Black Box, a cooperative for visual documentary projects, was recently founded by New York City based photographers Chris Gregory, Natalie Keyssar, and Jake Naughton, and designer Alejandro Torres Viera. We asked the team some questions about their new initiative and its future.

Sarah Stacke: When did you form Black Box and why?
Black Box: We first started meeting about a year ago. We had been talking to each other about how we wanted some framework that would let us be more ambitious and more creative. The feeling was a need to expand on some of the constraints of photographic assignment work and make room for us to do something exciting, that really pushed us to think and create in ways that were new for us, and that challenged some of the more traditional ways of presenting photojournalism. We also wanted to create a space for us to bounce ideas and push our own boundaries creatively. We wanted to make a space that has the camaraderie of a collective, but the production capacity of a creative agency.

SS: What is a dream job for Black Box?
BB: We’re very interested in pushing narrative photography and visual communication outside of the traditional slideshow/illustrative function it currently serves. Internally we’re throwing around a lot of questions about how to photograph ideas as opposed to literal objects or people? How do we use design as content as opposed to just a way of presenting content? Our dream jobs are visual puzzles that we can sink our teeth into as a group. We all love aesthetics and we’re all pretty stimulated by great stories and concepts, so we’re looking to find those intersections. This could mean anything from tackling social issues abroad to fashion campaigns. We’re excited about all the possibilities that this framework creates.

SS: What genre of artist or type of agency, client, partner, publication, etc. are you looking to collaborate with?
BB: We’re really open to any type of collaboration. The three photographers in Black Box come from a photojournalism background, but we love the energy and creativity of great advertising photography, fashion, art, etc. We’re really hoping to break down the boundaries between some of these genres in the work we do. When we talk about our dream clients in the studio, they run the gamut between major editorial clients, NGO’s, and commercial brands. We feel that we have a lot to offer to the journalism, editorial world in terms of new ideas and models for story telling—a capacity to develop interactive, freestanding pieces with a great deal of content that we can generate quickly. We also would love to get creative with marketing and anything we can make fresh and beautiful.