For readings related to social practice, and what it means and how it functions. Lacy has an amazing diagram about audience. The ideas they talk about can be extrapolated to include projects that use images, though they themselves are not discussing images.
- Suzanne Lacy’s Mapping the Terrain
- Tom Finkelpearl’s What We Made
- And three books by Julie Ault: Tell it to my Heart Show and Tell Come Alive (Julie is an AMAZING writer, and also gets at the heart of collaboration. Though her work and these writings she illustrates what a robust process looks like, and how things that you might not have thought of as art forms–curation, for example–can themselves become art. To me, this is helpful for getting myself to treat parts of my own process as valuable, nuanced and interesting that I initially didn’t examine because I was so focused on the image by itself.)
Readings about inequality and representation:
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Paulo Friere‘s seminal text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, sets an incredible framework for any collaborative actions and poses challenging questions
In terms of projects,
- I like Mark Klett’s Phoenix Transect Project and his 3rd View project.
- Wendy Ewald — anything! (She is just such an interesting example of an artist who focuses on process and product as equally valuable)
- I did a project in Melbourne called The Local
- Gemma’s Melbourne project called Red Light Dark Room is great.
Contemporary criticism:
- I think Pete Brook is the most exciting photo critic writing today. His blog Prison Photography is fantastic and has amazing resources.
Interviews:
- I have two interviews that I did a while ago now that could be of interest: Carla Williams Fazal Sheikh
For ideas about how photography can be thought about a little differently, and for examples of photography as the subject of a social practice project
- Will Steacy’s Photographs Not Taken
- Words Without Pictures