EXHIBITION: Photography in Practice; Photography in Theory (PIPPIT) – TELLING PICUTRES- Edward Street | 27 September – 14 October 2022

The University of Brighton Research Group in Photography (PIPPIT) is once again exhibiting work at Edward Street, this time under the collective title: Telling Pictures. The show runs to 14thOctober and is timed to take place within the context of the Brighton Photo Fringe 

The aim of this show is not by any means to try to squeeze this multiplicity into any theoretical straitjacket.  On the contrary, by holding the different ways of working up to each other, we hope to throw some light on the rich diversity within the photographic ecosystem, even within the tightish confines of a single group of colleagues in one university.

For some, neutral or near-neutral photographs hold evidence of something a researcher wants us to see. For others, the photographs themselves are the subject of the enquiry.  Another route takes the making of photographs – the whole chain from inception to realisation – as a research process in its own right, and the interest is in the method.  Some researchers are photographers and the value lies in the pictures.  Others would never call themselves photographers (they belong to any one of the rich tribe that goes from anthropology to zoology) but they choose to use photography. It is, after all, an exceptionally important tool.  For them the value may lie in words and graphs and pictures and many other media judiciously combined in harmoniously blended recipes, with no especial priority to photography.

But in whatever dosage, in whatever proportion to other communication (most commonly that expressed in words), all of the ways of working with photographs here expect the photographs to be telling.  Our colleagues expect their pictures to inform, to excite, to reveal, to describe, to provoke, to underline… Photography in the research context is a chameleon.  It takes on the colours of the research in which it is active.  Examination cliché asks candidates to compare and contrast.  That’s what you can do in this wide-ranging exhibition that asks what exactly is the role photography plays here, or here, or here – and finds answers sometimes not at all obvious.

Work by

Holly Birtles
Daniel Campbell-Blight
Zoe Childerley
Matthew Cornford
Jasper Goodall
Fergus Heron
Åsa Johannesson
Mark Joste
Badhey Kamal
Rachel Maloney
James Murray
Annebella Pollen
Xavier Rivas
Epha Roe
Martin Seeds
Kirsty Thomas

Image by Badhey Kamal