Source: Graduate Photography Online 2023 - BA Selections

Each year as part of Graduate Photography Online we ask a number of professionals from the world of photography to review all the BA work submitted and choose their favourites. We hope this makes an interesting introduction to the project as a whole.

What came across strongest to me through all the entries was the sense of students exploring their environments through their photographs – feeling their way around the world visually, experimenting, discovering (as Gary Winogrand once said) what things look like when photographed. There is a lot of darkness and human fragility here, and quite a lot of the work speaks to experiences of isolation, which seems appropriate, perhaps inevitable, given COVID and the effects of lockdown. But the prevalence of introspective observations made me hanker for joy - pictures and projects less concerned with our interiority and more with uplifting viewers, looking outward. Choosing only six series to single out feels tough, perhaps random, when the overall standard is so high.

Selected Photographers:

Selector's Comment: Away from the mood of introspection, Roberts offers a set of “Victorian” portraits in the manner of Fox Talbot – compelling, convincing and very polished.

Selector's Comment: Kara offers multiple photographic approaches in one series, but everything relates, and you get the strongest sense of Kara’s immersion in her topic. The grids are beautiful and this feels like a fragment of a major body of work.

Selector's Comment: I am not sure I understood Holder’s statement entirely – she describes these photographs as “a transgressive iconography to explore the tired tropes… of femininity”. But it doesn’t matter - these are surprising and thrilling images! Holly has a great eye.

Selector's Comment: There’s a classic photographers’ eye at work here, with an echo of Paul Strand in the close-up portrait. They make me want to see more.

Selector's Comment: This is a well-executed series: very tight aesthetically (in terms of their minimal pallet) and very clear in their human argument.

Selector's Comment: I might argue about the inclusion of a couple of pictures in Robinson’s group, which I don’t think quite work, but meanwhile there’s a couple of pictures here that are really amazing. This work and Robinson’s eye is dark, but you are uplifted by their bravura.