2023 Scholarship
This Scholarship Photography submission focuses on sites of significance for the candidate and her whānau, setting the scene for their family migration story. Their investigation into this family history began at primary school (revisited in 2017, 2020, 2023). Utilising this familial search as a beginning point for a photographic enquiry provided many inroads to the nature of the unfolding image-making.
Seeking out stories and spending time in the town’s chapel, ‘imagining’ these spaces and places where their grandparents once sat, was a pivotal move in developing a connected relationship with the past. The workbook effectively documents the journey taken in honouring the family story through a mix of the candidate’s own conversations with family, recording and telling (written text and old photographs), and thereby establishing a modus operandi for seeking out new ways of seeing whakapapa in the context of their creative discovery process.
In conjunction with their pursuit to know more, the candidate started asking questions about aesthetics and collections. They understand the productive tension between the aesthetics of a handwritten mark, the fade of a well-worn page and the significance of holding an object once held by their ancestors. We know this via their own photographs on the folio and the accounts in the workbook. These were productive prompts for reflecting on family ephemera/printed matter, old photographs and artefacts found or gifted and how these elements/subject matter could be used to stretch out the imagined content across time. Due to the lived experience component of the enquiry, the project remained active and inquiring throughout. The candidate’s Nana was able to share various treasured objects, such as the family bible (containing a hand-drawn face) and two silver/gold pocket watches, which became the central subject matter for later photographs.
Various photography practices are employed; cyanotype, pinhole and darkroom (including stencils and glass negatives) position the work across and in time. Experimentation with non-digital processes conceptually supports their interest in looking into the past, such as using the pinhole camera to take a contemporary family portrait akin to the qualities of the historical family photograph and working with family-owned film slides and glass plate negatives. Incorporating these found images/processes into their own work trajectory created a rich layer to the work that both honours and makes the past present.
Links to artists’ work like Robin Morrison and Robert Frank inform processes and aesthetic decision-making. The candidate was analytical and thoughtful in how they engaged in their artmaking, in parallel with their ongoing experience of learning and knowing more through each iterative phase and artwork made. The folio work evidences an authentic journey through an articulately composed and well-executed body of practice.
Download 2023's Scholarship Photography exemplar [PDF, 17 MB]
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2022 Outstanding Scholarship
This Outstanding Scholarship submission embraces youth culture, focusing on the social life of skateboarding in urban environments. There is good 'seeing' in the work; multiple photography shoots were taken when the candidate was out skating with friends. The candidate is interested in composition and taking photos that capture skateboarding culture. They want their images to appeal to the audience and spend time considering how they can photograph the subject accordingly.
The photographic approach employed is highly experimental in the technical management of the camera; they work with and against conventions. Technical considerations are conceptually crucial to how each image is conceived, including technology (fish lens, tripod, ISO, lightroom) and devices of inverting, silhouette, and reflection. They are analytical of their intent behind the steps/ideas for each image.
Every composition is purposeful and constructed either pre- or post-production through critical decision-making and high technical facility. For example, they deliberately under-expose the photo to maintain quality, and then edit the image with consideration of colour and time of day to communicate mood. Throughout the work, they successfully merge in-camera documentation practice with staged portraiture.
The entire project is informed via clear investigations of practice, research, and continuous practice/testing. They repeatedly make very considered pictorial shifts using camera/photo devices and conventions, such as framing, awareness of light, reflection, movement, colour, shape, and silhouette. The images produced are seductive; they capture the beauty of movement and figure/urban setting symmetries. At times, they isolate the performing subject against the sky, framed by concrete structures and architecture to refocus the subjectivity of the image.
The workbook documents their reflections on the practice, most significantly, the composition and intention of their photographs. It also documents other works, edited out of the portfolio but still successful. Their familiarity with the subject matter is very informative. It helps them to know what is possible with the images they take. They use colour, style, and editing tools to 'process' photographic output, which is researched and well-executed. The comprehensive research methodology has enabled the student to understand why they work the way they do.
They invest time in picture-making: reflecting and selecting, then returning to picture-making in a cyclical practice of inquiry, which seems apt in the context of a sport that requires repetition, skill, and technique (practice). Through a purposeful and critical selection of artists' practice/films and their own constant practising, the candidate found a good balance of research between contextual and formal conceptual concerns, and the technical requirements needed to achieve particular results.
This submission is a celebration of skateboarding, friendships, and skills through highly-competent compositional understanding of the camera, intelligent and clever use of leading lines, framing devices, angle, and viewpoint shifts.
Download 2022 Outstanding Scholarship Photography workbook pages [PDF, 23 MB]
2022 Scholarship
This Scholarship submission focuses on the beauty of two derelict, abandoned houses explored through concepts of time, neglect, preservation, and care. The house that set up the inquiry sits on the road the candidate and her family regularly drive. The second house is an early settler-colonial house in Rahotu. Both farm properties and houses act as signifiers of their continual transition and decay over time, sparking the candidate’s interest and imagination about their current and past lives.
The initial connection began as passers-by and a curiosity and desire to learn about their spirit. Granted permission to access the properties, the candidate set about exploring and identifying the type of relationship they wanted to establish with these domestic spaces. Working with a method of encounter and response versus pre-planned photo shoots, the inquiry is, in one sense, an account of becoming familiar, of moving from apprehension to knowing.
The student stated they first thought about what/who was no longer there (death). But after getting to know the site and feeling a sense of mutual comfort between the houses and themselves, they felt “a strong presence of life in the home.” Visiting often and taking frequent photoshoots concretised the personal connection and embedded a robust photographic understanding.
The candidate clearly understands how composition can reveal presence/s and natural symmetries through movements of light (day/night, interior/exterior), positive-negative space, perspective, scale, and macro/micro relations. An astute observation method was applied to the subject and sites based on the candidate’s interest and affection towards these derelict homes that once housed farming families. Appropriate and critically relevant artistic references and analysis in the workbook inform all the work produced.
