Photography | Four years BA (Hons)

Year 0 is a preparatory year which provides you with a focused introduction to your chosen area of study. Upon successful completion, it will secure your place on the three year degree without further application or interview. 

If you choose the four-year option, during the Year 0 you’ll work alongside Film Production students, learning the fundamentals of editing and skills in moving and still image.

The Poetics of Space
We'll introduce you to practices and procedures for exploring the relationship of sound to image in time-based productions. Thematic content will be the exploration of ideas about place and space.

Personal Research Project
This unit provides you with the opportunity to explore your own personal creativity by looking at development work by a range of artists, photographers and filmmakers. The emphasis will be on your personal exploration of ideas and sources of inspiration, resulting in a one-minute moving image project, or a series of still images (which could include text).

Practices of Looking
This unit is designed to provide you with a grounding in the conventions of academic writing and discourse in film and media studies. Through the examination of codes and conventions of reading images in contemporary culture, you will be introduced to a range of theoretical models and debates

Storytelling and Staging
Through an exploration of different forms of storytelling, you'll be encouraged to analyse texts and to create your own stories. You'll also be introduced to ideas of narrative and paintings, and work on the staging of a story.

You'll be introduced to the theoretical study and creative practice of photography, as well as the basic tools needed in the production and manipulation of photographic imagery and text. You'll learn the fundamental technical skills required to progress and develop your practice.

We'll introduce you to a range of approaches to photography, utilising digital and darkroom techniques to control studio and location production. These strategies will be underpinned by theoretical and historical frameworks to explore how to create meaning in your work.

Constructed Image
You’ll explore picture-making and the notion of what a constructed image is. You’ll gain the skills needed to create your own constructed images, as well as studio production, darkroom and digital modes of picture-making and image manipulation.

Photography in Context
This unit explores photography’s potential to create meaning within relevant theoretical and contextual frameworks.

Documentary Practices
In this unit you will research, explore and experiment with a variety of practices, conceptual approaches and presentation methods to consider the photographic representation of the external world.

Narrative
This unit invites you to experiment with different ways of using photography to ‘tell stories’. Photographs are regularly praised for their ability to ‘reveal’, ‘explain’, or ‘tell’ a story. This unit will explore a range of narrative strategies, while questioning photography’s ability to ‘speak’ and whether or not a photograph’s meaning can ever be fixed.

This year is about solving the problems of how to represent ideas in photography by thinking strategically.

Building on the critical introduction to photography practices and assumptions carried out in Year 1, we'll consider ways of appropriating, modifying, negotiating, challenging or replacing existing conventions of representation.

You’ll explore critical ideas that challenge the conventions of photographic practice. During this period, you’ll produce an exhibition and, through building links with industry, you’ll begin to locate an external context for your work. 

Photographic Communities
This unit explores notions of practice-based community and photographic networks. It will help you to develop professional skills to navigate your career through a variety of complex social, political, economic and environmental systems. Photograph’s meaning is determined by the nature of the image, audience and context. How you position your practice defines its identity.

Critical Approaches
Considering the larger cultural and philosophical implications of photographs and their meaning, you’ll learn not only the core themes but also the boundaries of your discipline. You'll examine key aspects of a range photographic practices and theory, in relation to their historical origins.

Vision and Knowledge
This unit asks you to think critically about the ‘objectivity’ of photography. Many photographic practices, including documentary, survey, scientific, medical, forensic, anthropological and military all have at their core the idea that ‘seeing is believing.’ The implication here is that visual representation is equivalent to ‘knowledge’. However, the ‘meanings’ of representations are in fact often determined by the contexts in which they are produced and presented.

Experimental Practice
You will explore a range of processes, treatments and applications to push the boundaries of photography, and test the relationships between subject matter, treatment and audience.

Study Abroad (optional)
This optional unit is designed to broaden your educational experience and deepen your understanding of cultural diversity. It will enable you to study within a different cultural context and gain fresh perspectives.

You'll have the opportunity to draw on the experience, knowledge and skills acquired so far. A core theme of this year is the major project, where you choose the areas of your practical studies that you'd like to concentrate on.

You'll be provided with a range of professional and career planning topics which help you to develop your future career.

The final year enables you to use your skills and knowledge to develop a major project through a practically-based critical inquiry. You’ll develop a specialist area of expertise that you’ll position in a professional context to develop your future career.

Independent Practice
This unit will provide you the opportunity to establish foundations for your final major project. You'll research and develop your ideas through further experimentation to produce a body of work that distinguishes your photographic practice.

Resolution
The Resolution unit represents the culmination of your studies and should involve the independent and sustained research, development, production and presentation of a significant photographic project. This project can define your degree experience and your lifelong photographic practice; it is very much a launch pad for your future calling.

Dissertation
This unit consists of a substantial period of sustained, individually negotiated research on a subject that is likely to be related to the contextual and/ or theoretical concerns of your discipline or chosen area of practice, towards the provision of structured written argument.

This course offers the opportunity to study abroad for part of your Year 2. To find out more about studying abroad as part of your course please see the Study Abroad section:

• Study abroad information

As a long-established photography course, our renowned teaching team bring with them high-profile industry connections, both nationally and internationally. We regularly arrange visits to, and lecturers from, a wide range of companies and institutions, such as:

• Autograph
• Impressions Gallery
• National Media Museum
• Berg, Blackwell, Focalpress, Routledge and other publishers
• bookRoom
• Brighton Photo Biennial and Brighton Photo Fringe
• National Institute of Design, India
• The Photographers’ Gallery, London
• Photography & Culture journal
• Photoworks magazine
• Source: The Photographic Review.

 As well as a course team including a number of practising professionals, we're connected with the Association of Photographers, a national body that works to give student members a head start as photographic practitioners.

Skilled and creatively gifted photographers are needed across an enormous range of industries, and many of our graduates have secured professional roles in a variety of fields, including:

• Fashion
• Editorial
• Advertising
• Fine Art
• Documentary-making
• Curatorial posts
• Gallery/ project management
• Writing
• Teaching
• Lecturing
• Technical support.

Alumni of this course include Paul Seawright, Gareth McConnell, Eileen Perrier, Andrew Bruce, Jane Bown, Stephen Bull and Anna Fox.