Collaborative Portraiture brings together work by Magnum photographers Carolyn Drake, Bieke Depoorter and Susan Meiselas to highlight different strategies of portraying female subjects. In each series, the subjects have been invited to present themselves on their own terms; to perform, play, and control their representation in front of the lens.

The three bodies of work in the exhibition are tied together as portraiture becomes a long-term commitment between photographer and subject.

Carolyn Drake’s project, “Internat,” takes its name from the Soviet-era orphanage where the young women she photographs currently live. Conceived to amplify their voices, the playful and gently surrealist images imagine an alternative feminine world. In doing so, the photographs subvert the real constraints of the women’s daily routines inside the isolated orphanage.

In 2017, Bieke Depoorter met Agata in Paris. The two women quickly struck up a photographic partnership and an ongoing project has taken shape over several journeys to Greece and Lebanon. Through her travels with Agata, Depoorter seeks to get to the heart of who her charismatic subject actually is, beyond a woman used to performing for men, and for the photographer and her camera.

Between 1972 and 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease for small town carnivals on the East Coast of America. “Carnival Strippers” was executed from the outset as a multi-media project including audio recordings of her subjects voices. The images included in Collaborative Portraiture focus on a group of portraits in which her subjects present themselves as they would like to be photographed.

Collaborative Portraiture
By Carolyn Drake, Bieke Depoorter and Susan Meiselas
Magnum Print Room, 63 Gee Street, London
September 10 – October 25, 2018