Next week, Source will be launching an archive season that will continue until May. Putting this season together I have come across a number of online archives, some well known, some obscure, that contain a wealth of material I had never seen before. Although the emphasis of the season is on the physical collections that we have visited, in some ways the most significant recent development in photography archives is their increased availability via the web. In an ideal world we would be able both to visit archives and see them digitally (and we will be running a competition that connects finding archives online with visiting them in person, watch this space for details) but, to start us off, here are a few of the pictures I have seen and some reflections on how they are changed by appearing on the web.

One day in July 1853, three men boating in the Niagara River were caught by the current. When their boat overturned two of the men were immediately swept over the Falls to their deaths. The third man, Joseph Avery was stranded on a log which had jammed between two rocks. Avery clung on but all attempts made to reach him were frustrated and after eighteen hours he succumbed to the river. A daguerreotypist Platt D. Babbitt had a pitch by the Falls and recorded Avery's predicament. This image can now be seen on the Library of Congress website as part of their huge Prints & Photographs Online Catalogue alongside such collections as Roger Fenton's Crimean War Photographs and the negatives of the Farm Security Administration.

Anyone interested in photography, starting with a traditional telling of its history, can find a vast number of images online, hosted by some of the major photography institutions. This includes George Eastman House, The Center for Creative Photography and many others. There are, of course, companies whose business it is to make their archives available, starting with Getty images and Corbis but including all types of specialism. And this is before we get to the mammoth image collections on Flickr and other photo sharing sites. To say nothing of Google images.

This is another way of saying ‘There are a lot of photographs on the internet’ which you probably knew already. More intriguing is what has happened to these pictures because they are on the internet. Archives are a way of organising information so it is useful and meaningful. What is a picture of a statue embedded in a courtyard for? Or, how did it come about in the first place? It might qualify as ‘news’ by being unusual, but then why no people? It makes more sense as part of a collection of photographs of earthquakes (in this case the San Francisco Earthquake 1906) which is what you would expect the U.S. Geological Survey to record.

There must be thousands of these smaller archives of photographs with a specific function that becomes enigmatic when they are floated free in the wider internet, like the wonderful Public Monument and Sculpture Association database of – often amateurish – photographs of public sculpture. This is also typical of council archives which include many pictures whose original purpose is now inscrutable like this man in an overgrown field (The original photograph of which can be examined at Buckinghamshire County Hall). There is a kind of logic being played out here that, once a picture has entered the archive, it submits to the larger purpose of the collection it inhabits. This larger purpose is amorphous and unpredictable because who can say what pictures will mean to us in the future? So the archive is obliged to preserve itself and, as time passes, the photographs become further removed from the reason for which they were first made.

One of the surprising consequences of this is that public archives not only keep but even digitize photographs that would have been considered mistakes by the people that made them. Double exposures, scratched and obscured images can all be found in the digital collections of English Heritage and the National Library of Ireland. Ironically, archives, which were formed to tie down the meaning of pictures, can now be explored for the utterly arbitrary and accidental beauty they preserve.

Tim Borton at Art Data

My general perception of photography book publishing is that, while there are more books published than ever before, there is a crisis in the business of publishing, apparent in the problems for booksellers (Borders and Waterstones) and the new competition from digital formats. The rise in self-published photography books, in this light, is another symptom of the crisis.

Borton has a slightly different view. Although he does see some cause for concern, it's not clear to him that the market has got smaller. He identifies the single biggest change, not as the crisis in large booksellers, but in the disappearance of the independent bookshops that the book chains killed off. In other words, something that happened more than 20 years ago.

I often find books in specialist bookshops (like those at the Tate or Photographers' Gallery) that I don't find anywhere else or via the web. This is because of companies like Art Data who distribute titles published by international museums (take this Stan Douglas book for example). So, specialist bookshops with well-chosen stock can still provide something you won't find on the web. Borton also says that the web has brought some old titles back into circulation that were otherwise sitting ‘dead’ in a warehouse.

