Photography

Parodically inspired by William Evans-Gordon’s 1903 book The Alien Immigrant, Emidio Battipaglia’s Aliens project reflects on UK immigration policies. His tender portraits, set in computer-generated landscapes, ‘force the viewer to rethink issues of border and community’.

Daniil Kolchanov’s photographs capture fleeting moments of human experience, with honesty, rawness and candour. His series The Shameless Baths of Pyatigorsk documents the lawless goings-on in hidden, cliff-top mineral springs in the North Caucasus, run by a group of activists and populated by party-seeking teenagers. 

Samantha Thompson aims to build meaningful connections between the viewer and the subject of her images, encapsulated by her moving, concertina-style photobook NANA that captures intimate details of her grandmother, who has dementia. It opens with ‘photographs of her grandmother’s head, where the illness resides, working down to her feet, which keep her standing’.

Eeva Hannula delved into her family photograph albums for her project The Choreography of Uncertainty. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, her monochromatic digital collages and diptychs probe the dichotomy of ‘familiar and unfamiliar’ that an image can possess.

Conceptually motivated, Lauren Jackson is interested in the performativity of the objects she photographs. In Make me a Channel we only ever see half a picture – unknown objects sit just off camera, casting shadows; shadow-puppet hands perform an unknown mime. The series is inspired by ‘our pursuit to achieve wholeness’, and its ‘impossibility’.

In his series The Celebrated Remedy for the Cure of Disorder, Jeroen Bocken mines the visual languages of natural science and technology, mixing hyperreal 3D rendered images with documentary photographs to present his own, alternative ‘reality’.

Chinese-born graduate Rujie Wang meandered through the landscapes of northwest China for her series Penetrate. Her images are subtly folkloric, recording both the industrial forms rising among the landscape, and the characters that move quietly among them.