Writing the self with others: collaborative photobiography in the 21st century

Etymologically speaking, the term autobiography has specific limits: hailing from the Greek words autos, bios, and graphein, the word designates, by its very construction, a self-written account of one’s own life. By this definition then, autobiography is a genre that categorically excludes plurivocal narration. What then, should we make of life stories recounted by multiple authors? How do we account for self-written narratives that are the product of collaboration? How can the photograph complicate the notion of self-writing – how does it graph, anchor, and form the center of life stories told by more than one voice? In testing the limits that autobiography conventionally imposes, these three questions will form the basis of inquiry for my dissertation. As I will argue, the place of the photograph in collaborative life stories of the 21st century cannot be understated – the photo is the very sticking point for collaborative self-expression across print, installation art, film, and social media sites in the works under investigation in my corpus. Collaborative photobiography, then, is arguably becoming a nearly omnipresent feature of our daily lives: how we shape and react to these self-narratives, relayed through image and text, has broader implications for how the genre develops in the future. While seeming to contradict the very definition of autobiography, the collaborative photobiographies in my corpus herald a new age of self-writing – one that proves that stories of self are increasingly cooperative, multivocal, and, importantly, predicated on photographs as the catalyst for connection and narration.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

French

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Swisher, Emily Rene

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gaillard, Julie
• Mall, Laurence
• Reynolds, Felisa
• Rushing, Robert

• photography, autobiography, collaborative life-writing

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Emily Swisher

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132790

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132790