MA Photography: The Image & Electronic Arts

This module instructs students in all the technical aspects that are required to complete the MA. These are taught through Enabling Sessions and include Digital and Analogue Photography, Web and Interactive Image Manipulation, and Durational and Post-Production. This is an intensive course in these three areas during the first term, and then follow-up instruction (following the needs of each student), in the second and third terms, where more focused and advanced technical processes are taught.

Photography has been understood as the founding innovation for all that we have in our visual world today. But what was that innovation? To bring a world in motion to a halt? The first verifiable evidence that there is such a thing as the past? The start of an all-out mania to get hold of an object or an experience with an image? When these static images were aligned in a sequence and run through a projector, we called them movies.

This module will examine the values and meanings once attached to photography and film as regards their relationship to objective reality, to history and to the part they play for our sense of intimacy in being in the world. Much of photography and film theory have required a second thought these days, as the way we make, look at, and more importantly value images has changed significantly many canonical texts. This module will question the differences between still and moving images and assess their significance in today’s visual social world.

This module builds on the core theory course (‘Ascent of The Image’), which serves as a reference throughout the MA, drawing on the seminars, discussions and reading to stimulate questions around contemporary experience and ongoing work development of the students. The theory course is followed in term two by the present module, Portfolio/Project/Viva Voce, which, alongside the continuation of learning from the three main areas from the previous module, also includes Practice/Theory sessions. These sessions investigate unfamiliar material, drawing out matters such as the relationship between thinking and feeling, the role of process, notions of repetition, the materialisation of objects in time and counter histories among others. This reflective work is situated alongside students’ engagement with Enabling Spaces (of which there are three areas, Digital and Analogue Photography, Durational and Post Production, and Interactive and Web). In these Enabling Spaces students experiment, negotiate new learning and skills, develop their individual work and investigate the changing parameters of their interests. The Enabling Spaces are workshop centered with tutorial attention attached. The process of producing work and reflecting is rounded into a circular process by students presenting their work in progress, in both small groups and to the cohort in a seminar situation. This creates cross-knowledge and appreciation. In this context, each individual student negotiates their development and knowledge, as well as the quality of their particular energies. This process propels the individual qualities of each student’s work. Personal presentations are not marked but serve as a teaching aid: the effect on the energy and quality of work produced is clear.

In the early twenty-first century we take, upload, share and see more images than ever before. The Guardian has declared photography ‘the medium of our time’. This module analyses the contemporary condition of living with photographs. It approaches photographs not only as individual art objects, memory devices and (increasingly doubtful) photojournalistic evidence, but also as flows of data that touch, animate, shape and regulate us in multiple ways. Through this, it explores the socio-political implications of the fact that our modes of understanding the world and making meanings in it, as well as our social relations, are increasingly mediated by images.

The module looks at different photographic practices, analogue and digital, while also exploring photographic infrastructures – from the platforms of ‘the networked image’ such as Instagram or Flickr through to issues of archiving, data storage and technological obsolescence that drives the regular upgrades of our devices. Through the exploration of ‘seeing machines’ such as CCTV, medical imagining, satellite pictures and drone media – which displace human vision from its mastery and knowledge, while also imposing other forms of control – the module then introduces the idea of ‘nonhuman photography’. Students will be asked to reflect on the fact that a large part of the images produced today are not actually made with human audiences in mind but are rather intended to feed the databases of machine learning and AI. We will also considers whether developments such as CGI, computational photography, in-game photography and photogrammetry actually shift the medium towards what some are calling ‘post-photography’.