MA Photography
MA Photography
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible – Oscar Wilde
What photographs show of the world to us, and correspondingly implicate us in how they show, are among questions posed in work by this year’s postgraduate Photography students at the University of Brighton.
Each body of work is a result – or ongoing work in progress – of practice-based enquiry with photography as a principal research method. The course develops an understanding of a medium comprised of different technologies to realise works in as full a range of ways as possible, from found photographs to rendered electronic scans using various materials and processes in and beyond the camera.
There is something particularly uncanny about the work made this year; present in a concentration on the strangely familiar, convergences of the animate and inanimate, the homely and unhomely, the domestic, urban and natural worlds comfortably intimate and unsettling at the same time.
From photographs originally made long ago, newly realised in print as if reborn, to those with inert objects among their subjects, different spatial and temporal distances evoke human fragility and mortality in different ways. Understandings of how photographs make meaning are incorporated into work actively forming associations and dialogues beyond what is depicted.
There is also a strange familiarity in works that involve convergences of new and old techniques, as well as those that picture features of the world ubiquitous in their presence but often unseen by the human eye in everyday encounter. Seeing these works, with Oscar Wilde’s preceding words brought to mind, reveals something of the world’s true mysteries.
Fergus Heron
Course Leader, MA Photography
Image detail courtesy of Mariana Arias Osorio. Copyright of the artist.