The Department of Photography has a fluid approach to image making. Whether still or moving, analogue or digital, the photographic image is a visual form that aims to be thoughtful as much as playful; allegorical yet thoroughly visual.

Most works call attention to the constructed nature of the photographic image, emphasising its narrative potential. Identity and politics are present, from the realism of Dudley to the Baroque of the Spanish culture. Some works implicitly or explicitly question the validity of typologies, proposing instead a self-conscious randomness, where images are not fixed in a predetermined structure. The photographic image is considered to be a material object with its own physicality and the act of imaging turns the real into signs and surfaces to be deciphered. The performative aspect of the image is also consistently present, from a ventriloquist’s dummy to a camera that behaves like a worm.


The students have produced Hardcover — Image Perspectives (published by Black Dog); editor Rut Blees Luxemburg; essays by Simon Baker (Tate), Leslie Dick (Cal Arts), Mike Sperlinger (LUX), and Olivier Richon and Vanessa Boni (RCA).