Tine Bek

Glasgow School of Art - BA (Hons) Fine Art Photography

Selector's Comment: The known world seems extra elastic in Tine Bek's photographs. Scenarios where human limbs, manmade and natural objects, are all equally caught in the flux of appearances that are alternately exotic and unknowable, pedestrian and banal. Photographs of a specimen rock on a plastic work table, pen and paper ready and waiting. For what? We don't know. Or a woman, seemingly in the process of falling in the background of a dog cluttered domestic scene. How has it all led up to this? All things seem to float free of consequences in Tine Bek's weird tragic, utopic world that seems to exist without hierarchy or regime.

Jan McCullough

University of Ulster - BA (Hons) Photography

Selector's Comment: Portrait of a man as a building is a series described by Jan McCullough as a 'photographic examination of a person's internal state'. Yet, underlining McCullough's approach is also a playful regard for photography's assimilating and investigative powers. A pair of photographs - one of a haphazard exterior scaffolding, the other a grainy image of a man's head - asks us viewers to build relationships between the outfacing world, and the cerebral, interior psychologies of others that we can never expect to know. Looking at McCullough's work, we inevitably construct an interpretive scaffolding of our own, and in doing we begin to learn something about photography's observant pleasures, its wishfulness, and its limits.

Cecilie Nicoline Rasmussen

Glasgow School of Art - BA (Hons) Fine Art Photography

Selector's Comment: Cecilie Nicoline Rasmussen's photographs seem to connect with recent philosophical interests in 'animism' and the animation of objects. A dried yukka plant, its leaves starved of nutrients, appears strangely style conscious and full of swagger. In another photograph, a balustrade in the foreground cartoons the movement of two dancers in the background. A branch in what-appears-to-be a zoo enclosure, seems invested with its own sense of exoticism. Looking at Cecile Nicoline Rasmussen's photographs, every single thing - living or otherwise - seems to have eyes, skin, and volition of its own. These photographs are, on one hand, nuanced observances about our vernacular world, but they also seem invigorated with a sense of latent life in dormant things.

Thomas Savage

Arts University Bournemouth - BA (Hons) Photography

Selector's Comment: Breathe is a series of black and white photographs that translate the patterning of psychological states onto routine commercial veneers and urban surfaces. Despite the evocation of the title, Savage describes a world that is airless and constricted; where the contingency of life seems to be run aground in a nestle of balloons, or in the marble effect of a door entranceway. The mid-grey tone of these photographs is another kind of airlessness. People remain absent from these images, and the surfaces that kick up like brutal encounters in Savage's photographs, seem hardly human at all. It's a similar hard-edged 'objectness' of human activity that refreshes the body of ideas expressed by a previous generation, with Michael Schmidt and Dirk Braeckman among others.

Samuel Taylor

University of Westminster - BA (Hons) Photographic Arts

Selector's Comment: Samuel Taylor's photographs draw upon the cinematic trope of the staged death. The body wriggling with bullets, arms flaying, and the mustering of enough energy for one final heroic trigger pull, before eventually collapsing like a sack of potatoes. Hollywood has its own particular treatment for violent death. Samuel Taylor's photo collage works isolate the body of Billy The Kid (played by John Mack Brown in the 1930 film), presenting him without cinematic context. The most famous outlaw of them all, set against a white empty space that acts to consign the body even further and deeper into the hollow chambers of lifeless representation.