Each year as part of Graduate Photography Online we ask a number of professionals from the world of photography to review all the MA/MFA work submitted and choose their favourites. We hope this makes an interesting introduction to the project as a whole.
John Duncan
Editor, Source Photographic Review
The projects that I have selected have benefitted from a prolonged engagement with a particular subject matter often over the two years of the course. The time and opportunity to work in this way is often cited by students (many of them are mature students) as a reason to undertake an MA in photography. For many of them the work matured within the environs of University will already be attracting the attention of curators and publishers. In this way an MA in photography continues to be an important stage in the development of photographic careers.
Selector's Comment: Minerva de Carvalho makes direct analogue imprints, from a computer screen, as a way of exploring satellite images. It is the emptiness and ambiguity of these landscapes, as opposed to the presentation of specific details and locations, that makes them so appealing. They have, like the recent images from the hazard avoidance cameras on Curiosity the Martian rover, an ability to produce a sensation of awe.
Selector's Comment: Judith Cornwell uses landscapes and details of interiors, alongside intimate family portraits to explore family life in a remote seaside village. There is a suggestion of containment in the rock pools and the room with the dead moth and flies at a window. In the expressions on the faces of the family there is an interiority which fuses with the muted tones of the images.
Selector's Comment: Ken Finegan's work examines ageing and Alzheimer's in one particular community close to where he lives. I find the work refreshing in its avoidance of the usual images around this subject matter. In a number of images there is a sense of waiting, of looking outwards, of other worlds, that reminds me of scenes from the science fiction film Another Earth.
Selector's Comment: Richard Gilligan photographs DIY skate parks that range in scale from those that the monumental land artist Michael Heizer might appreciate to those that might fit more comfortably with the ephemeral nature of Richard Long's work. There is something too in the search and feel for space that chimes with those artists, but here we find ourselves in an urban landscape of scrub lands and vacant plots rather than in any far flung wilderness.
Selection by Anne Braybon ▸
Photographic Project Commissioner at The National Portrait Gallery.
Selection by Brian Dillon ▸
Writer on photography for The Guardian, New Statesman and Artforum.
University of Brighton
MA Photography
London College of Communication
MA Photography
Manchester School of Art - MMU
MA Photography
University of Sunderland
MA Photography
University of Ulster
MFA Photography