He also explained to me how the art book market is not like the general book market. He identifies a large area of growth in the number of books produced by commercial galleries. These may be nicely produced books but it hardly matters, in a conventional publishing sense, if the print run sells well to the public. The purpose of these books is to sell the artworks or artists they represent.

This is just one example of the many ways in which the art book market is subsidised. Which is also why it can continue even when relatively small numbers of books are sold. Borton says that only maybe four or five of his titles sell more than 3,000 copies. ‘I've got a book I want you to distribute, I'd be amazed if you sell one!’ That, for Borton, would be an encouraging proposition from a prospective publisher: it would at least be realistic.

Tom Lovelace's work at Beers Lambert

We were located in the Arts Projection section for ‘solo shows and curated exhibitions’, upstairs from the main floor of the Fair. The first work I spotted was Tom Lovelace’s new work at Beers Lambert Contemporary Art alongside a print from the series that had appeared in Issue 57 of Source. The new work uses frames from a Gilbert and George photo-piece decommissioned by the Tate which Tom had managed to get hold of. I bumped into Tom at the stand and he told me about his recent show Gouge at Galleri Image in Denmark which specializes in up and coming photographers, they are currently showing work by Irish Photographer Miriam O’Connor.

In Preparation no.4, 2011, Tom Lovelace

Across the way in our section were Hoxton Art Gallery showing work by Turkish photographer Guler Ates. The gallery works with a number of young artists, many of who have studied at London colleges. Their next group show includes photographic work by Chelsea College graduate James Bacchi-Andreoli. Nearby were Rise Art who where showing work by Ting Ting Cheng a graduate of the MA Photographic studies at Westminster. I had seen earlier work by Cheng at the Rhubarb festival and it was interesting to see the new work and to find out it had also recently been shown at Kiállítás Elott Galéria, Budapest. Rise Art is slightly unusual in that it uses a board of curators to select work from submissions by artists.

I judge a book by its cover, Ching Ching Teng

Galleries on the main floor showing photography included Purdy Hicks with work by Tom Hunter, Jorma Puranen, Anni Leppala and Bettina Von Zwehl. While at The Ricard Saltoun Gallery you could purchase work by Alexis Hunter, Keith Arnatt, Victor Burgin and Jo Spence (a film about the Jo Spence archive will feature in the new Source Archive Season in March). Over at GBS Fine Art there was photographic work by Veronica Bailey former Jerwood photography prize winner, Emily Allchurch, Susannah Baker-Smith and Helen Sear’s new work Sightlines.  A book of Sear's work is being published  by Ffotogallery with the launch on the 25th February.

Sightlines, Helen Sear

Among those calling by the Source stand were Andy Fallon, one part of a recently formed collective of music photographers who have just opened their new gallery Rock City Art in Bedford. Their aim is to protect their image rights, offer mentoring to younger photographers, run workshops and program exhibitions of music photography related exhibitions.

Peter Ainsworth, who I had met at the Rhubarb and Format festivals, had just finished packing his new prints for participation in State of the Art Photography at NRW-Forum Duesseldorf. Peter is one of the movers and shakers proposed for the show by a panel of photoworld Illuminati that included Andreas Gursky, Thomas Weski, Klaus Biesenbach, Udo Kittelmann, FC Gundlach, Thomas Seelig, Andrea Holzherr, and Werner Lippert.
Like so many gallery photographers Peter balances making his own work with teaching. From his Nottingham campus he reported a new focus amongst students on what they could expect for their increased fees in terms of technical resources, along with an overall decline in applications.

Zone of Transit, Peter Ainsworth

Irish artist Emer Gillespie who I'd met at Arles had been busy in 2011 exhibiting at RUA Red in Dublin alongside Irish artist Simon Burch and her work had been included in the international group show Altered States at the Foley Gallery in New York. Also moving beyond the UK, Gina Glover was looking forward to taking part in the Sense of Place exhibition in Beaux de Arts in Brussels curated by Liz Wells.

