Source: Graduate Photography Online 2024 - MA/MFA Selections

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.

It was a real pleasure to discover the work of so many new and emerging photographers from the MA graduates. I was impressed by how thorough many of the projects are, revealing a willingness to dig deep into the histories, politics and personal backgrounds of their subjects without forgoing considerations of composition, display, even pure aesthetic pleasure. It’s a fine balance between communicating an overall concept to the viewer and ensuring that the images are striking enough to catch their attention. I also appreciated the breadth of subject matter. While it didn’t necessarily dictate my selection, I was pleased to see so many photographers engaging with identity, history and heritage in a way that didn’t feel solipsistic. Rather, they made me want to see and understand more, to get an even broader sense of where their respective projects might develop.

Selected Photographers:

Selector's Comment: In this series of atmospheric, low-contrast black-and-white images, Tipper captures the former military testing grounds of Old Winchester Hill. Taken on a 1940s large format camera with lengthy exposure times, they are striking in their marriage of subject matter and conceptual approach. The grain of the prints, the misty grey-toned sky, the complex tangle of branches and roots, and the rusting bits of machinery left behind: Tipper’s series evokes a strong sense of melancholy, and of a distant history that is only barely perceivable through the undergrowth.

Selector's Comment: I was very intrigued by both the visual aesthetic and the underlying story in Mansi Ambhore’s series exploring prejudice against Dalit communities. They’re confrontational – literally, with the artist posing for a series of self-portraits based on newspaper stories of caste discrimination – and this straightforwardness amplifies their effectiveness. Ambhore uses colour-coded prints and fragments of archival text to tell the individual stories of her subjects while also incorporating certain details and accoutrements – a backpack, splashes of blue paint – to register, and communicate, her anger at this ingrained system of inequality. I could feel this sense of injustice throughout.

Selector's Comment: There is something so compelling in Jeremy Chih-hao Chang’s series of free-standing folding photographic screens that perfectly encapsulates ideas of intimacy and distance. As objects, I love the way the panels recall domestic settings, how they are able to enclose their subjects and to explore the formal arrangement of bodies within a gridded background. But the images themselves are also so seductive. Chang’s presence as a bystander, an impassive observer who looks directly back at the viewer, while his various nude lovers carry on with everyday activities, represents a clever and critical statement on his own identity as a gay, Taiwanese artist navigating online dating.

Selector's Comment: These works caught my attention immediately. Individually, Yan Lam Shi’s photographs are formally beautiful, elegantly composed and arranged. They are poetic in the best sense. However, as a series, they really come together, subtly inferring an almost cinematic narrative of emotional connection while allowing space for silence and speculation. I found myself so invested in these people, their relationship and the turbulent emotions that can be conveyed through a mere sideways glance, holding hands, or shoulders brushing against each other.

Selector's Comment: The view through a windshield is so commonplace that it’s easy to switch off from one’s surroundings, particularly when following the same daily route. In Úrsula Rénique’s photographs of Dubai, taken during the school run, routine offers up moments of spectacle and beauty, framed by the ever-present recurrence of the steering wheel. I found this series both fascinating – the golden statues of horses! - and familiar, from the gridlock of seemingly identical white automobiles to the silent backseat passenger of her child. There is an honesty and authenticity imbued in each of the images.

Selector's Comment: Maria Quigley’s photographs first appear as abstract compositions; flashes of colour, amorphous forms, vague shapes. I was surprised then to see the all-too-familiar slump of Donald Trump in one of them. Quigley printed the images from the surface of her grandmother’s television screen and developed them in that same room. There’s an anecdotal background here – of her grandmother in St. Petersburg constantly watching TV – that belies the sociological, even geopolitical, breadth of the project. How do our viewing choices inform our beliefs? Who chooses what we watch? How much should we believe? These blurry, static shots cleverly hint at the wider, underlying ideologies that inform media consumption.