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GRADUATE
PHOTOGRAPHY
ONLINE 2024

Each year as part of Graduate Photography Online we ask a number of professionals from the world of photography to review all the BA work submitted and choose their favourites. We hope this makes an interesting introduction to the project as a whole.

Darren Campion

Assistant Curator, Photo Museum Ireland

photomuseumireland.ie

While on one level a graduate project is the end of something, closing off a particular period of study, it also marks the start of what will hopefully be a long-term engagement with the possibilities of photography as a creative medium. My selection has been guided by a sense of how the stylistic or visual language that these photographers have evolved for their individual projects is linked in a fundamental way to what they want to talk about. That match is a key element of a successful work for me, that it ‘speaks’ in a way appropriate to the subject, and in doing so expands our understanding of what that subject is. While there are many accomplished projects in this year’s graduate selection, the six that I have chosen strike an interesting, open-ended balance between their thematic concerns and how these are realised visually.

Selected Photographers:

Olivia Baumanis

Selector's Comment: Family photographs are highly ritualised, saving only the best, most presentable moments for posterity. By contrast, Libby Baumanis delves into the messy, unspectacular reality of her dad’s seemingly endless home improvement endeavours, using a multifaceted blend of imagery and visual strategies. The mix of styles, requiring collaboration with her subjects, feels very contemporary. The resulting sense of bricolage touches on a fundamental truth about her family situation, one that is too often edited out of our carefully curated albums. This is the social and economic context in which the very idea of ‘home-making’ is situated – one in which not everyone is equal.

Leslie Allen Spillane

Selector's Comment: Photography is a technological process, though now typically the result of digital programming and silicon chips. Lesile Allen Spillane reintroduces a material, biological element into her work, using plant-based developers and unique prints so that result is as much a collaboration with unpredictable substances as it is sheer mechanical reproduction. Working with a family member, Spillane underscores cycles of growth and change, connecting the materiality of the work to her subject matter, each unfolding over time. Plants have a rich history of symbolism and cultural usage that becomes deeply resonant in this context.

Conn McCarrick

Selector's Comment: Conn MCarrick’s project emphasises the narrative, story-telling aspects of photography, using an assemblage of small, off-hand moments to build up a larger whole. This encompasses older family pictures, contextualised by more recent diaristic images, to show how our histories shape us, but also the potential gaps in those histories that need to be filled. This is particularly important in the context of queer lives, which too often seem to fall outside of representation, or to leave little archival trace. In attempting to address this absence, McCarrick’s own personal story takes on a wider significance, making space for queer self-representation, and for joyful presence.

Zihao Yan

Selector's Comment: While typically very adept at description, photography has many different registers – from hard to soft, light to dark – that can convey a range of experiences or states. Zihao Yan’s pastel-hued images deal with the idea of emotion and embody that idea visually through the use of focus, blur, and tonality, creating a vividly dream-like impression that nonetheless remains grounded in the everyday. The pictures stop short of presenting any readily identifiable feeling. Instead they concentrate on moments of contemplation or quietude when feeling seems likely to arise, offering elements of cryptic symbolism to anchor what emerges.

Barney Jobson

Selector's Comment: Photographers seem drawn to marginal areas, places in-between, or nowhere in particular. With Limbo Barney Jobson focuses on such indeterminate landscapes, crossing over between suburban/ urban, industrial/ rural. The tensions that these oppositions generate drive the pictures, often suggesting some potential narrative, which remains unresolved, giving an air of anticipation, or suspension, to the images. Jobson uses a familiar grey tonality and static compositions to good effect. While apparently neutral or descriptive the style of the work flattens out differences and connects disparate locations. This deliberate lack of specificity is telling; places that are nowhere really could be anywhere.

Jake Hughes

Selector's Comment: Jake Hughes’ project asks us to look again at a place we think we might know, an ordinary small town, but when filtered through his own state of mind and through his camera, becomes suddenly quite unfamiliar, even threatening. The project takes away much of what we take for granted in a ‘good’ photograph – lighting, focus, framing, an identifiable subject – and yet the feeling of the pictures, their mood, leaves a definite impression. Even when we’re not quite sure what we’re looking at, photography can still communicate. Hughes’ stark monochrome images capture the often unstable intersections between place and individual psychology.

Selection by Jilke Golbach ▸
Curator, Writer & Researcher

Selection by Anne Adesolabomi Nwakalor ▸
Founding Editor, No! Wahala Magazine

View Submission Guidelines  ▸