Education

Roll up! Photo Meet returns from 08-09 June

“It is an opportunity to meet people in the industry in a relaxed and enjoyable setting,” says Mimi Mollica, photographer and founder of Offspring Photomeet. “It’s easy to build contacts when you hang out for a couple of days with editors and publishers who share the same passion as you.” Offspring Photomeet will return to Space Studios in Hackney in June for its 5th annual portfolio review, offering one-on-one reviews with experts from Tate Modern, British Journal of Photography, The Guardian and more.

2 May 2018

Francesca Woodman and Egon Schiele paired at Tate Liverpool

How can art express movement in the human figure? And how does it convey emotion and strain through depictions of the body? A summer exhibition at Tate Liverpool will try to answer those questions by pairing work by influential 20th century American photographer, Francesca Woodman with drawings by Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. Life in Motion: Egon Schiele/Francesca Woodman, which opens on 24th May, will investigate how Woodman’s photographs depict both physical movement and what she referred to as “the body’s inner force”. It will also highlight the relationship between the two artists’ work, and how Woodman’s images of the body from the late 1970s illuminate Schiele’s drawings – which were made more than fifty years before.

21 March 2018

Collaboration on show in Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto

Photography is often considered a solitary pursuit, but the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto, Canada hopes to overturn this conception with a research project led by artists, scholars, and curators such as Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler. Now an exhibition at RIC called Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography is putting their work on view. Featuring approximately 90 photographic projects the work on show demonstrates some of the many ways photographers have collaborated with their subjects and other participants. It includes Wendy Ewald’s Reciprocating in Arabic installation, which combines image and text in an attempt to show the experience of walking through the Arabic language, and WEB Du Bois’ The Potential of the Archive I, a look into the history and present challenges of black America, among many other projects.

6 March 2018

Jason Evans’ Flower Power celebrates colour and community

“The Garden Gate Project has a reputation in my neighbourhood,” says Jason Evans, who has just published a zine with participants from the Margate-based charity. “Established almost 20 years ago for people with learning difficulties and/or mental ill health, the Garden Gate Project is visited by various members of the community for a range of seasonal activities.” He was volunteering there two years ago when the organisers realised he was a photographer, and invited him to come up with ideas for the programme, which centres mainly on Horticultural Therapy. His first project with GGP was Tool Shed Dark Room, which saw Evans improvising with participants “without mains electricity or an enlarger to make photograms using materials from the garden”.

23 February 2018

Sign up for free NOOR masterclasses in Stockholm, Brussels, and Warsaw

It’s one of the best-respected photo agencies in the world, representing image-makers such as Nina Berman, Yuri Kozyrev, and Kadir van Lohuizen – and yet NOOR is offering three four-day masterclasses completely free of charge to “young, aspiring photojournalists and documentary photographers”. Run by NOOR and the NOOR Foundation with the support of Nikon Europe, the masterclasses will take place in Warsaw (26 February-01 March), Stockholm (12-15 March), and Brussels (19-22 March).

22 January 2018

The Hyman Collection donates 125 photographs to Yale Center for British Art

London-based collectors Claire and James Hyman have donated 125 photographs to the Yale Center for British Art, gifting key works by leading figures in British photographic history – including Bill Brandt, Bert Hardy, Roger Mayne, Tony Ray-Jones, Martin Parr, Chris Killip and Anna Fox – to the 44-year-old institution in New Haven in the US. It’s a move that could be interpreted as a damning indictment of UK institutions’ commitment to collecting British photography – particularly as, the last time BJP caught up with James Hyman (our May 2015 issue), he said building such collections has been “left to private individuals, and it shouldn’t have been”. In the same interview Hyman also singled out Birmingham Library and its curator of photography collections Peter James for praise – yet in the intervening time, both the photography archive and James’ job have fallen victim to funding cuts. But Hyman says the donation should be viewed in a positive light as evidence of the growing interest in British photography abroad – an interest which may spark more commitment in the UK.

18 January 2018

The Shadow Archive, vernacular portrait photography at The Walther Collection, NYC

The Walther Collection has kicked off an 18-month exploration of vernacular photography with a show titled The Shadow Archive: An Investigation into Vernacular Portrait Photography. Taken from the 1850s to the present day, the collected portraits depict groups such as ‘migrant laborers’, ‘inmates of an asylum’, ‘criminal photographs’, and ‘G&G Precision Works Photographic Identity Badges’, and, says the organisers, show how “identification photographs have been used to sort, shape, segregate, and select subjects based on occupation, social group, body type, or political affiliation”. The title references a phrase used by writer and photographer Allan Sekula to reference “the entire social field of human representations, comprising both heroes and deviants, within which every portrait takes its place as part of a moral hierarchy”.

13 December 2017

Fresh talent first in indie photo magazine Splash and Grab

After graduating in 2012 with a BA in photography from University of the West of England, Bristol, Max Ferguson became quickly disillusioned by the lack of viable career paths or platforms that would publish his or his friends’ work.. Growing frustration quickly turned into inspiration, however, and with that came the idea to create a platform from scratch in the form of Splash and Grab.
“The magazines I really liked or wanted to work for were either shutting down or not in a position to reply to emails, let alone give me a job,” he explains. “So I just decided to start something myself. Lots of magazines start in those DIY circumstances I suppose, with some hot headed graduate who thinks everything will be really easy but ends up finding it really difficult.”

7 December 2017
A place to celebrate the work of photography graduates and early-career image-makers. Plus a deep dive into key photography education centres, universities, residencies and masterclasses.

Education is the foundation of our industry. In this collection, we scour the country's universities and institutions, to interview our selection of the best photography graduates year on year. We also speak to educators and university course leaders to find out more about the nuances of their photography undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, locally in the UK and further afield.

But education does not stop there. There are countless opportunities to develop photographic practices for early to mid-career photographers outside of the traditional structures too. We speak to residency directors, leaders of short courses and masterclasses, and more.