MA Commercial Photography

Course outline

MA Commercial Photography students will be able to engage with a breadth of creative practices including advertising, fashion, editorial, documentary and fine art photography. Using still and/or moving image, you’ll define your own visual identity and then identify an appropriate audience to ensure a successful and profitable career.

MA Commercial Photography offers the opportunity to study in the genres of advertising, fashion, editorial or documentary photography, whichever genre you choose to pursue will define your experience of the course.

In each genre you’ll develop a comprehensive understanding of techniques and knowledge relevant to that specialism, combined with a critical awareness of developments in that area of professional practice.

The course will encourage students to make industrial links and live projects as part of their MA study. This may include students working very closely with external organisations to achieve a highly creative postgraduate level outcome and possibly make industrial links that continue far beyond graduation.

Digital technologies have driven an ever-increasing trend towards the blurring of boundaries between the various art practices and this has presented challenges and opportunities for today’s professional photographic practitioners. The course encourages the appropriate use of frontier technologies and will support this whenever possible.

The course comprises of three units that should be seen as one integrated body of study. Depending upon your own individual approach and learning style, you’ll be given the opportunity to run one major project across all three units, or produce a smaller project for each, it’s your choice.

The course is project focused and builds towards the completion of a major portfolio of work through self-initiated practical assignments, which are supported by written commentaries.

Full-time and part-time pathways

This course runs for one year (45 weeks of study), from September to September. Attendance is on average one day a week (Tuesdays).

The part-time course runs for two years (90 weeks of study), from September to September. Attendance is one day a week for the first 15 weeks (Tuesdays) and then one day every other week for the rest of the course.

The part-time day typically starts at 11.00 and runs until 18.00. This is to allow students who are travelling from further afield to reach the University in good time. There are breaks in teaching at Christmas, Easter and a month in the summer.

Full-time and part-time students are brought together a great deal in order to enrich their study and create a vibrant master’s level community.