Laurie Campbell

University of Ulster - MFA Photography

Selector's Comment: I found Laurie Campbell's project 'Overshadowed', a series of work documenting Soviet-era monuments rooted in sites that have changed irrevocably over the past twenty-two years, powerfully resonant of Russia's current socio-political reality. The relics in Campbell's subtly schizophrenic 'liminal' landscapes are stranded yet unforgiving and abrasive.

Maria Gruzdeva

London College of Communication - MA Photography

Selector's Comment: Maria Gruzdeva has documented The Border Guard Service that patrols the perimeter of Russia; the longest national border in the world. As in Campbell and Tahvilzadeh's works, a transitional threshold, or ambiguous contemporary reality results, amplifying strength, yet also fragility and impermanence.

Kavin Supupramai

University of Sunderland - MA Photography

Selector's Comment: Kavin Supupramai's 'identity interiors' speak of the artist's initial displacement, isolation and a subsequent coming to terms with his new environment. This cultural duality and tension connects in a more personal manner with the previous three artists' work I have selected, this time within a contemporary UK context.

Robin Gardiner

Central Saint Martins - Postgraduate Photography

Selector's Comment: Continuing the UK context referred to in Supupramai's series, Robin Gardiner has examined a subject very close to home. His photographs of Central St Martins in Shadow Dancing present his art school's old premises in central London before its move to new headquarters in Kings Cross. One could see this action as examining the changing nature of the institution in a way that that frames the artist's education, as well as ideas around transition and impermanence through a form of abstraction grounded in the real.

Solmaz Tahvilzadeh

Sir John Cass School of Art, Media and Design,
London Metropolitan University - MA Photography

Selector's Comment: Solmaz Tahvilzadeh's pictures of the Kadoosan Grand Hotel in the Iranian seaport of Anzali shows a similar form of displacement as Laurie Campbell's photographs of Soviet-era monuments. Built in the 1950s before the revolution, traces of the Shah of Iran's enterprise are still present in the building's interiors and faded architectural details.

Christopher Torry

University of Brighton - MA Photography

Selector's Comment: Christopher Torry is the anomaly in my set of six. His work is informal, incidental, haphazard and contains no strong or identifiable subject matter. Yet somehow this series of photographs still works. There's something naturally disjunctive and just plain wrong about these images compared to anything else in Source's current bank of graduating photographers. For this, it should be celebrated.