archived news | september 2009

MAP2010

16th September 09

MAP2010
An exhibition of lens
based art.

September 17th - 30th
Private View @ 6pm Thursday 17th

Working across a range of related media and genres the photographers in this exhibition, all part-time students on the MA Photography at the University of Brighton,  are  engaged  in seeking a way of working with the relationship between the changing network of technologies that constitutes photography today and deeper, historically rooted questions about how we can make pictures that adequately reflect our experience of modernity, our relationship to place, our sense of what it is to be a person, and our ability to imaginatively reconstruct the world in a way that will allow us to reflect upon it.

MAP2010

It has never been so easy to take photographs or make beautiful images. The sophistication and cheap availability of current photographic technology makes it possible for all of us to pull out of the bag an occasional stunning image. In such a context, ironically, developing a strong sense of what might constitute a photographic art practice is much more challenging. How, from within what Kracauer called ‘the flood of photographs’, can we begin to define a serious, experimental interrogation of the medium, one that will aid us in confronting our passive subjection to the pleasures of the image? How can we create a practice that will enable us to work around the determining influences of the technology and instead use that technology to reflect upon the ways in which photography makes meaning in the world?

The photographers in this exhibition, all part-time students on the MA Photography at the University of Brighton, are engaged in finding an answer to this set of questions. Working across a range of related media and genres: video, photography, documentary, portraiture, high allegory, archival practice, conceptual art, they are each, in their different ways seeking a way of working with the relationship between the changing network of technologies that constitutes photography today and deeper, historically rooted questions about how we can make pictures that adequately reflect our experience of modernity, our relationship to place, our sense of what it is to be a person, and our ability to imaginatively reconstruct the world in a way that will allow us to reflect upon it.


Joanna Lowry
Course Leader, MA Photography,
University of Brighton