Picture me, Picture you, Emer Gillespie

Photo 50 the dedicated photography exhibition within the Fair was curated this year by Sue Steward, writer and regular contributor to Radio 2’s Arts Show. The exhibition included work by Esther Teichmann who featured in issue 55 of Source and Michael Wolf whose book Real Fake Art by is reviewed in the current issue. Steward was on hand to discuss the work with visitors to the Fair and speaking to her briefly she revealed she hopes to curate an exhibition at a gallery in Northern Ireland in the near future.

Photo 50 exhibition

In the quiet moments I managed to speed read Elizabeth Edwards excellent new book The Camera as Historian, published by Duke University Press which is out in March. Her exploration of Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885 -1918, provided a perfect counterpoint to the contemporary photography at the Fair.

Opening night, Copper House Gallery at Fire, Dublin

Darek Fortas was the winner of the award in 2011 and it was his work that was on show. The six months available to produce new work was a challenge and it seemed appropriate that Darek had chosen to develop his graduate project from Dublin Institute of Technology. It was work that I had also selected as part of Graduate Photography Online  so it was interesting to see what a little bit more time had contributed to the project.

The work was introduced on the night by Darek’s old tutor Anthony Haughey. Anthony’s own work, which was featured in issue 65 of Source, had been on show at the gallery in October.

Anthony Haughey, providing the inside information

The evening was also the launch of Propeller 2012 which will continue the collaboration between Fire and Source. This year the award is open to any student based in Ireland or Northern Ireland as well as Irish students studying abroad. Full details of the competition are online.

The deadline for submissions is the 5^th June 2012 and its something that’s well worth considering if you are soon to be an Irish graduate.

I was planning to do a roundup of the photobooks published in 2011. We have started to review self published books this year and the job of finding out what has been published, and deciding what to review, has become even more challenging. Larissa Leclair's list of her favourite self published books of the year (most of which I hadn't seen before) is a particularly fine selection - drawing together a wide variety of high-quality books.

Can we draw any conclusions from this and other lists? One Year of Books – another consistently interesting list, made up of books added to a private collection – suggests compiling a list of lists, which is exactly what Eyecurious has done. In first place, curiously, are two books about crimes, Redheaded Peckerwood and A Criminal Investigation. Lots of people seemed to like Ricardo Cases' Paloma al aire (which we have just reviewed) but it's not all small or self published books: Prestel, Aperture, Steidl, Dewi Lewis all feature as well.

Going back over the books we have reviewed over the last 12 months and comparing it with these ‘books of the year’ lists it is noticeable they are all picture books; there are no books about photography. Yet, there are ever more photography books with words in published, and not only for an academic readership. Reaktion continue to put out new titles in their excellent Exposures series. We have just reviewed Photography and Ireland and previously reviewed Photography and Death and Photography and Japan but Chris Pinney's Photography and Anthropology is the one I am most looking forward to reading. These often provide the first general introduction to a photography related subject and are well illustrated, yet not mentioned in anyone's best photography book lists.

Other ongoing trends in books about photography include the steady trickle of philosophically inclined books – including James Elkin's What Photography Is and Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature – that have continued to appear from large and small publishers. Another interesting trend has been reprints. Steidl (who republished Lewis Baltz's Candlestick Point this year and a Baltz boxed set last year) and Errata Editions continue to republish classic and less well known photobooks. However, the most striking example this year was the lavish reprint of The Pencil of Nature, which seemed to pass without notice (Geoffrey Batchen gave it it a mixed review in issue 67). This is surely a book anyone seriously interested in photography would want to look at, but which has not been available in a good recent edition (even if this new edition is not exactly cheap).

So I will pick five books, perhaps not the best photobooks of the year, but books that are likely to change the way I think about the medium.

