To accompany this year's MA/MFA submissions Source has asked a number of respected figures from
the world of photography to select their favourite sets of images from all the work submitted.
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Special Guest Selection by: Gordon MacDonald Co-founder of GOST Books Overview: It's been 20 years or more since I last entered my photography for graduate competitions, but I remember clearly the frustrations of the process. I remember cursing selectors for not understanding my work, for not picking me. Now, as a publisher and editor, I am selecting for similar open competitions and understanding the process a little better. I have chosen six folios from the many entered, because they made the most sense to me and my current preoccupations and interests. This is not to say that they are the best work for everyone, and other selectors would, no doubt, make different decisions for their own reasons - following their own preoccupations and interests. But for me now, they fit. |
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Kingston University - MA Photography
Selector's Comment: I chose the work of Doris Himmelbauer because of its comment on the contemporary proliferation of photographic images. Particularly how the images' exposure to an unlimited audience on various social media platforms, can expose a lack of imagination and a flatness of creativity. |
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University of Westminster - MA Photographic Studies
Selector's Comment: I think it is a brave thing to cut into your photographs and to make them indecipherable as individual images. William Eckersley has made a composite artwork that really translates the feeling of walking down a large shopping street - the isolation in a crowd and the overwhelming scale and power of Capitalism. |
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University of Hertfordshire - MA Photography
Selector's Comment: Sandra Olufsen's work is well considered both conceptually and technically. It was interesting in Sandra's case, to move out of the images she provided and to look at her website, which shows her to be an interesting emerging talent with varied interests. |
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Royal College of Art - MA Photography
Selector's Comment: Martina Lundqvist's practice is the most confusing (not confused) I encountered in this selection process. After looking at her website I can see that she has shifted her practice from trying to give answers, towards posing interesting open questions, which is a positive and unusual experience for the viewer. |
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Ulster University - MFA Photography
Selector's Comment: Paul Dickinson's deadpan photographs of shop facades (and facades is the perfect word in many senses) are evidence of the ongoing 'nothing to see here' attitude towards the free market's failures. The phenomenon photographed is everyday now, but in decades to come this will be viewed with incredulity I am sure. |
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Royal College of Art - MA Photography
Selector's Comment: The familiarity of the landscapes in Erin Solomon's photographs is deceiving, as further, more concentrated viewing reveals far more complex structures. One can only imagine the physical effort of looking for these fragments of landscape in order to reveal the haunting gaze of the pareidolia projected onto each rock. |
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Gordon MacDonald was the founding Editor of Photoworks magazine and was Head of Publishing at Photoworks - the Brighton based organization for contemporary Photography in Britain, which he left in 2012. Before this he worked as a photographer, writer, photography curator, press photographer and educator. He recently stood down as the Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Brighton Photo Fringe, which he co-founded in 2003. MacDonald is co-director, alongside Stuart Smith, of the visual arts publishers GOST. MacDonald is also one half of the collective MacDonaldStrand who initiate idea-based projects. |
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