Photography plays a crucial role in contemporary art, and the Photography programme at the RCA aims to provide a critical and educational environment in which students can develop as artists with photography at the core of their practice. We have a fluid approach to image making. Whether still or moving, analogue or digital, the photographic image is for us a visual form that aims to be thoughtful as well as playful: an allegorical and thoroughly visual form.
The programme understands photography as a medium with no fixed identity. This disregard for a fixed essence is photography’s strength: no aesthetic purity but a multiplicity of rhetorical forms used for the creation of fact, fiction and fantasy. Equally the boundary between the still and the moving image is now fluid and porous, enabling new forms of image making to be created.
An informed practice of photography acknowledges the heterogeneous traditions of fine art and visual culture. It also engages with practices of reading and writing about the image. Here, theory and practice inform each other and this dialogue characterises committed study at postgraduate level.
The Photography programme is located within the School of Fine Art. This is a distinct feature of our approach to photography, that it relates to practices and theories of contemporary art, rather than to media and communication programmes.
Download Photography Programme Information Pack (PDF)
Key features of the programme include:
- tutorials, seminars, lectures and group critiques by leading practitioners and thinkers
- practices of representation that engage with the still and the moving image
- specialist facilities for colour and black-and-white exhibition prints
- research work on the relation between image and language
- the formulation of aesthetic questions that relate to the students’ practice
- high-profile alumni.
Open Days are held at the College between October and January of each academic year, to enable applicants to explore teaching programmes and meet staff and students.