The question of control

Adam Weinberg: The whole idea of control and authorship in photography and any art is always a question because you are expressing yourself whether you want to or not. When a painter goes and attacks a canvas, whether you have Van Gogh working with dabs of paint, or you have Jackson Pollack's dripping—so much of that is instinctive and intuitive—and people think that's chance. But yet it isn't chance. It's the same thing with a photographer coming in and making photographs. You're controlling the situation even if you don't want to control the situation. You're coming in to make a picture and you're using a certain kind of camera, a certain kind of film, you're standing in a certain way at a certain distance at a certain height in a certain light. You're controlling all of those palettes, so to speak. So for Wendy, giving up authorship is not really giving up authorship. She is still setting up the situation. She is just allowing the subjects to have more freedom within the constraints of the artistic expression.

Wendy Ewald: If I photograph someone, just looking at the pictorial qualities of the subject and how the subject's sitting, the light's falling, etc., I'm trained, in an art school mode, to line all those things up to make a visually pleasing photograph that also reveals something about the subject. I am trained in that way. The person who I am photographing may have a very different way of seeing him or herself. If I include that vision in my photograph, it's a much deeper photograph.

In a photograph or a series of photographs, I'm looking for something that I didn't know before I started, for the photograph to reveal something to me about a relationship or a situation, that there's something revealed about a person, about a social situation, that was opaque to me before. Giving up authorship allows that mysterious process to happen, allows another voice to come in and to show me something I didn't know. And the combination of my voice and my collaborator's voice creates something new that we both are engaged in and is revealing to both of us.

It really doesn't interest me whose photographs they are, who has taken them, what people think, whether they think they're mine or somebody else's. I think that's the point. Who makes a photograph anyway? The subject or the person who takes the picture? Things that are photographed can make a wonderful photograph just because of the things that they are.