other
camaraderie and shared experience
How to collaborate
Keep an open mind.
Communicate your goals.
Listen to what the other person is saying.
Remember the goal is to produce something you wouldn’t create on your own so it might not be exactly what you thought it would be at the start.
Photo collaboration ideas
The simplest collaboration is one where you and at least one other person go to the same place and take photographs together. Compare your favourite 5-10 images at the end of the day. It’s fascinating to see how different people pay attention to different things even when standing in the same place.
You can put a twist on this idea in many ways:
You don’t have to be at the same place at the same time. Agree a route in a place you can all visit in the next month. Everybody follows the route and makes their photographs at any point during the month and then you all share at the end.
You aren’t in the same place but you are photographing at the same time. Agree some prompts ahead of time or stay in touch in a chat group. Go out locally and everybody works through the prompts starting together. Use any of the AYWMC app weekend challenge prompts if you needs some ideas or use our Make 30 Photos or 30 Days of Composition ideas.
Photograph back to back: in 1997 Laurent Malone and Dennis Adams set out on a walk together from Manhattan to JFK airport. Their rule was that either of them could stop to take a photograph but if they did they had to hand their shared camera to the other person who had to take a photograph in the opposite direction. Can you find someone to try this exercise with?
In Emma’s book, A Creativity Workbook for Photographers, she sets out many exercises that will help you push your creative boundaries including a whole section on collaboration:
1. Photo to-and-fro
Find one friend to do this with. You take a photo and send it to them. They then take a photo inspired by yours and send that photo back to you. You do the same, and so on for as long as you can keep going.
2. Illustrate some writing
Do you know an author, a poet, someone writing a memoir or a recipe book? Very simply they send you their pieces of writing as they are completed and you take photos to illustrate. If the writer is up for a reverse-collaboration you can also send them photos you have taken as inspiration for them to write.
3. Joint exhibition
Get together with four to six other photographers and commit to putting on an exhibition together.
4. Model
This works well in small groups of two or three photographers. Each person takes their turn at modelling for the other photographer/s to give an unthreatening place for everyone to improve their portrait photography.
5. Start a collective
"Collective" is just an ambitious word for "group", but it does give your project a bit of gravitas. You'll need a theme. It might be simply taking photographs near where you live, or of a particular subject matter, or you might want to raise awareness of a social injustice.
Start by inviting just one other photographer to collaborate. Have a place where you share your work – it might be a Facebook group, an Instagram hashtag or a joint website. Each of you can invite one further photographer to join, and each of them can do the same, and so on. Put a limit on the total number (maybe ten or so), after which someone has to leave before another person can join.
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