Overview:

This selection incorporates examples of a variety of approaches to the medium of photography. There are of course patterns to the concerns apparent in the images overall, but each artist's output is unique. Students this year are most often engaged with issues of urban landscapes, for example lonely and desolate sites, abandoned spaces, which speak to decay and death, and 'memory' as it relates to intimate relationships. Indeed, some students investigate the past with the fragments that remain, whereas others address environmental and social concerns of the present. Through photography, they have explored a range of thoughts and experiences, and their well-developed ideas and aesthetics have produced a number of very successful projects, such as those illustrated here.

Amy Bartlam

Birmingham City University

Amy finds beauty in otherwise overlooked places. She draws rich, soothing colours from unsightly objects and patterns and creates dramatic compositions with the most basic forms.

Brendan Berry

University of Wales, Newport

Brendan's focus on an abstracted landscape, in which he uses a close-up point of view results in beautiful compositions. He asks us to see our environment afresh and gives us a new perspective on our relationship with our surroundings.

Samantha Goddard

University of Brighton

Samantha's images present us with a real sense of loss. They are violent scenes of the destruction of interiors, but, seen in the aftermath, we focus more on the brilliant bits of colour than on the charred mass.

Lucy Jackson

Swansea Metropolitan University

In photographing fragments of a domestic interior, Lucy records the lives of its inhabitants in a quiet, intimate manner. The work evokes one's own experience and memories of 'home'.

Janet Marrison

Blackpool and the Fylde College

Working in a difficult genre, Janet has produced simple but penetrating portraits. The images she presents here are a good mix of views of individuals, all intimate and sympathetic in their nature.

Jacqueline McCullough

University of Brighton

Jacqueline has successfully employed the juxtaposition of text and image to embolden her sitters, a group of people of different ages expressing a range of sentiments. This is a very well thought out project that addresses an emotional issue with strength and some humour.

About the Selector:

Ashley Givens is the Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Museum's photography collection is over 150 years old and ranges from the historic to the contemporary. In April Ashley co-curated the annual re-display of the Photography Gallery, which highlights the variety of genres and processes and techniques included in the collection. She also recently published essays on the artists Veronica Bailey (Portfolio magazine, #49, May 2009) and Marrigje de Maar (exhibition catalogue, March 2009).