The Photography Department understands photography as a medium with no fixed identity. This disregard for a fixed essence is photography’s strength: there is no essential aesthetic purity but rather a multiplicity of rhetorical forms used for the creation of fact, fiction and fantasy.

This year our graduating students have produced works that engage with: representation, identity and history; the still and moving image as a form of thinking and writing; the studio as a performative space to enact situations; and the image as object, and the object as image.

As in previous years, our students have conceived a publication to accompany the Show, in collaboration with students from Communication Art & Design. This is not only a catalogue illustrating an exhibition but also a work in its own right. This year, it uses dialogue and commentary as a structuring device, and aims to construct an open-ended form that enables a dialogical relation between text, image and spectator.

An informed practice of photography acknowledges the heterogeneous traditions of fine art and visual culture and also engages with practices of reading and writing about the image. Our students aim to produce not only images, still or moving, but also analytical thinking in order to study what photography is, for the purpose of discovering what it can become.