Photography at the RCA offers a critical and educational environment where you can develop as an artist, with photography at the core of your practice. We have a fluid approach to image-making. Whether still or moving, analogue or digital, the image is, for us, thoughtful and playful: an allegorical and thoroughly visual form.

We understand photography as a discourse that encompasses and extends across multiple practices. This disregard for a fixed essence is photography’s strength: no aesthetic purity but a range of rhetorical forms used to create fact, fiction and fantasy. Equally, the boundary between the still and the moving image is fluid and porous, enabling new forms of image-making to be created and disseminated.

An informed practice of photography acknowledges the heterogeneous traditions of fine art and visual culture. It engages with practices of reading and writing about the image. At the RCA, your studies will be characterised by the dialogue between theory and practice. The Photography programme is within the School of Arts & Humanities, and your studies here will be grounded in the studio practices and theories of contemporary art rather than media and communication studies.