Source: Graduate Photography Online - 2017 Selections

Each year as part of Graduate Photography Online we ask three curators to review all the MA/MFA work submitted and to make some recommendations. These are published both in a supplement in the magazine and here on our website. We hope this makes an interesting introduction to the project as a whole.

Whilst enjoying making a selection from the projects of this years MA/ MFA graduating students it was a reminder of the value of physical form for engaging with photography. I imagined the spaces to interact with the work, confronted with the subject and realisation of ideas. I considered a structure filled with all of the projects presented online, and how different audiences would react to the projects. Which stories would I spend the longest with, how would they be presented, which would stay with me throughout the exhibition, the day, the week and onwards. Photography is unquestionably a medium of the present; a common language of our times implicated in love and war, identity and non-human autonomy. The projects I have selected felt assured of themselves, had a coherence in thought and deed, and I look forward to carrying them with me.

Selected Photographers:

Selector's Comment: Recording lyrical markers along the aging process, Taylor-Money gives us a glimpse of a road to come. But it is from the position of fellow traveller on a path experiencing awe, discomfort and discovery from which she can most convincingly communicate a life lived together and a parting to come. This project communicates a tenet of photographing something very close to the creator - that you are presenting a relationship to this idea, rarely the subject as distinct and separate from you.

Selector's Comment: Fornieles work bursts from the wall and spills into the exhibition space noisily, demanding awareness like a fight on a street. The piece creases, flaps and folds down onto the floor, and poses in shades of bruise and light as an object in itself. The work is made from found footage of female power and aggression: a series of stances and punches; a welcome resistance when the female body is widely objectified in images.

Selector's Comment: Full disclosure - I've worked with Ben before on an exhibition in Liverpool. His intriguing work has matured into a confident exploration into ideas of what we record and what we could record with the camera. By taking up the space with the physicality of paper, and with folds which seem sympathetic to the pixelated nature printed upon it, Ben's installation images make me think about the future of communication photographically, and the wonder of the photographic process.

Selector's Comment: Probably one of the projects that I would want to work with Arcalis on pulling apart and really re-thinking how to exhibit. A bit of a left-field selection, but I've always had a soft spot for gnarly rock shots in high definition - something about the natural abstraction. Pair this with the muse of mythology and photography, memory and forgetting, and I think we've got something very fun here.

Selector's Comment: This medium allows for an uncomfortably intrusive access to the lives of others, but great portraiture maintains the tensions of a balanced society and relationship. Open and expressive in some regards, but respectful in maintaining a dignity and humility. Lennon has observed these customs creating a technically accomplished series of portraits. Her title 'Like roses that never bothered to bloom' is apt but I'm glad of the tender resilience that can be read as optimism.

Selector's Comment: I have my concerns around exotic spectatorship - and I've never lived in any of the new states which arose from the former Yugoslavia. I would need to talk to people who knew these cities which have suffered terrible human atrocity to better know this project myself. But the scope and quality of the work is enough to spark my interest and describe the city, women, children and detritus alongside the river. Junicic can communicate something of the pain suffered through clear visual metaphors.

COURSES: