Source Photographic Review

Graduate Photography Online 2012

Special Guest Selection by:

Brian Dillon

Writer on photography for The Guardian, New Statesman and Artforum.

Overview: The range and ambition of the work here was impressive: from quite traditional practices of reportage, landscape and portraiture to conceptually adventurous or visually oblique series. As often, I think the less successful work comes from a tendency to aim at some abstract theme or problem without having found a complex or ambiguous or surprising enough visual or narrative correlative for it. (Or conversely from retrospectively attaching such a topic to images that are not engaging or complex to begin with.) I've chosen photographers who seemed to engage a specific story, place or quality - whose vision mines that milieu for pictures that don't just attach themselves to a topic but properly render it either visually arresting or obscure, but also leave us with some imaginative or conceptual work to do ourselves. It's that that I want in a photograph or a body of work: a sense that however satisfying or startling or instructive the image, something more remains just out of reach.

elector's Comment: Emma Campbell's series addresses the predicament of women forced to travel for an abortion from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. Some of Campbell's images depict directly the journeys these women take, but it's the more oblique scenes and textures that are most suggestive.