#13 The Graduate Issue

After another challenging academic year where many photography students were taught remotely and faced limited access to campus and facilities, we celebrate the work of ten graduates from around the world.

Jodie Bateman, Lina Geoushy, Matt Hind, Lena Holzer, Wing Ka Ho, Esther Gabrielle Kersley, Marianne McGurk, Ryan Prince, Agnieszka Sejud, Felix Schöppner. 

The selected projects reflect a range of ideas and experiences, from personal projects born out of lived experience to work tackling current social and political issues.

Special thanks to the selection panel including; Natasha Caruana, artist, lecturer and mentor, Daniele de Luigi, Curator Giovane Fotografia Italiana, writer and critic, Ian Howarth, Photographer and Content Creator MPB, Tshepiso Mabula, Photoworks writer-in-residence and photographer, Maryam Wahid, artist and lecturer, and Julia Bunnemann, Photoworks Curator.

A huge thank you to our sponsors MPB and print partner Spectrum Photographic for selecting four lucky graduates to support with kit loan and a printing voucher.

Can You Sit for Me?

 

Ryan Prince’s Can You Sit for Me? is a project that functions on two levels. On the first, it explores Stuart Hall’s theory of the ‘dominant regime of representation’, an idea that describes the mass stereotyping of group of peoples by the media. Prince challenges this regime and the stereotypes it produces by exploring visual alternatives to these hackneyed representations. On the second level, Prince draws on John Byng-Hall’s work on ‘re-editing’ family mythologies, which addresses how false beliefs about the present of a family can be supported by family legends, to consider how families can alter their self-perception. Prince uses his own family to contemplate ideas around how the Black body is seen and represented, what a typology of a modern Black family from London may look like outside stereotypes, how positive imagery challenges racialised gazes and how photography can explore familial ties.

© Ryan Prince, Mum (Valerie), from the series Can You Sit For Me?, 2020

Ryan Prince (born 1991) is a documentary and portrait photographer based in London. Prince uses the camera as a tool to explore themes that revolve around his identity as a Black British man from the Jamaican diaspora. In 2021, he graduated from the MA Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the University of Westminster.

© Ryan Prince, Stepdad (Granty), from the series Can You Sit For Me?, 2020

Photography+ is supported by MPB.

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