Photography Exhibition - Opening Speech

HNC Photography 2015

Exhibitions of photographers' work do the photographers no favours. Typically a display of pictures like this represents a few seconds or maybe minutes of time - each picture taking a fraction of a second to record on film or a digital sensor. 

When choosing what to put on the wall at an end-of-year show, or a personal retrospective, photographers and gallery curators are likely to select pictures that an audience is most likely to want to see. So often this means beautiful landscapes, or fantastic cities, glamorous models or charismatic portraits. This ends up giving the impression that the photographer leads a fantastic lifestyle in wonderful exotic locations rubbing shoulders with beautiful people. If they do the job well, everyone thinks their chosen profession is both enviable and easy. 

The truth - as all of the students who have contributed work to this show will surely agree – involves very little glamour and a great deal of grind. 

A successful photograph requires a lot more than 1/250^th of a second of effort, and every year our students discover that behind every photograph lies a lot of time researching, planning, testing technical equipment, making test shoots, failing and making mistakes, discussing and solving problems, getting to grips with computers and software, negotiating and persuading – sometimes even charming reluctant subjects or gatekeepers. Most of it goes on in the backroom.

The result of all this labour is hardly visible, because like a good performer or athlete, a good photographer  makes sure that the end result that the public sees is made to look effortless.

The students in here who have taken part in the HNC programme have been making a huge effort and they are probably very tired!  A lot of the pictures here aren’t even course work. They have spent  the last few months on a demanding programme of challenges covering a wide gamut of photographic practice from studio portraiture, the technical rigours of microscope and other applied techniques, traditional chemistry and darkroom printing technique, exploration of landscapes and cityscapes,to  digital editing techniques, lots of theory and even more research, planning, evaluation and discussion. Not to mention the real discipline of deadlines and the vexing attentions of hyper-critical lecturing staff – or caring and supportive lecturing staff – depending on your point of view.

Most people do not really see how much skill goes into making photographs, and in fact, many photographers themselves do not always see how many transferable skills they are employing. The very talented Scottish photographer for the Guardian and the Observer  Murdo MacLeod said once that “I wouldn’t know how to explain what goes into making a photograph – I just want to make the viewer slap their forehead and say wow.”

It is probably worth emphasising – for the graduating students as much as anyone else – that photographs on the wall are not only great photographs and 1/250^th of a second of time. They also represent a very demanding and complex set of transferable skills that they can take with them into employment or their own lives. These skills are worth being proud of.

So, although this year’s programme involved a fair number of achievements: a wonderful visit and photographs of the atmospheric canals and bridges of Amsterdam for example; scoops involving photographing high profile politicians like Nicola Sturgeon and Labour leader Jim Murphy (not at the same time though) in a 2 day photographic coverage of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations flagship event, The Gathering – this was described by the event organisers as  “the best set of event pictures that we have ever had!” .

The real work – and the real achievement -  is the behind-the-scenes  stuff. The long hours studying at a laptop…the work that usually goes unrecognised.  It needs to be stated clearly to this year’s students that this effort is understood and has been recognised – even by those hyper-critical, caring and supportive lecturing staff mentioned earlier.

So to recognise this huge effort and achievement that an HNC in Photography, and this display of pictures represents, we should do as Murdo MacLeod suggests – we should “slap our foreheads and say wow!”