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.
Charlotte Cotton
Creative Director at the National Media Museum, London
It's been a real pleasure to see the representative scope of undergraduate and graduate photography in the UK, Ireland and beyond. It is the diversity of the ambitions that has struck me during the selection process and the energised ways in which emerging photographers are reinvigorating established photographic genres. There were many really thorough photographic investigations in the submissions, exploring architecture, individual lives and communities, as-well-as some really strong meditations upon the medium of photography itself.
Selector's Comment: I like the elegant drama of the series 'Fade in Darkness'. Adam and Norman harness a range of historical references - from Sultan and Mandel's 1977 use of engineering and scientific photographs for Evidence, to the unsettling richness of 20th century Eastern European photography. Fade in Darkness makes a strong proposal of how potent black and white photography can be in a chromatic, digital era.
Selector's Comment: Pedro Guimarães's Paraisópolis project is extensive and ambitious, creating a web of observations of the favelas, the slums, of Brazil. Guimaraes manages to create an open-ended type of photographic story that gives over a sense of the enormity and complexity of this vast, enclosed and impoverished society. The project combines different photographic tempos, from intriguing, singular images to portraits and expansive landscapes.
Selector's Comment: The seemingly conventional framework of Andrew Moynehan's Dadford - a photo story about a personal journey through a northern English city - is refreshingly reworked by this photographer. By layering the photographer's relationship with his father into the journey through the city - combined with a confident resistance to photographically 'pictorialising' - Moynehan creates a subtly challenging body of work.
Selector's Comment: The space of the analogue darkroom has become a subject in contemporary art photography, marking the passing of the default, analogue working processes of photography. Simon White's photographs are a great addition to the meditation upon this moment of change. His use of black and white photography and his knowing homage to the minimalist frame of Lewis Baltz point to another axis shift in photographic practice from the early 1970s.
Selector's Comment: Tereza Zelenkova clearly has a highly sophisticated and intuitive relationship with photography. Her combining of observational and staged photographic processes - the confidence to deploy photographic style as a motif - is very much of this moment. Ultimately, the success of her practice relies on a thorough, even ruthless, editing and sequencing process that creates a dynamic and compelling host of visual signs.
Selection by Elisabeth Biondi ▸
Visuals Editor at The New Yorker.
American University in Dubai
BFA in Visual Communication - Photography
Blackpool and the Fylde College
BA (Hons) Photography
University of Brighton
BA (Hons) Photography
Camberwell College of Art
BA (Hons) Photography
Cambridge School of Art
BA (Hons) Photography
Central Saint Martins
MA Communication Design - Photography Pathway
University of Chester
BA (Hons) Photography
Dublin Institute of Technology
BA (Hons) Photography
Edinburgh College of Art
BA (Hons) Photography
Edinburgh College of Art
MA Photography
Edinburgh Napier University
BA (Hons) Photography & Film
University College Falmouth
BA (Hons) Photography
University for the Creative Arts, Farnham
BA (Hons) Photography
University of Central Florida
MFA Studio Art and the Computer
Glasgow School of Art
BA (Hons) Fine Art Photography
University of Gloucestershire
BA (Hons) Photojournalism and Documentary Photography
University of Gloucestershire
BA (Hons) Fine Art Photography
Governors State University Illinois
MFA Independent Film and Digital Imaging
Griffith College Dublin
BA Photographic Media
IADT Dun Laoghaire
BA (Hons) Photography
Kingston University London
BA (Hons) Photography
Leeds College of Art and Design
BA (Hons) Photography
University of Lincoln
BA (Hons) Media Production
University of Lincoln
BA (Hons) Contemporary Lens Media
London College of Communication
BA (Hons) Photography
National College of Art and Design
Certificate in Photography and Digital Imaging
The University of Wales, Newport
BA (Hons) Documentary Photography
Rochester Institute of Technology
BFA Photographic Illustration/Fine Art Photography Concentration
Rochester Institute of Technology
MFA Imaging Arts/Fine Art Photography Concentration
Sheffield Hallam University
BA (Hons) Photography
University Campus Suffolk
BA (Hons) Photography
Swansea Metropolitan University
BA (Hons) Photography in the Arts
Swansea Metropolitan University
BA (Hons) Photojournalism
University of Ulster
BA (Hons) Photography
University of Westminster
BA (Hons) Photographic Arts
University of Westminster
BA (Hons) Photography (Part Time)
University of Westminster
MA Photographic Studies