Source: Graduate Photography Online 2025 - MA/MFA Selections

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

The selection process was not easy, but it was interesting to see the issues, topics and age ranges of the graduates. The photographers who interested me most were those who engaged various strategies to explore the complexity of the issues they addressed. They grappled and negotiated with issues such as how our identity has been and is currently being shaped, for example, through personal data extraction, technology and its dissemination. Similarly, the interrogation of systems and apparatus of power, and authority of institutions. I was interested and pleased to find that photography was not just used as a descriptive device tool, but utilised different iterations and materialities, creating dialogue between performance, fiction, text, installation or documentary images. The projects that interested me were ones that married aesthetic devices with rigorous engagement with the subject, thus positioning the viewer to be invested in the subject and not as some passive observer. I hope these practices can develop and continue to grow in these difficult times.

Selected Photographers:

Selector's Comment: The legacy of diasporic peoples is one where we exist between two worlds, two cultures, and objects become powerful vessels of memory and cultural anchorage. This can become more apparent for people who are in exile, or who politically had to leave their homes. In 'Faces of Resilience', Masoud Teimory photographs Iranians like himself who were displaced from Iran after the 1979 revolution. All of the people in these portraits have made Sussex their home, embodying the process of transformation, resilience, and dignity. The objects from the 'Haft Seen', the table that is symbolic of the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, are vessels that embody memory, belonging, as well as pride. They become cultural anchors of a far-away land that was once home. These images suggest that many things can coexist at the same time for immigrants; home can be one of them. Pain, absence, and loss coexist with joy, hope, and pride, where both worlds—past and present—collapse together, intertwined with studio portraits. These objects are a constant reminder of that connection.

Selector's Comment: This project activates personal archives, objects of colonial and cultural symbolism and documentary photography to explore the complexity of migration and immigrant experience, alongside the intersection of class, race, cultural diaspora and family. Told through the photographic archives of Chandi’s grandfather and contemporary images, the project traces the evolution of immigrant identity as a negotiation of multiple cultural influences. The row of portraits of Raithatha’s grandfather is a beautiful, poignant, and effectively clear articulation of this process and its complexity. It is an intimate and sensitive portrayal, which also looks beyond the frame of the photograph and utilizes different descriptive codes. Through written and oral histories, along with physical personal objects, we are asked to engage with not just a visual experience, but one that includes wider sensory potential. The use of the zebra skin table once owned by Colonel Ewart Grogan, who killed the zebra, acts as a metaphor for the mechanisms of colonialism, of violence, the dominance of land and people. This story of his grandfather's journey is one that begins in Kenya and leads to a new life in the UK, its complexities of identity and belonging played out in both public and the domestic space.

Selector's Comment: Milo’s project is an interesting and inventive approach in presenting the origins, ideologies and the apparatuses involved in the underpinnings of a construction British identity and Empire in the 19th century. Utilizing the aesthetics of documentary practice, performance, and speculative inquiry, the project seeks to undermine the process of myth-making through a reconstruction of British history and the Roman empire. Creating a dialogue between images that refer to Roman classicism, empire and contemporary environments, Lethorn suggests the interrelation between the past and the present.

Selector's Comment: Photography becomes the vehicle of exploring grief, ideas of absence and presence appear in this project. Persoglio attempts to piece together fragments of memory, from spaces and possessions related to her brother who died in 1998. The imagery acts like pointers to these fragments, spaces that apparently have not changed since his death. What we see is the constant presence: a reminder of the absence of people who are no longer with us. Within the series we are presented with the repetition of the traces of objects, shadows cast by a tree, or a shadow looming over an old letter, portraits of a young man. We are constantly reminded of something that always alludes to us within the frame, and nothing is fully resolved. In many ways this is the strength of the project, we can never fully form the details and the information presented to us. Always fleeting, always with opacity, like our memory, a constructed reality of reconstructed fragmented details.

Selector's Comment: 'Hi, Trojan Horse' presents a multi dimensional layered project, that explores our relationship between the apparatus of surveillance capitalism, technology and aesthetics. The project montages a multitude of glitched imagery and extracted data from captured images. These visuals appear spontaneous and innocuous but hint at a more nefarious purpose. What was particularly interesting and effective was how the project exposes the role of aesthetics — specifically the use of sugary sweet colours as a motif in the seduction process. Thus, emphasising our own complicity in the extraction of our data and how visual conditioning takes place, asking us what we feel and not just what we see.

Selector's Comment: 'Sanctuary' deals with the very prominent subject matter of asylum seekers, refugees, migration, and the environments known as asylum hotels. Bull handles the complexities of the subject with sensitivity and dignity, using the camera as a device for collaborative storytelling while employing strong aesthetic considerations. The work interweaves written testimony with images of their day-to-day temporality while they volunteer at the charity, all while maintaining their anonymity and safety. It is this awareness of anonymity through the project that subtly allows the reader the potentiality of reading the precariousness of the asylum seekers existence.