Paul Kusserow - 'Universe'

Text will follow suit, but in the meen time check out Paul website, http://www.kusserow.co.uk/.

Mira Federicia Donath - 'Swimmers'

Before I moved to Brighton I always wanted to live right next to the sea and now my window gives a view straight over Brighton Pier. Since spring last year I have been watching the swimmers every morning from my bedroom window. I am fascinated by the sea itself, and have lots of respect for the swimmers who are there regardless of wind and or bad weather conditions, swimming to the end of the pier and back to the shore.

James O’Neill - 'Sussex Murders'

O’Neill’s work is a study on the late photograph, an idea demonstrated in Safety in Numbness by David Campany. The photographs depict the places of murder or attempted murder, but the interest lies within the landscape afterwards. The photographs almost refuse to tell us something, it is through knowing about the image afterwards that we become more interested in the space as a ‘stage’ for the narrative. We scan the image for details, prying into it for more information and trying to decode objects as signs of denotation or connotation. We usually never find such satisfaction, but instead we are still drawn to the images as the photographer was drawn to the space.

Phil Bedford

James Allen - 'Five Hat Racks'

The project shown above is titled 'Five Hat Racks', we were asked to find five genuinely discarded objects from the environment. I managed to accumulate a variety of objects: a lampshade, an exhaust pipe, a builders hard hat, a candle holder and a bottle of Magners. The project had two parts, the first being to run these objects through a system know as the 'Five Hat Racks' which consist of: location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy. Each system had to have an A1 visual outcome for each object, this was aimed to make us look closer at our objects and become familiar with them.

The second part was to take these same five objects and run them through an emotive set of categories and produce another five outcomes that could be a size and format of our choosing. Some of the emotive categories were as follows:

Temperature / hot – cold

Intrigue / fascinating – banal, dull

Sentiment / soft, tender, alluring – hard, tough, and the list goes on.

During this point of the project I started to become frustrated, after having a few bad critiques by tutors about my first set of posters I started debating whether the categories listed above were actually emotive, in my opinion they are descriptive. Being able to emphasize my hatred towards the project in this emotional part of the brief I decided to show this by breaking the objects into pieces using a hammer. Questioning why we were doing a project of this type in a graphic design class that specifically focuses on typography it dawned on me that this project was more fine art than design. This is what lead me to design/photograph the objects in the style I did, purposely mimicking and ridiculing the brief with a parody on fine art.

http://www.jamesaallen.com

Pavel Fiorentino - 'Walls of Brazil'

I worked on this project while traveling in Brazil this January. Finding myself on the opposite side of the world, where literally everything was different, I went through various stages how I perceived my surroundings - from fascination to alienation. While trying to record my feelings with the camera, I realized that the images of “exotic” places and people that were around me were the last thing I wanted to bring back home.
So I started looking at the way people arrange their living space in Brasília, the capital of the country, and a small old town of Luziânia about 60 km from it. Suddenly I realized that the walls, simple walls surrounding houses and yards of any type, represent the essence of Brazil for me. Looking at the wall itself, the pavement or the road below and what I could see above, I could imagine what life was like behind the confines of the wall. This was purely a product of my imagination. But isn’t it what we get when we go abroad thinking that we can gain a greater understanding of peoples’ needs and values in such a short period of time?

Besides, these three horizontal partitions (sky, wall, ground) form unique abstract compositions like those of Mark Rothko, delving deeper into levels of reality perception as a combination of simple forms. I saw these compositions as real masterpieces created by nature (sky and the trees), humans (wall) and time (ground that holds a function of memory, walls’ mould and cracks indicating the flow of time).

JoAnn Kneedler - 'Portraits'

Kneedler was born in Stockholm, Sweden, but grew up in Denmark from the age of eight. She has also lived in Germany and the UK. Her project featured here is from the first year of her study at Brighton. The subjects depicted are foreign students who are pictured with the objects and decorations that they have brought from home. These people are very interesting but the relationship with the photographer is my concern. The project was done at a period when she herself was adjusting to living in the UK and coping with the alienation and barriers of language. There is a profound strength in the background of this work and Kneedler is careful to portray her subjects with defined dignity and a deep intimacy with their surroundings and their reflection on the idea of ‘home’.

Phil Bedford


kneedler@gmail.com

Jamie Orlando Smith - 'RGB'

Smith is originally from Herefordshire; his progression through the editorial course has led him to a certain archaeological influence in his photography. Smith doesn’t necessarily look for ‘traces’ but more finds the objects and signs of an institutions structure. The images in ‘RGB’ are taken from a photo lab and his recent project on the Fabrica gallery demonstrates that the backbone of a space is made up of the chairs, tables, lights, offices and desks that help an organisation function. Smith presents us with a banality that is photographed rather beautifully but draws our attention to the details that we ignore in our everyday lives. These details become not only visually exciting and intriguing when presented to the camera but also remind us of that which we take for granted.

Phil Bedford

jamieosmith.photography@googlemail.com