In no particular order:

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, with an introduction by Colin Harding, KWS

Chris Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, Reaktion

Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography), Penguin Press

Janina Struk, Private Pictures. Soldiers' Inside View of War, I. B. Tauris

Robert Crawford, The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal, and the Birth of Photography. Birlinn

As part of a new series of interviews on collectives, Source asked Rory O'Toole from the Cork Analogue Photographers, ten questions:

1.  Can you fill us in on your background?

Cork Analogue Photographers left Crawford College in 2008 and we set up the group after a meeting in a pub. Within a year we were part of 3 exhibitions and generated more than 100 web posts about our work and the photography we like. We continue to host group shows all have very active portfolio websites.

Some members have an outdoor lunch after spending the morning in the darkroom

2.  What are your ambitions as a group?

Our ambition is to continue working as a group of artistic photographers using the medium of film.  Film has become ever more difficult to find and expensive to buy, while lab facilities and darkroom facilities are becoming rarer.   There is a beautiful craft to shooting film and printing from film, particularly in black and white, that we feel should not be lost. Although film has died out in the mainstream, we do feel that it is a medium that artists will continue to use, and we want to be part of that.
We would like to become well known in Ireland as an artistic group expressing their vision via film-based photography. We would also like to be known locally in Cork as a community-based group, and work within own local community

3.  What resources do you share?

Film, paper, chemicals - purchased via members subs. Cameras are all owned by individual members, but a bit of sharing goes on there occasionally!

4.  How regularly do you meet as a whole group and as smaller groups?

Some members based in Cork city might meet a few times a week, otherwise the regular monthly meetings and any planned projects

5.  How do you fund your group?

 Currently self funding via subscription. We have had some arts council funding in the past to help fund a project and exhibition in Gallerie Nautique in Cork.

6.    Where have you exhibited most recently?

We have exhibited collaboratively in Dublin with the Guerilla Exhibition group as a part of PhotoIreland festival.

Cork Analogue Photographers collaborated with Guerilla Exhibition for a calculated attack on the streets of Dublin as part of PhotoIreland Festival 2011

7.   What are your common interests?

 Art, photography. We're not 'gear heads', and don't generally bring cameras to meetings, but if somebody has acquired some interesting old camera, we're always happy to take a look!

8.     How do you join the Cork Analogue Photographers group?

 Just contact us, come to a meeting. We're a small friendly group, and happy to meet fellow photographers!

9. What advice would you give someone about to start a collective?

 Think about why you are setting up the collective, and what you want to get out of it.  Lay out your plans or goals in a structured way, and on paper.  You probably won't follow this as it's originally conceived, but it helps to guide your vision. Meet regularly and define roles for core members.  Most importantly, if there is money involved or funding is needed, get this straight.

10.  What problems might a new collective face?

Money is the most likely cause of all serious rows in a group or collective!  Define how much members will need to contribute, keep records of money coming in and money spent.

Stills Gallery in Edinburgh

Two weeks ago I spoke to photography students in Falmouth and one of the questions I asked them was if they felt part of a photography community. Some did, some saw the university as their community, but most explored the photography world online. There's lots of stuff online but there is also a lot missing. If the experience doesn't translate online, if there is no easy way to link to it and if there are no advocates, then bits of the world remain invisible to the web.

There are many examples of this in photography such as old photo magazines (here's an exception - these recollections of Creative Camera, but try to find out about Ffotoview or the Open Eye Gallery magazine and you won't get far) but the most striking lacuna is photography galleries. In Ireland and the UK the photography galleries first grew up in the 1970s. To see their importance you only need to look at the CVs of now famous photographers like Martin Parr (who had his early shows at Impressions Gallery) or Paul Graham. These galleries each have 40-year exhibition histories that are invisible online (here's the exhibitions for the Gallery of Photography back to 1999, but what about 1978 - 1999?). This might give the impression that no one is visiting these galleries any more but in 2009/10 the Photographers' Gallery received 381,615 visitors and even the quietest regional galleries get more than 1,000 people a show, which is probably more than would see any publication of the same work.