The workbook also outlines the challenges of capturing their seeing, specifically in the dark spaces of derelict properties without power and night shoots. In becoming close to the site and familiar with the qualities that lent themselves to photographic conventions and ideas, the candidate developed a nuanced approach and inventive strategies for working with natural light (and darkness) and composition created by the house architecture, spatial structures, and window/door frames.
Methods include photographing at different times of day using natural light filters, improvising light (presence) with a phone light inside the house at night to photograph an exterior view. The student’s relationship to their chosen subject, the two houses, and their histories were critical to this inquiry. Through thorough research and time spent on site, they established a reflective kinship considerate of those that had occupied the houses.
In the workbook, they speak of change (physical and social) that had occurred over time, the sale of the land and house, and endings. There is a heartfelt quality to how the photographs capture the beauty and effects of time on these houses; the images emanate a sympathetic aesthetic that communicates the candidate’s investment and commitment to their subject.
Download 2022 Scholarship Photography workbook pages [PDF, 23 MB]
2020 Outstanding Scholarship
This Outstanding Scholarship submission engages in a focused and in-depth enquiry about the ocean. On one level, the topic is simple and defined by the explicitness and directness of the imagery. However, looking closer, the relational qualities, feelings, and emotional connections emerge, revealing a subtle yet thorough investigation of the ocean as a subject and metaphorical body.
This intelligent project stems from the close relationship the candidate has to the ocean. They have been "brought up in the ocean" and are a surf lifesaver. They respect the ocean and consider it a beautiful resource that should be looked after. Key words used to describe their feelings towards the ocean became concepts to work with photographically: beauty, serenity, movement, fear, danger. The sublime is also posited as a sub-theme, providing a productive theoretical backdrop to the candidate's fascination and respect for the ocean.
The workbook is a critical component in this submission. Its role in unpacking the portfolio work is integral to understanding the authenticity and real depth of the proposal and practice in context. The candidate does an excellent job of expanding their proposal and citing all the influential factors that have entered into the decision-making process, which is thorough. For example, they explain the reasons for choosing to change the photographs from color to monochrome (the how/why/what). The workbook pages act as a guide to the enquiry and the methods developed to engage criticality. The practical listing of the gear used for photo shoots reads like a conceptual how-to list, as does the discussion under the subheadings: the ocean's purpose, the sublime, techniques (lighting, black-and-white, post-production, and shutter speed).
There is an incredible level of seeing and photographic control over the subject area exerted by the candidate. This skill is evident in the consistently sophisticated images, which captured the range of tides and the formal properties of the ocean seen from different viewpoints in the camera; that is, taken from the shore, underwater, and revisited at different times of the day. This systematic approach helped create an immersive experience of the ocean for the viewer.
Artistic reference is pertinent and provides ways for the candidate to understand potential conceptual directions, such as the idea of 'flow state' (colloquially 'being in the zone') drawn from artist Cathy Carter. The analysis and reflective engagement with Carter's work, and then the candidate's own experience of being in a body of water, were effectively transformed into sequences of photographs that speak to the openness and vastness of water, as both a site of beauty and danger. Similar insights are identified in Trent Mitchell's artwork and applied to the candidate’s unique understanding of the ocean as a body. They are continually thinking about experiential relations as something unseen and use this abstraction as the subject and basis for project-specific methods and processes that they developed to get closer to the topic.
Download 2020 Outstanding Scholarship Photography workbook pages [PDF, 21 MB]
2020 Scholarship
This Scholarship submission focuses on a personal story and traumatic event in the candidate's life – brain surgery at 13. Through processes of staging and re-enacting this real-life event, and intelligently reflecting on the trauma in retrospect, the candidate was able to actively analyse while making the artwork, expanding the proposition authentically. The intention for this proposition was to share the candidate's experience of what happened; to tell their story.
In the workbook, the candidate explains their process of directorship and curation of imagery by outlining many devices and references to established practice. For example, the candidate used a self-timer for the self-portraits, then worked with their Mother to take the hospital series. Interestingly, it was her earlier photo documentation of the candidate in the hospital that sparked this series. This method of linking strategies connected the reader/audience to the reality and emotion of the story being told.
There was a consistent level of analysis and personal insight, which was well-founded and enabled the candidate to sustain an in-depth investigation through / into photographic practice. The workbook is analytical, establishes a parallel commentary about the folio work, and reviews critical decisions while keeping the work at the heart of the conversation.
The portfolio and the workbook informed and related to one another in a cyclical relationship. The workbook also featured work not included in the folio, demonstrating the breadth of engagement, editing skills, and genuine thinking.
A high level of technical facility is apparent in the portfolio work, which was unpacked in the workbook, discussing the project's 'trial and error' process. Each passage of work has a role in the telling of the story.
The candidate designed the portfolio layout to communicate the experience and storyline versus projecting a linear representation of the work's order. This required the candidate to take control and manage the editing process as part of their making.
There was skilled handling of colour, composition, and lighting, alongside the use of objects (life-saving objects involved in the medical intervention) and installation in the staging of set-ups for photography. The candidate was constantly considering symbolic and semiotic relations to the surgical, hospital, and medical equipment, and how they could create the appropriate 'mood'.
Effects such as the digital approach employed using the "disintegration effect," a process of fragmentation of the figure (edited shadows) introduced a highly stylised element acting as a visual transition parallel to the conceptual ideas of operation, medical intervention, and recovery. These digital aspects of the portfolio works are meaningful and successfully communicate the experience from multiple viewpoints (emotional, psychological, and physical).
Download 2020 Scholarship Photography workbook pages [PDF, 18 MB]