BA Photography: Year of 2025

What you see here is a gathering of skill, endeavour and creative vision. It is also an archive of a journey, one that has seen the photographers featured here develop from passionate novices to confident and knowledgeable image makers. What these graduates also now know is that a photography education is not simply an exercise in developing technical aptitude. They have been asked and have asked themselves tough questions, learning to think with and through the image, a key, if not the currency of our time. They have come to understand that photographs are full of surprises, and that photography speaks to a plural world.  

 By its very nature, photography is impossible to pin down. No matter how many attempts are made to distil its essence, to write its language, to draw its diversity together into a neat package, it slips away, spills over and mutates. Even the most rudimentary definition of a light informed image can no longer be fully trusted. While it has become cliché to describe the contemporary cultural condition as one of radical uncertainty, it is worth reiterating that photography is pre-eminently placed to negotiate this moment. What better than a medium that is fundamentally indeterminate to address a world of indeterminacy? What better than a medium that draws from the world to interrogate its inconsistencies? What better than a medium that fools us to expose or prospect its illusions?   

Nonetheless, to successfully find one’s way through all this is no given. It takes patience, commitment, and a willingness to fail, try again, and fail better. That these graduates have done this against a backdrop of powerful ideological forces and the widespread philistinism that seems to have gripped this nation is alone sufficient reason to celebrate. However, we should also celebrate the impressively wide variety of approaches this year’s cohort have taken to their subject. From the so-called commercial photographers who understand the role of artifice better than most, to those whose work explores the complexity of our relationship to self, family, culture and the digital, what you see here are frequently powerful and always singular responses to a central provocation to realise a vision and find a voice.  

The world is an undeniably richer place when it is open, polyvocal and resisting those forces that would shut down difference in favour of homogeneity and standardisation. That our subject is home to such an abundance of creative possibility provides a wonderful platform to embrace and contribute to such a world. These graduates leave us with the skills and knowledge to shape that world in important ways and it is exciting to think where they might go next.    

David Eckersley