So, we have a network of well-established galleries, with long and varied histories and eager contemporary audiences, how are they represented online? Let's try the web's reference book of choice, Wikipedia. Of the 11 photo galleries that have existed for more than 20 years: the Gallery of Photography, Belfast Exposed, Focal Point, Ffotogallery, Stills, Open Eye, Street Level, Impressions, Side Gallery, Photofusion and the Photographers Gallery only three have entries on Wikipedia, the Photographers' Gallery, Ffotogallery and Belfast Exposed (and they are pretty scant). Given that Wikipedia can record all the villages in Lincolnshire (where more of the residents are sheep than people) this seems a peculiar blindness to me.

At the beginning of this year the Director of Impressions Gallery, Anne McNeill, called a meeting of the people who run photography organisations to discuss ‘collaborations and networks’. If a new generation of people interested in photography are learning about the medium via the web it would appear there is still plenty for this network to talk about, perhaps starting with a request for volunteers to dash off a few Wikipedia entries...

Impressions Gallery

I was at Impressions Gallery in Bradford on Saturday, as part of the Ways of Looking Festival, to meet photographers and try to find new work for Source to publish in our portfolio pages. We had received over 120 initial submissions by email, which I had whittled down to a shortlist of seven photographers to meet on the day.

Davide Maione is the photographer in the picture. He is a recent graduate from the MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster. He was one of the photographers I had selected as part of the MA Graduate Photography section of the Source website. So, although I had some sense of his work, it was useful to be able to discuss it in person and to see what he had been working on before and after his final graduate show.

It proved an exciting day in terms of all the work I got to see (and a welcome break from the office). I asked some of the photographers to send a tighter edit of the pictures they showed me, tailored to the eight pages of the portfolio section. This will feed into a wider editorial discussion. If any of them survive that they will end up in the pages of the magazine.

Davide Maione (left) shows John Duncan his work

I was also able to meet up with Anne McNeill and Pippa Oldfield from Impressions Gallery to find out who is on their radar. And, being a festival, there were other photographers about, including Alex Currie of the Human Endeavour Collective and Red Saunders who is showing at Impressions. Stuart Griffiths was also there to launch his new book The Myth of the Airborne Warrior along with editor Gordon MacDonald.

The Hungarian Social Club Bradford

Diane Bielik installation, inside the Hungarian Social Club

Walking around the festival’s carefully curated shows – on the theme of ‘evidence’ – it was interesting to see Diane Bielik’s work which had been published in issue 66 of Source. The prints were pasted up at the old Hungarian Social Club where the original images had been made. Downtown, the hoardings around the temporary urban garden were being put to good to use, to exhibit Bradford Grid’s ongoing photographic survey of the city. And, at the National Media Museum it was good to have my lapsed faith in documentary photography renewed by the Daniel Meadows retrospective. His book and a number of exhibitions at the festival will be reviewed in the next issue of Source.

I will be at Street Level in Glasgow on the 12th November to look at more work from photographers. The submission deadline for this is Friday 28th October and full details are in the submissions section of the Source web site. After that I hope to  be in Cardiff at Ffotogallery in February.

Bradford Grid Collective, installation on hoardings City Centre

Starting a photography degree is exciting and daunting, there will be new people to get to know, equipment to get your head around, ideas to mull over, lengthy reading lists, and all this whilst working out how to pay rent and buy two weeks food for under a tenner!  Source has some collective experience of what a photography course entails and some lessons learned the hard way, so we thought we'd pass on some handy tidbits for those fledgling photographers just beginning their academic journey;

Your classmates will be your creative peers

1. Make friends with the other students.

It might sound obvious, but your classmates are your creative peers, they will have a range of experiences, all different from yours and this is the time to share all that experience, knowledge and passion. Once you have left the supportive environment of university, it can be hard to find people to bounce ideas off, see exhibitions with, or even just to share equipment and facilities with. If you shut yourself off and work in isolation, you are less likely to grow as a practitioner (and no one will buy you a pint...).  Don't however, restrict yourself to fellow photographers, depending on the institution you go to, there will be an array of other students studying interesting things with ideas that run parallel to your own.

