Source: Graduate Photography Online - 2018 Selections

Each year as part of Graduate Photography Online we ask three professionals from the world of photography to review all the MA/MFA work submitted and make some recommendations. These are published both in a supplement in the magazine and here on our website. We hope this makes an interesting introduction to the project as a whole.

The opportunity to encounter and engage with work being made by graduates up and down the country has been hugely rewarding, and a timely reminder as to the power of the photographic medium. Many of the bodies of work submitted reflect and address the burning issues of the day, from gender, identity and sexuality to loss, mental health and the ongoing quest of the self in these divisive times. It was heartening to view such a broad spectrum of aesthetic strategies, from process based photography to delicate landscapes, exquisite portraits to well researched documentary projects. While it was a challenge to whittle the selection down to 6 submissions, my selection is based on my response to bodies of works that compelled me to return to the images time and again, be it for the narratives they recount or the simple beauty of the image and hopefully a combination of both.

Selected Photographers:

Selector's Comment: Nude yet covered with props, Lorimer sites her playful and at times uncanny mise-en-scènes in empty or sparsely furnished rooms that have a distinctly functional and domestic quality to them. Inserting, hiding, blending and revealing her naked figure in amongst the vestiges of the everyday, Lorimer's black & white photographs had a confidence and precision to them that I found beguiling. While Lorimer's work recalls the surreal world of Francesca Woodman, her photographs are firmly steeped in the banality and hard edges of the modern world and reflect on the relationship between women, domesticity and the body in this age of #MeToo.

London College of Communication - MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography

Selector's Comment: 'Sunday Best' is a documentary project that brings together studied straight-on portraits of individuals and groups of twos and threes decked out in their Sunday finest, set in the urban landscape alongside bright or brooding interior shots of religious sites that reflect the plurality of voices and identities that make London such a vibrant city. A celebration of diversity and religious beliefs set against the backdrop of a growing nativism and nationalist fervour as Brexit looms ever nearer, I was drawn to Waggett's extensive project for its clarity of vision and in particular her vivid portraits of both men and women, young and old, that capture the joy, timidity, stoicism, tenderness and familial ties that bind these distinct communities together. Ultimately the series serves as a reminder of how a multiplicity of cultures can enrich a society.

Selector's Comment: From the very beginning of photography, architecture has been its most willing accomplice and photographers have continuously returned to the subject of the built environment to disrupt our perception of the world around us and draw our attention to the effect of the urban surroundings on our psyche. I was drawn to this body of work that employs strategies of distortion, blurred imagery, super imposition and double exposures to communicate an anxiety and general sense of discombobulation with the modern world. Transforming the hard angular lines of the skyscraper into soft unstable structures or by changing the orientation of the buildings to become the foundation for new ones, the photographer manipulates our existing landscape to offer up new architectural possibilities.

Selector's Comment: Wallace offers the viewer a world where close-up landscapes of densely wooded areas are combined, at times surreptitiously, with black & white images of the artist either as an adult or child, that for me seems to heighten the narrative potential of these seemingly idyllic spaces. By covertly inserting herself into these landscapes, the work hints both at a dark undertow while also alluding to the harmony between subject and object. I also appreciated how the artist allowed herself to be guided by the natural form of the body or landscape to determine the overall composition.

London College of Communication - MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography

Selector's Comment: Polish-born Korycki turned to his home country to observe and record the little known history of the Tatar Muslim community in Podlaskie, a lush and forested region in the east of the country. Bringing together archival images that serve to testify to the longstanding settlement of this unique community as well as verdant landscapes, detailed portraits and studies of the built environment, Korycki's documentary project contradicts the widely held image of Poland as an ethnically homogenous state. As far-right nationalist sentiment pervades the Polish body politic, Korycki's documentation of this small yet flourishing community attests to a time in the country's history when migrant communities were accepted into the broader social fabric. A timely subject given Europe's curent fraught relationship to migration and Islam in particular.

Selector's Comment: A meditation on love and grief; an exploration of loss; a reverie of blue. Le Brocq's images, which are presented neither chronologically nor thematically, appear like photographic fragments and are infused with a poetry and bittersweet logic that I found compelling and made me, despite myself, return to the images again and again. Favouring the historical Cyanotype process, each portrait, landscape or interior shot is rendered more ethereal, more romantic, as a result of the soft blue wash suggesting both a mourning for the past but also a potential dream like future.

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