Trigger # 04 — Together

For its fourth issue, ‘Trigger #4: Together’, Trigger collaborated with photographer Susan Meiselas.
‘Trigger #4: Together’ explores various forms of collaboration in photography. Sixteen contributions engage with strategies of co-creation that stretch notions of authorship and ownership, breaking through existing heteronormative, state-owned, or hyper-individual categories. In this issue, you can find essays by internationally renowned researchers and writers such as Elspeth Brown, Ileana Selejan and Hettie Judah. It further gives an insight into the forms of collaboration and community in diverse photography practices by Jonathas de Andrade, Grace Ndiritu, Leigh Ledare, Dries Segers, Meghann Riepenhoff and Vincen Beeckman. You can also read some conversations between photographers, critics and curators about socially engaged photography and curating. Rabiaâ Benlahbib and Taylor Dorrell each go out and talk with two different people from different generations, genders and backgrounds, working in the broader field of socially engaged practices. When comparing both conversations, a small history pops up of the changing role of the curator since the 1990s. Nato Thompson would have ‘curator’ changed in ‘infrastructure builder’. Both Rita Ouédraogo and Mariama Attah on their part, see a crucial role for the curator as caregiver in making sure the focus is on ‘togethering’ as a process. Last but not least, a large part of this issue consists of artists and photographers such as Debmalya Roy Choudhuri, Susanne Kriemann, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Kaali Collective, Rehab Eldalil, Hoda Afshar and Anthony Luvera, who have repurposed existing work in answering our ‘call for collaboration’.