The BA Photography course combines rigour with creative freedom and professional understanding. It considers photography as an expanded medium ranging from clearly photographic analogue and digital practices to those that explore the boundaries where photography collides with other creative mediums to create new exciting hybrid works.

This approach not only results in a positive and exciting learning experience but lies behind the outstanding national and international successes enjoyed by our students and alumni in competitions, publications, exhibitions and professional life within the creative sector.

The course provides many chances to engage with real world opportunities from publishing imagery in Socket Magazine and publicly exhibiting work to responding to commercial and community commissions.

The course structure is modelled on practice within a healthy creative professional lifestyle, with each year made up of four modules that mirror this best practice in professional life.

In the Project modules students learn to employ the skills and approaches needed to create their own finished projects, exploring ideas, subjects and aesthetic approaches that are of interest to them. Projects are assessed on experimentation, research, application of appropriate photographic skills in creating the final outcomes, communication and management. This allows students creative freedom while demanding an excellent approach to making a creative body of work.

Technical and Professional Practice modules enable students to develop their practical skills. The degree covers digital and analogue 35mm and medium format photography as well as large format analogue practices and is taught at one of the UK’s very few art schools equipped with both colour and black-and-white darkroom facilities. In addition, students learn how to apply their individual creative identity within a professional environment. This is not just as a photographer but through understanding how the excellent transferable professional skills developed on the course can be applied to a wide variety of exciting roles and opportunities within the creative industries, ranging from curator to picture editor or art director to photographer’s agent or digital technician.

The Looking and Making modules provide an opportunity to expand your knowledge of photography and other creative practices, but also, and crucially, to have a place within the course structure that encourages having fun with adventurous, open playful making, and experimentation as this is often the basis of future focused project work.

Critical Contextual Studies modules in each year help you to expand your critical understanding and you are supported and guided to develop confidence in structuring and working with text while expanding your knowledge of critical perspectives, photography and art history.