Source: Graduate Photography Online 2012 - BA Selections

This year we bring you a number of special bonus selections - chosen from the 2012 BA Submissions. We asked some of the Directors, from those courses who participated in 2012, to choose their favourite set of work. The only condition we set was that the work they chose had to be from a course other than their own.

Tony Clancy is Course Leader for the BA Hons Fine Art Photography course at University of Gloucestershire, having previously worked at Falmouth and University of Central Lancashire. He originally studied drama and, after practising as a freelance photographer and educator, went on to take the MA in Photographic Studies at Derby.

Selected Photographer:

Selector's Comment: Beata Kosc's images of men who carry out domestic violence use a range of strategies: faces shown or concealed, subjects consciously posed or apparently glimpsed through windows, the men identified or faces concealed. The men are not classified or homogenised into a typology. Their eyes are always either hidden or averted, we do not confront their gaze directly. Is there an implied shame? Is the photographer denying us the chance to peer into their eyes? Despite dramatic lighting and the emotion that the images provoke, there is a coolness to these images, they let us think for ourselves without preaching. The stories of sadness and conflict, the consequences of their behaviour, we are left to imagine. There are no simple conclusions to draw, we are not allowed to simply demonise them much as we might want to. Should photos seek to embody a morality? Is looking enough? Questions as old as documentary photography itself of course and not answered here. The text tells us what we need to know but does not over-complicate or tell us how to see these pictures. The images are brave and have the self-assurance to look where others might not.