Nobody Makes Anything Alone: Why Collaboration Matters for Every Creative

Film is the most collaborative art form there is. There's no way round it. Even on the smallest shoot, someone's holding a light, someone's agreed to be on camera, someone's unlocked a building for you at 7am. The credits at the end of a film aren't a courtesy. They're an honest account of how the thing got made.

So when I hear photographers, painters, writers — any creative working alone — talk about collaboration as something optional, something for film people, I think they're missing what's actually going on in their own work.

Because here's what twenty years of this has taught me: nobody makes anything alone. Not really.

Take photography, supposedly the loner's discipline. Every portrait I've made is a collaboration. The person in front of the camera is doing at least half the work. With 100 Faces, the whole project rests on that — on someone trusting me enough to be honest in front of a lens. If they don't collaborate, I get a picture of a face. If they do, I get a picture of a person. The difference is everything.

The same applies further back in the process. Most of the work that's come my way over twenty years has come through people — people who knew the work, people I'd helped, people who'd helped me. That's collaboration too, just slower.

There's a practical side to this that I think gets overlooked, especially outside film. When you're a small creative business, you can't be good at everything. I'm not. Nobody is. Working with other people isn't a compromise — it's how you get access to skills, kit, and thinking you don't have. Some of the best decisions in my projects came from someone else in the room saying "what if you did it this way instead?" and being right.

Collaboration also keeps you honest. Work alone long enough and you stop being able to see your own work clearly. You need someone who'll tell you the edit is two minutes too long, or the image you love doesn't actually say anything. That kind of honesty only comes from people who are invested in the work with you. An audience won't tell you. They'll just quietly not care.

And then there's the thing I find hardest to explain to people who haven't felt it: collaboration makes the work bigger than you. Every project I'm genuinely proud of has other people's fingerprints all over it. The subjects who trusted me. The organisations who backed it. The people who challenged the idea until it got better. On my own, I make what I can imagine. With others, I make things I couldn't have imagined.

If you're a creative working alone and it's starting to feel small, some of what's worked for me: show unfinished work to someone whose eye you trust, and listen to what they say rather than defending it. Offer to help on someone else's project with no agenda — you'll learn more from being inside someone else's process than from any course. And when you do collaborate, credit people properly and loudly. It costs nothing and it's why they'll work with you again.

The lone genius is a myth we tell about creativity because it makes a better story. The truth is less romantic and more useful: the work gets better when you let other people in.