London College of Communication Degree Show 2015

Art — 19.06.15

WORDS: GEORGE UPTON

Judging by last year’s graduates, the London College of Communication is one of the best places in the capital to study photography. The class of 2014 included TEETH collaborator, Rosaline Shahnavaz, who won a prize for her sensitive and poignant Far, Near Distance, and three photographers, Francesca Allen, Rebecca Scheinberg and Jocelyn Allen, who form part of The Photographer’s Gallery showcase of new talent, Fresh Faced and Wild-eyed. The varied styles of these graduates and their considerable success meant that I came to this year’s show with high expectations and I wasn’t disappointed. 



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Sirin WingeIscoceles

Having discovered Winge’s work online some time ago I was thrilled to see her final BA piece in the exhibition. Her photographs are beautiful in their calm, minimal sensibility and soft pastel palette. She has an attention to texture, line and form that gives a maturity to her work and a high level of finish.

For the exhibition, Winge erected wooden forms that surround photographs printed on large pieces of card. Entitled Iscoceles, a name that refers to the triangular shapes in the work, Winge attempts to present the image as sculpture and question the form of photography. In addition to the details of a torso, pale and with a supine, delicate strength, a video where the sitter contorts in slow motion is projected onto two pieces of wood, one behind the other, splitting the image. Taken as a whole, the work succinctly demonstrates the already well established gentle, erudite minimalism of the photographer and her combination of technical ability and theoretical thought.

 


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Ellen SyrjalaMarket Portraits

At first glance, you would think Ellen Syrjala’s photographs of the market around Elephant and Castle station would be better exhibited with the graduating photojournalists on the floor below. But in addition to the documentary aspect of her work, Syrjala’s subjects, turned away from the camera, sometimes encased in their trolleys or absent altogether, are depicted as part of a wider artistic project the captures the culture and history of the market. These are not simple images but are layered with meaning. In Syrjala’s hands, the visual motifs of a market – the thin metal structures, the colourful striped plastic sheets, the fashions of the traders and the shoppers – form a thoughtful mediation on the lives of the people of Elephant and Castle. It is a portrait in the truest sense of the word, a representation of the area visually while also expressing its sensibility, a vibrancy and a life that is threatened by the tide of gentrification.


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Silvia Tudini – The Poetics of Space

Silvia Tudini’s work is concerned with colour, transparency, and ultimately light. Her work plays self-reflectively with the scientific principles of photography, how the wavelengths of light from different colours, how this is subtly modulated by shadow and transparent objects. She plays with the camera’s ability to capture a tangible moment, to stop time by depicting the way light is falling through objects or the shadow made by a figure at that particular moment. And in doing so, Tudini manages to make some beautiful images that are still and considered, abstracting the everyday ephemera she encounters into carefully controlled colour and shape.