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‣ Special Guest Selection

It's been a real pleasure to see the representative scope of undergraduate and graduate photography in the UK, Ireland and beyond. It is the diversity of the ambitions that has struck me during the selection process and the energised ways in which emerging photographers are reinvigorating established photographic genres. There were many really thorough photographic investigations in the submissions, exploring architecture, individual lives and communities, as-well-as some really strong meditations upon the medium of photography itself.

I like the elegant drama of the series Fade in Darkness. Adam and Norman harness a range of historical references - from Sultan and Mandel's 1977 use of engineering and scientific photographs for Evidence, to the unsettling richness of 20th century Eastern European photography. Fade in Darkness makes a strong proposal of how potent black and white photography can be in a chromatic, digital era.

Pedro Guimarães's Paraisópolis project is extensive and ambitious, creating a web of observations of the favelas, the slums, of Brazil. Guimaraes manages to create an open-ended type of photographic story that gives over a sense of the enormity and complexity of this vast, enclosed and impoverished society. The project combines different photographic tempos, from intriguing, singular images to portraits and expansive landscapes.

The seemingly conventional framework of Andrew Moynehan's Dadford - a photo story about a personal journey through a northern English city - is refreshingly reworked by this photographer. By layering the photographer's relationship with his father into the journey through the city - combined with a confident resistance to photographically 'pictorialising' - Moynehan creates a subtly challenging body of work.

The space of the analogue darkroom has become a subject in contemporary art photography, marking the passing of the default, analogue working processes of photography. Simon White's photographs are a great addition to the meditation upon this moment of change. His use of black and white photography and his knowing homage to the minimalist frame of Lewis Baltz point to another axis shift in photographic practice from the early 1970s.

Tereza Zelenkova clearly has a highly sophisticated and intuitive relationship with photography. Her combining of observational and staged photographic processes - the confidence to deploy photographic style as a motif - is very much of this moment. Ultimately, the success of her practice relies on a thorough, even ruthless, editing and sequencing process that creates a dynamic and compelling host of visual signs.

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