BA studies in Photography

By challenging and investigating the relationship between photography and other visual as well as non-visual expressions, students are encouraged to understand their own work in a wider artistic context.

The programme incorporates today's technical production of photographic images, with a continuous emphasis on key photo-theoretical subjects. The intention is to provide the students with an empirical basis of the many visual and narrative qualities contained within photography. Representation, objectivity, subjectivity, and truth content, are important subjects in the curriculum. Parallel to photo-theoretical discourse, students are encouraged to analyse and critically reflect upon their work in group sessions or during tutor guided counselling.

First Year
After the first year you will have a basic understanding of photography as the outcome of technological and artistic processes. In terms of technology you will have learned about camera systems, lab work, studio and lighting, digital imaging and video, and how to use software in preparation for working with digital media. Projects and seminars allow a closer examination of topics such as portrait/self-portrait, landscape, reportage, documentation and constructed realities, propaganda and manipulation. You will also develop an understanding of the history of photography in relation to application techniques, contemporary aesthetic practices and cultural creation of meaning.

Second and Third Year
Emphasis in the second and third years is on project work and developing your own artistic thinking. Important areas for investigation are social, political, aesthetic and autobiographical dimensions. Other topics are photo and text combinations, amateur and family pictures, critique of photography's representative function and its self-referentiality, video/time-based art, the real and the virtual. Studies into topics like these can lead to fresh conceptual and formal possibilities.

Artistic work is accompanied by lectures and discussions which see theoretical, cultural and art-related topics in relation to the photographic idiom. The objective here is the development of your analytical approach to the visual language of photography and your own work.