Try out new equipment

2. Don't be afraid to try out new things.

Hopefully this will be applicable to every area of your new life as a student. As a photography student in particular you have the luxury of experimenting for a few years before you have to try and find a way of working in the non-academic world. You will have access to studios and cameras which will suddenly be more expensive to play with the minute you graduate, so try them out and ask your classmates to help you if a process is unfamiliar. At university you will have the luxury of time to experiment and the freedom to try approaches that won't work out.

3. Read about photography whenever you can.

Your reading list is a good start, though remember it is only a guide and will range across the varied interests of the people you are taught by as well as standard photography essentials from Berger to Sontag.  Aside from these, explore your physical library in person and not just on the computer database. Images that don't strike you on-screen may jump out at you when you browse physically. Don't feel obliged to limit yourself to photography books either, photography doesn't exist in a vacuum, your practice needs to be relevant to be interesting. A decent daily or weekend broadsheet read is a good habit to start. Journals in your areas of interest outside of photography can spark off ideas and good fiction is a wonderful way to think roundly about a subject. Obviously photography journals like ourselves and others will give you a much more up to date critique of photography and will likely show you work you haven't encountered before. Blogs and websites too can generate discussion and debate, in fact we have already gathered up Ten Photography-Related Blogs You Should Read which is a good starting point for any research around the current issues in photography.

4. Count your pennies.

Photography is not cheap. Decent equipment isn't easy to buy on a part-time wage and will need updating every few years. Lenses and bodies will need to be added to and updated, even old manual cameras can set you back the equivalent of a month's rent!  With all of your camera and computer equipment lying around in your halls or shared accommodation, see if you can extend your parents insurance to cover you while away from home. Depending on the facilities at your institution, buying, processing and scanning film can quickly make a dent in your semester budget. This won't change when you leave uni, so it is good idea to get into the habit of budgeting. In the big, bad freelance photography/artistic world, you will regularly be asked to account for your expenses, be it travel or sustenance, in order to quote for jobs and apply for funds.  Whilst at university it is great to get the financial help that part-time work can offer, and most university towns have seasonal work catering to their transient populations.  Student Beans is one of a few sites giving money saving tips, jobs and offers to students throughout the UK and Campus.ie gives a few guides to student life in Ireland.

Mingle with the people who might shape your future at openings and events.

5. Attend or Organise Cultural Events

Go to galleries, visit museums, attend photo festivals or start a film club. Exposure to all things cultural is great for your outlook, research and social life. It can also be a cheap way to have an evening out, (most exhibition openings are in the evening and most have a free glass of wine or two for attendees) with the bonus of being able to mingle with the people who might shape your future as well as the artists themselves. Most cities in Ireland and the UK are involved in a late night art project once a month, and if you are in any of the major cities, there will no doubt be something you can see for free every week. Join or organise a film club, a book club or anything else you feel would widen your horizons. Some free events can be catalysts for collaborations and inspiration for your own work. How will you organise your own end of uni show unless you have been to some exhibitions yourself? Also, don't forget to support your own university, visit recent graduates shows, or those in the classes above and below yours, if there are ‘open’ lectures, attend them. The Arts Council for where you are studying will have listings or links to events:

• http://www.creativescotland.com/
• http://www.artscouncil.ie/en/homepage.aspx
• http://www.artswales.org.uk/
• http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/

