Photography BA (Hons)

Photography and the World

(40 credit points, full year)

The module develops your understanding of the complex nature of representation and continues guiding you towards a more self-directed practice. You will make, think, and write about photography and visual cultures, considering audience, narrative, and impact. You will utilise short and long-form storytelling in the process.

It aims to:

• Provide experience of making creative, experimental, and critically informed word
• Develop understanding of critical strategies in the interpretation, analysis, and practice of photography
• Develop a more sophisticated awareness of your emerging practices
• Continue to develop new skills and approaches
• Consider the contexts of your work’s conception, construction, and consumption
• Themes explored come from contemporary photographic culture and may include issues such as surveillance and the data image, documenting the twenty-first century, temporalities of still and moving image, activism, ethics of participation and class perspectives, the ethnographic portrait and colonial discourse, space, place, architecture, and the Anthropocene landscape.

Optional module

You will also choose one 20-credit module from:

• Encountering Objects (delivered entirely online)
• Materials and Making
• Publishing: Experimental Formats
• Typography: Use and Expression
• Telling Stories
• Digital Marketing and Communication
• Music Video
• Sound Art & Design

Live Assignments

(40 credit points, full year)

This module offers students the opportunity to further develop and apply the thematic and practical tools accrued in the first year, through a series of simulated work-like assignments. The emphasis is on moving creatively from interpreting a client brief, to ideas, to realisation, enabling students to interrogate their own creative process while ensuring a client’s intent is clearly and compellingly communicated. Students are directed to foster creative and collaborative approaches to problem solving through a series of briefs representing different career strands and outputs.

This is supported by ongoing research, encouraging students to continue developing an informed and critical perspective, simultaneously helping them to locate industrial opportunities.

By the end of the module, students will be more confident in developing and resolving ideas-driven creative processes that can be applied in different contexts, for different audiences. They will be comfortable constructing coherent and evocative image-based narratives that fulfil briefs whilst forging individual style.

Co Lab: Research, Exploration and Risk-taking

(20 credit points, half year)

Through active participation with team-based problem-solving, you will work together in mixed teams on a project where you will use your creative ideas to generate solutions to the challenge or brief. Your project will allow you to explore how creativity can make an impact in society, as you choose a theme of sustainability, social justice, enterprise and innovation or community. This collaborative learning experience will expose you to a range of new processes and approaches that will develop your creative thinking.

Optional Placement Year (Sandwich)*

We have an option for all of our students to undertake a placement year (Sandwich) and allow you to decide whether this is right for you once you have completed years 1 and 2 of your course. This time spent working in industry provides our students with crucial work experience, which is highly prized and much sought after by employers upon graduation. If you are successful in securing a placement you will have the chance to gain an additional Certificate or Diploma in Professional Practice, dependent on duration.

* If you choose to take the sandwich route option, you will still need to apply for this course with the full-time UCAS code: W640

The recent past and near future of creative storytelling

(20 credit points, full year)

This module introduces students to a range of internationally recognised figures drawn from industry, academia and popular culture. It facilitates student engagement with a wide range of questions, concerns, ideas and practices that are animating the creative industries. The module brings student thinking into live and direct contact with industry, enabling them to road-test their theories, pitch their ideas and make valuable real-world connections. The series offers students invaluable opportunities to research connected audiences (both technologically and thematically connected) from their position at the centre of the discussion.

By the end of the series, students will have first-hand knowledge of compelling storytelling, its constituent parts, its’ production process, its’ intended purposes, applications and impact. They will have been central to internationally networked conversations, seen how they and their participation has been rendered digitally and recognised their impact and the impact of others, on that network. They will have had opportunities to extend their professional networks of industry contacts and related audiences.

Workspace

(40 credit points, first half year)

In this module you will write/set a negotiated brief with guidance from your tutor and produce a final major project realised in a form appropriate to the subject matter. You will test ideas and explore contextual themes of your subject to establish your project. You are required to be innovative and establish the ambition of your photographic practice. Through informed critical research and developmental ideas, you will evaluate your work in progress and its relational context in photographic cultures.

By the end of this module, you will have explored and developed bodies of work in progress which have explored several ideas, identified prospective audiences, and considered strategic approaches to participate in public dialogue.

First Edition

(60 credit points, full year)

In this module you will complete your final major project to the fullest expression of its creative resolution, produced ready for audience engagement. It is where your passion and creative vision take form as a physical or digital interface.

This is a self-directed module, with tutors taking a supporting role, providing guidance in regular formative feedback. By the end of this module, you will have identified and engaged with prospective audiences (employers), ready to share with them compelling visual experiences built on a strong contextual understanding and practical foundation. You will demonstrate an ability to speak clearly with images, to be heard and taken seriously in the world of photography with the ‘First Edition’ of your work.