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| Graduate Selections: |
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| In the first of a number of specially commissioned selections Clare Grafik, curator at The Photographer's Gallery, chooses her favourites from the 2008 'Graduate Photography Online' project. |
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| Clare Grafik's Selection: |
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| In selecting from the photographers and artists graduating from MA and BA courses this year it is striking - and encouraging - to see little or no consensus on what it means to be working with photography today in the UK. The medium continues to have a stalwart flexibility which combines genres and resists easy categorisation. From the eloquent use of readymade images, to accomplished studio-based projects, to documentary approaches, there is a refreshing diversity across the board which bodes extremely well for photographic culture in the coming years. I have chosen five projects from many which reflect, for me, some of this variety, a creative energy and conceptual rigour. |
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| University College Falmouth |
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| Lucy Blowers 'Charlie's Family' |
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Lucy's project is affectionate and tough at the same time. It is about faliability, loss, and photography's role in weaving together the threads of individual and collective identities. |
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| University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham |
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| David Abrahams 'Clockwork Orange Project' & 'Geek' |
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There is a great energy in this work, and an unashamed kitch.
The portraits are striking and uncanny. |
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| University of Westminster |
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| Steve Sabella 'In Exile - States of Mind' |
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I like Steve's use of the photographic surface to produce a kind of visual vertigo. His images flatten and extend the plane of the photographic medium transforming their representational quality to endless data. |
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| Cleveland College of Art and Design |
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| Jill Cole |
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Jill has a very accomplished visual sensibility which enables her to combine a number of different elements into this coherent and striking series of work. |
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| University of Wales, Newport |
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| Elliott Wilcox |
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I like the 'worn-in' formalism of these images, and the marriage of abstraction and textural surface gives them a great sense of movement and depth. |
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| Photograph by Cuny Janssen |
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| About the Selector: |
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| Clare Grafik is a curator at The Photographers' Gallery, London where she has been working since 2003. She has recently worked on exhibitions with David Brittain 'Found, Shared: The Magazine Photowork', with David Hurn on a retrospective of Keith Arnatt's photography, and with photographers Taryn Simon and Antoine d'Agata on solo exhibitions. Catalogue/exhibition projects include Cuny Janssen Finding Thoughts, Zineb Sedira Saphir and Keith Arnatt I'm a Real Photographer and she has written for magazines including Next Level, Art on Paper, and is a contributing editor to Contemporary Magazine. She is currently working on a history of The Photographers' Gallery book with art historian Helen James as the Gallery prepares to embark on its move from Great Newport Street into Soho, November 2008. |
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