Gain inside knowledge on how parts of the industry work

6. Get Experience.

Your time at college should be a wonderful educational experience, but it can't teach you everything you will need to know about the photography industry. Tutors' areas of expertise won't cover everything. Try volunteering in your summer holidays. Internships and volunteering opportunities are usually advertised on the same Arts Council sites above. These placements will only be possible if you can afford not to be paid once you leave uni, so for most, expect to do a mixture of donkey work or admin, alongside a few good learning experiences, and gaining inside knowledge on how parts of the industry work. It's not just photographers who need this kind of knowledge and expertise. Studios, agencies, photo-libraries, archives, film, television and radio, press and publications, advertising, galleries, museums, photo-labs, forensic labs, the armed forces and the police, non-profits and charities, architects and web agencies are all involved with photography in some way, as are many other areas of work. Try a few on for size and see what you find yourself to be most excited by and most comfortable in. It can be just as useful to find out what you aren't into as what you are, and the more work-trials you have, the greater knowledge you have to start building a suitable portfolio of work and experience. Places like the AOP, BAPLA and the NUJ have some good information on the kinds of places you might find yourself, but bear in mind a great many places will expect you to contact them directly. Sometimes you can earn yourself a little extra spending money by using your photography skills!  People need many kinds of work or personal images and there is no reason why you can't make money from this whilst still studying. If you want to separate the work you do to earn money from your own work, simply have two websites with two different names. See below!

Ensure you don't slip through the net of picture editors and curators by having your own website

7. Have a web presence.

As mentioned above, two websites might be necessary. If this is the case, then one should be a clear, concise and simple portfolio website with obvious contact details and the other might need to include a download section for clients and more flexibility for uploading new material, with separate email addresses. If you want to do it yourself, you can make it as simple or as complicated as you like, depending on how much you already know or how much you are willing to learn. If you are willing to pay either a friend (in kind) or a professional in hard cash, again this can be as simple or as complicated as you want, but don't obscure the point of the site: the images themselves. Can the people you want to attract see a selection of your work with a succinct introduction? Then your website is doing its job.

There is rarely as much time as you think to make work.

8. Leave enough time for a project and shoot as much as you can.

It's easy to be overly optimistic about the time and money it takes to do anything, and photography projects are no exception. If you take into account your essays, part-time jobs and lecture and tutorial time, as well as holidays – which will be often spent at home where it is often impossible to do the work you promised yourself – there is rarely as much time as you think to make a piece of work. You can still challenge yourself but be realistic with your goals. Don't let a good idea be hampered by administrative restrictions, there are often imaginative ways around them, but equally don't plan a project in Australia if you have 3 months and a few hundred quid to complete it! When you are starting at uni, get used to lugging a camera everywhere, even if it's a little second hand manual that you aren't scared of spilling beer on – it doesn't always have to be your best kit – but the more you practice looking at the ground glass or through the viewfinder, the more you'll get used to making pictures. Everything we do in life requires practice, great singers train their voices so why should image-making be any different?

A diary can become integral to your work

9. Keep a diary of some sort.

It doesn't have to be detailed and it doesn't need to be a litany of your repressed feelings (though if you want to, go ahead!), it doesn't even have to be on paper, but something small and portable to dump your thoughts and ideas in will become a great resource if maintained. A decent smart-phone or a small notebook is fine,  just try not to lose them, back up the digital data from time to time and occasionally look back through your notes and commit any emerging or important ideas to a more permanent record. Sometimes a diary is merely research and sometimes it will be absolutely essential to understanding the progression of your own work. Ten years later you might even look back through it for inspiration...

Sometimes you will need to let off steam

Enjoy yourself.

Enjoy your picture making, enjoy your research, enjoy your peer group and their work and enjoy your lectures. You won't enjoy all your lectures and essays but take what you can out of them and don't be afraid to voice your concerns if you have any, or ask for help if you are finding the writing difficult. Do your best, don't be too hard on yourself and you'll enjoy the projects more. Sometimes you will need to let off steam and sometimes you will need to just chill out in your pyjamas, but work hard and you'll get more out of your photography degree.

Good luck and have fun!

To see if I could find any new photo books I went along to the London Art Books Fair. There I met Daniel Jewesbury (our self published book reviewer) and we compared notes on what we had seen. We also met a number of publishers, some artists, including, once again, the Artists' Books Cooperative. We had just reviewed a book by member of the Cooperative Mishka Henner (positively, fortunately, although he hadn't seen the review) so I asked him how the group had been set up and what his experience of self publishing had been so far.