Each year as part of Graduate Photography Online we ask a number of professionals from the world of photography to review all the photographic work submitted and choose their favourites. We hope this makes an interesting introduction to the project as a whole.
Clare Grafik
Curator, The Photographer's Gallery, London
thephotographersgallery.org.uk
In selecting from the photographers and artists graduating from MA and BA courses this year it is striking - and encouraging - to see little or no consensus on what it means to be working with photography today in the UK. The medium continues to have a stalwart flexibility which combines genres and resists easy categorisation. From the eloquent use of readymade images, to accomplished studio-based projects, to documentary approaches, there is a refreshing diversity across the board which bodes extremely well for photographic culture in the coming years. I have chosen five projects from many which reflect, for me, some of this variety, a creative energy and conceptual rigour.
Selector's Comment: Lucy's project is affectionate and tough at the same time. It is about faliability, loss, and photography's role in weaving together the threads of individual and collective identities.
Selector's Comment: There is a great energy in this work, and an unashamed kitch. The portraits are striking and uncanny.
Selector's Comment: I like Steve's use of the photographic surface to produce a kind of visual vertigo. His images flatten and extend the plane of the photographic medium transforming their representational quality to endless data.
Selector's Comment: Jill has a very accomplished visual sensibility which enables her to combine a number of different elements into this coherent and striking series of work.
Selector's Comment: I like the 'worn-in' formalism of these images, and the marriage of abstraction and textural surface gives them a great sense of movement and depth.
About the Selector: Clare Grafik is a curator at The Photographers' Gallery, London where she has been working since 2003. She has recently worked on exhibitions with David Brittain 'Found, Shared: The Magazine Photowork', with David Hurn on a retrospective of Keith Arnatt's photography, and with photographers Taryn Simon and Antoine d'Agata on solo exhibitions. Catalogue/exhibition projects include Cuny Janssen Finding Thoughts, Zineb Sedira Saphir and Keith Arnatt I'm a Real Photographer and she has written for magazines including Next Level, Art on Paper, and is a contributing editor to Contemporary Magazine. She is currently working on a history of The Photographers' Gallery book with art historian Helen James as the Gallery prepares to embark on its move from Great Newport Street into Soho, November 2008.
Selection by Fotohof Team ▸
Galerie Fotohof, Salzburg, Austria
The Arts Institute at Bournemouth
BA (Hons) Photography
University of Brighton
BA (Hons) Editorial Photography
Camberwell College of Arts
BA (Hons) Photography
University of Chester
BA (Hons) Photography
Cleveland College of Art and Design
BA (Hons) Photography
Dublin Institute of Technology
BA (Hons) Photography
IADT Dun Laoghaire
BA (Hons) Photography
Edinburgh College of Art
BA (Hons) Visual Communication - Photography
University College Falmouth
BA (Hons) Photography
University College Falmouth
MA Photography
Glasgow School of Art
BA (Hons) Fine Art Photography
University of Gloucestershire Cheltenham
BA (Hons) Photography
London College of Communication
Graduate Diploma Digital Lens Based Image-Making
London College of Communication
MA Photography
University of Wales, Newport
BA (Hons) Photographic Arts
University of Wales, Newport
BA (Hons) Documentary Photography
University of Portsmouth
BA (Hons) Photography
Central Saint Martins
MA Communication Design - Photography Route
Swansea Metropolitan University
BA (Hons) Photography in the Arts / Photojournalism