Charter of the Klik.tw collective

Klik.tw is a co-operative owned by the photographers in it. It is not an agency, a gallery, a club, or a business that employs anyone. It exists to do three things: publish our work as one archive filed both by maker and by place, sell prints on our own terms, and get us into the same room often enough to keep each other honest.

The collective has no editorial line and no house style. What holds it together is the island, the standard of the work, and the rules below.

Membership is by invitation. There is no open call and no application form; the co-operatives we take after are self-selecting, and so are we.

1. Nomination. Any full member may nominate a photographer, with a body of work and a short note on why the collective is better with them in it.
2. Discussion, then a vote. The nomination is discussed at the next business meeting and put to a vote of all full members. A simple majority carries, provided there is no more than one objection. An objection must be explained, and the person objecting may ask for the decision to be deferred once.
3. Provisional membership. A new member joins provisionally for six months. They publish, sell prints and run workshops like anyone else, they speak at every meeting, and they do not vote.
4. Confirmation. At the end of the six months there is a confirmation vote on the same terms. If it fails, the provisional period may be extended once by six months, or it ends; nobody is voted out twice for the same reason.
5. After that. Full membership continues for as long as the photographer wants it.

Size and spread. The collective sets no fixed limit on how many photographers it holds, or how many work in any one city. We add people when the work and the person are right, at whatever pace that turns out to be, and we decide that ourselves.

• A print review once a month, rotating between our cities. Bring work on paper. Attendance is expected; two consecutive absences without a word is a conversation, not a penalty.
• A business meeting once a quarter, where nominations, money and changes to this charter are decided.
• One member, one vote. Provisional members speak but do not vote. A member who cannot attend may vote in writing beforehand.
• Ordinary decisions: simple majority. Anything that commits the collective's money, its name, or another member's work: unanimous, less one abstention.
• Roles — who keeps the site, who answers the general enquiries, who holds the accounts — rotate every year and are not owned by anyone.

Every photographer keeps full copyright in their own photographs. Klik.tw acquires no ownership of anything and licenses nothing without the maker's written agreement, on every single occasion.

By placing a frame on the site you give the collective a non-exclusive right to show it on Klik.tw and in our own promotion of the collective — a group exhibition, a poster, a post — always credited, never cropped or recoloured, and never sold as a Klik.tw product. Nothing else.

Non-exclusive membership. You may be represented by an agency, show with a gallery, belong to another collective, and publish anywhere you like. You do not ask permission. Only the frames you choose to put on Klik.tw are governed by this charter.

A photograph on Klik.tw is a photograph: made by the member who publishes it, in a real place, at a stated time.

• Allowed: cropping, dodging and burning, contrast and colour work, conversion to black and white, dust and scratch removal — the darkroom, by another name.
• Staging and direction are allowed. Pose people, move them, light them, ask for it again — we are not a news agency, and a directed picture is as legitimate as a found one. The only limit is the caption: do not describe a picture you arranged as something you happened upon.
• Arranging the scene is your business. Move the chair, close the shutter, take the bin out of shot — anything you do in front of the camera, before the exposure, is photography.
• Small tidying afterwards is allowed: a cigarette end, a stray cable, a sensor mark, a sticker on a wall, the corner of a passing scooter — distractions of that scale may be removed, by hand or with a tool that does it for you.
• Not allowed: removing or adding anything that changes what the picture is about — a person, a vehicle, a building, a sign, a whole background; generating any part of the frame that was never there; composites and stitched panoramas presented as single frames.
• No AI-generated or AI-extended imagery. A tool may help you clean up a frame you made; it may not invent one, extend its edges, or fill in a space you never photographed. If a picture — or a meaningful part of one — was made by a machine, it does not belong in this archive.
• Captions are part of the picture. Place, date and what is actually happening. Guessing is not captioning.
• The test is simple, and it is the one we will argue about at reviews: would a viewer feel misled if they saw the original file? If yes, it stays in.
• Files stay as you made them. Nobody else edits, crops or retouches your frame — including whoever is looking after the site that year.

Most of us work in the street, where the law permits a great deal more than this charter does.

• If someone asks you to stop, you stop. If someone asks you not to publish, you do not publish, whatever your rights are.
• No photograph of an identifiable child is published without a parent or guardian's agreement.
• Nothing is published that leaves a subject exposed to real harm — to their safety, their work, their family, or their standing.
• Directing people is fine; provoking or misleading them is not. Ask, explain what you are doing, and do not manufacture distress.
• Temples, funerals, rituals and hospitals: ask first, accept a no, and put the camera down when told.
• Dignity outlives the frame. A picture can be brilliant and still not worth publishing.

