Jane Baker

London College of Communication - MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography

Selector's Comment: Jane Baker's series on Jesse Hill Gunmakers in Birmingham tells a story of place and time. Increasingly, traditional trades are lost to industrial mass production, and with that goes an entire tradition of making, teaching, and living. That the subject of this particular series is not a chandler, or tanner perhaps, but a gunmaker, invests the works with an apt nostalgic ambiguity on the viewer's behalf.

Francis O'Riordan

University of Ulster - MFA Photography

Selector's Comment: Our view of the land is subjective. And the land itself is, too. It changes not only with the weather and with time, it changes with the beholder. We define its use, its names, its borders. O'Riordan's series is as much about the land as it is about the act of seeing: extending our gaze, we claim what we see - wanderer, photographer and beholder alike.

Luba Kozorezova

University of Westminster - MA Photographic Studies

Selector's Comment: Portraiture is such an established genre, it seems almost impossible to encounter a surprise. Luba Kozorezova's series caught me off guard. Confronted with their own reflection, her sitters reveal an astonishing moment of vulnerability towards the camera, leaving me startled when looking at their image.

Katarina Mudronova

University of Westminster - MA Photographic Studies

Selector's Comment: Call me weird, but great composition gives me great joy. Katarina Mudronova's images of almost obsolete domestic appliances at the intersection of manufacture and machinery are nothing if not meticulously made. But they also exude a deadpan humour and real concern for colour. And that gets me every time.

Andrew Pengilly

University of Brighton - MA Photography

Selector's Comment: The sublime contrast of nature and culture very often cajoles photographers onto the well-trodden paths of an updated pictorialism. Andrew Pengilly's series is aware of photographic tradition, but avoids its pitfalls. Making use of his medium's specificity, he turns historic precedent on its head, using analytical means to emotional effect.