COLLABORATION NOTES: POWER DYNAMICS

2025-present

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Jo and I met at her home in Albany, New York. I was there on assignment for the Guardian. We had two days to work together, but something wild happened in that time. At least for me, it did. I went back to visit Jo and didn’t leave for months. We began working on a project together.

What I’ve really been reflecting on is how much I struggled in our dynamic, and how Jo helped me work through it. I wrestled with letting go of the power structure of “journalist” and “participant” that framed our first encounter. The rules in that system are rigid: you don’t share, you maintain distance, the direction of taking flows one way. I struggled with my own vulnerability, and with what this kind of collaboration asked of me. Meeting her changed the course of my life. It showed me what kind of life is possible through recovery, and how strange and powerful creativity can be as a thread through all of it.

This an excerpt from a conversation that Jo and I had and recorded - we talked about the reason we met, her archive, and what it meant for us to look at photographs for a year together. But it also became an excuse for us to talk about our relationship: about working together, about fear and vulnerability, about the questions we have for one another. I’m still learning not to wait for a reason to slow down and examine these dynamics honestly.

S: This leads me to something else I’ve always wanted to ask you. We met in the context of a journalism story - which has a really different container than what we're doing now. Our relationship now goes beyond any “project.” I consider you an incredibly close friend. But when I first met you, I arrived in the context of my specific role as a photojournalist, and in that role, my boundaries were different. When I work as a photojournalist, I tend to share a lot less. I’m quieter. I'm there to help facilitate a particular environment for someone else. So, the question I have… we've left that context behind a long time ago. We’ve been working together since then, for ten months now. I'm not here as a photojournalist anymore. We're doing something totally different. My question to you is, do you feel that I'm too held back in our collaboration? Do you still feel that old role there more than it needs to be? Does it frustrate you that I don't open up or share a lot about my family or give as much as you give? Do you think it affects the work or our collaboration?

J: That is such a great question, because I have thought about it. I remember asking you why you didn’t include yourself in the work we were doing, or work on your own family story or images alongside mine. And part of me wanted us to do it together. But looking back, I'm glad that we didn’t dive into our separate stories side by side, because I don't think we would have had the same outcome. We needed one of us to be more of “the observer” and one to be “the doer” to get to this place. So, I think you had to be in that role.

S: I wonder if it would have helped to just discuss and name these underlying things we both felt - to name those roles and to recognize them as being there, versus pretending they weren’t. I wonder what kept me from doing that, or from wanting to pretend I wasn’t occupying a certain role that I was. I don’t know, I’ve been thinking a lot about that refusal to name and looking back… I wish I had done that.

Co-created with JoAnn Stevelos