You may think there is no need for yet another photography course but I’m here to say that this one is different. I know you’ve probably heard that before but please let me explain why I feel that my statement is based in fact rather than marketing hyperbole. I devised and wrote the course, and I’ll be leading it at Oxford Brookes University, so I guess I’m the best person to explain it!
Let’s start with the title. The word professional is carefully chosen not to suggest that this is a course only for those who want to be or are professional photographers, but to identify it as being career focused within a broad understanding of the creative industries. We will teach photography as a visual language that fosters numerous transferable skills alongside the development of your professional photographic practice. Many other courses will claim to have the same intention so what makes this one different?
Well, you will only be taught by currently working photographers, art directors, editors, writers and creatives from a broad range of backgrounds and locales. These will form an international teaching team. This Masters of Arts is a course that recognises the importance of hearing from those who are currently engaged in all aspects of photography. So, you will hear from them every week and you will study professional practice in-depth over two semesters.
It’s an online course so you can make work wherever you live, stay in your home and keep working if you wish. Our MA can be taken on a full-time one year basis or two year part-time basis. You can choose which suits you best.
Perhaps most importantly you can set your own creative agenda from the moment you join and choose what you want to photograph, how you want to place your work and set your own expectations. We are not only focused on art practice or documentary. We will embrace every area of the medium from food to fashion, from music to architecture, from sports to social documentary and everything in-between and alongside! You will choose what you want to get from the course.
It’s a course with academic rigour, it has to be its a Masters of Arts programme, but you will not feel intimidated or lost amongst a mountain of academic writing. You will have to write essays but they will be connected to your interests. They should be about what you are interested in.
All we ask from you is that you bring your enthusiasm, passion and inquisitive nature.
Interested? Then drop me an email to find out more gscott@brookes.ac.uk. Interviews will begin in January 2024.
Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Under Graduate and Post-Graduate Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was first screened in 2018 www.donotbendfilm.com. He is the presenter of the A Photographic Life and In Search of Bill Jay podcasts.
Scott’s next book is Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is on sale February 2024.
© Grant Scott 2023