• Each member prices, prints, signs, packs and posts their own work, and answers for it. The collective takes no commission and holds no money.
• A print enquiry made through the site goes to the photographer who made the frame, not to the collective. Nothing is bought on Klik.tw; the site introduces a buyer to a photographer and then gets out of the way.
• Buyers are told plainly, before they pay, that the photographer produces and ships the print — and roughly how long that takes.
• Edition size is fixed before the first print of that frame is sold, and is never increased. Sold out means sold out, in this life and the next.
• Open editions are allowed and must be labelled as open editions. No pretending an open edition is a limited one.
• Every limited print is signed and numbered, and carries a numbered certificate naming the frame, the size, the paper and the edition.
• Paper, size and finish are the photographer's decision — it is their artwork. The only obligation is to describe accurately what the buyer will receive.
• Prices are in New Taiwan dollars, with shipping stated separately for Taiwan and abroad.
• If you cannot fulfil an order, refund it in full and say so. A slow print is fine; a silent one is not.

• Any member may run sessions in any city under the collective's name, and keeps what they charge.
• Before booking opens, a session states: what happens, who leads it, the meeting point, the maximum number of people, the price, what to bring, what is provided, and what happens if it rains.
• Cancelled for weather or too few bookings means refunded in full, decided and announced by a stated hour on the day.
• The collective's name is not used for an event that no member is present at.
• The same rules about subjects in section 06 apply to everyone on a walk. Say so at the start.

The only shared costs are the domain, the hosting and database that keep the site up, the email addresses below, and whatever a group show needs. They are split equally between full members, agreed annually in advance, and never spent without that agreement.

An address for everyone. Every member has an address at the domain — name@klik.tw — for as long as they are a member. It is how print enquiries reach you, and it is what a buyer sees when you write back. The mailboxes are part of the shared annual cost, not something anyone is billed for separately and not a favour from whoever set them up.

The figures are open. Any member may see what the collective has spent and on what, at any time, without explaining why they want to know. There is nothing here worth keeping private, and a co-operative where the accounts are a question you have to ask is not one.

Provisional members pay nothing until they are confirmed. If the shared cost rises by more than a little, it is agreed again before it is spent, not reported afterwards.

There are no dues beyond this, no commission on anyone’s sales, and no salaries. Nobody makes money from the collective itself; we make money from our work. If that ever stops being true, this section is the one that has been broken.

• Critique the picture, never the person. Everyone brings work to be taken apart; nobody brings work to be admired.
• Answer a print enquiry, a workshop question or another member within five days, even if the answer is no.
• Do not take a commission or a workshop that came to another member, and do not undercut each other's print prices to get one.
• Do not publish a frame from someone else's ongoing project without asking, even if you were standing next to them.
• Harassment of any kind — of a member, a student, a subject or a buyer — ends a membership. There is no version of this rule with exceptions.
• Disagreements are settled between the people involved first, at a meeting second, and never in public.

• You may leave at any time, in writing, with no notice and no penalty.
• A member who has published nothing for twelve months is asked — not punished — whether they want to stay. Life happens; the archive can wait.
• A membership is ended only for the things that damage other people: faking a photograph, misusing a subject’s likeness, selling an edition twice, harassment, or persistent bad faith towards the collective. It takes a vote of every full member except the person concerned, who is heard first.

What happens next is the same whichever way it ended. Within thirty days: the photographer’s frames come off the public site and their profile goes with them, their access to the members’ area is closed, and their address at the domain stops. Their files are deleted rather than kept quietly on our servers — a collective that holds on to the work of people who have left is a collective nobody should join.

Sales already made stand. Buyers keep their numbered prints and their place in the edition. Nothing is un-sold because someone left, and no edition is reissued because its maker is no longer here.

Outstanding orders are the collective’s problem, not the buyer’s. Any print agreed and not yet delivered stays our responsibility until the buyer has it in their hands or has their money back in full. Whoever holds the site role that year collects the print from the photographer and sees it delivered; if it cannot be got, the collective refunds the buyer itself and settles with the photographer afterwards. A buyer should never find out that the person who owed them a print has left. This is the whole reason the thirty days above is thirty days and not an afternoon.

Whatever the ending, credit for past work stays. Removing someone’s frames from the site is not the same as removing them from the history of this collective, and we do not do the second thing.

This charter is read out and reviewed once a year at the first business meeting after the anniversary of the collective. Any member may propose a change at any time; a change needs two-thirds of full members to pass, and takes effect when the version below is updated. Sections 05 and 06 — what we publish, and the people in our pictures — need unanimity to weaken, and a simple majority to strengthen.