MA Photography (Online) Welcome Guide : Preparing for your course

We're delighted that you've chosen to join our creative community at Arts University Bournemouth. We can't wait to see what you'll create.

Welcome to the MA Photography (Online) course

This welcome pack is designed to give you an idea of what to expect during the first weeks of your course. Please take the time to read it carefully and take particular note of the pre-course preparation. We hope that you'll enjoy a happy and productive time with us, and we look forward to meeting you.

A message from your Programme Leader

Welcome to your MA Photography (Online), we are excited to meet you and help guide and support you through this next step in your creative career as a postgraduate student. On our course you will explore the discipline of photography, make connections with other areas of art and design and engage in wider discourses and debates relating to photography within a contemporary and historical context.

A huge asset of this course is that it welcomes students from all around the world. The cultural and social diversity of our student cohorts enriches the sharing of ideas, experience and perspective. Offering us all the opportunity to see and understand our world afresh.

We are very much looking forward to meeting you all over the first few weeks of the course.

All the very best!

– James Elliott and the MA Photography (Online) course team

Before you join us

As a new student, there'll be lots to read and to do this week. Some of this will be in the form of content to read and to watch in your own time, as well as some scheduled live welcomes from AUB to watch. The course is designed to be asynchronous, which means you can read and watch these at your own pace and at times that are suited to you. Live content is recorded and made available shortly after it takes place.

You’ll find information on the following pages about the various software that you have access to as an AUB student. On the MA Photography (Online) course you will regularly use Microsoft Teams to join in our weekly optional live seminars and Canvas, our virtual learning environment, to engage in the weekly course content and forum discussions. We recommend installing Teams on your devices and becoming comfortable with how it runs before the first seminar.

As an AUB student, you have access to LinkedIn Learning, a valuable and extensive resource of video materials detailing how to make full use of the various professional tools and programs available to you.

Your first unit is called POD700 – Positioning Practice and content for this will be available on Canvas from 12.00 19 September. New content and discussions are released each Friday at 12.00. Unit specific information is delivered by announcements in the unit on Canvas. You’ll also find other course specific information on the MA Photography course hub on Canvas.

Each week of the course, there will be discussions to be involved in, texts to read and challenges to guide you towards producing your assignments for each unit. Throughout the course we recommend you collate your thoughts, notes, research and drawings into a Reflective Journal. Your journals are part sketchbook, part notebook, part diary and research log. They can be digital or physical, whichever works best for you, but we recommend having easy access to them as a resource for regular documentation, reflection and thinking. You’ll find more information about these in the first unit, but instilling in yourself a regular and productive use of your journal as a space for unedited creation and thinking on the page can be key to a successful creative practice.

For unit specific information and asking questions related to the course we recommend using the various discussion forums available to you on Canvas, where the MA Photography course team can provide help.

Programme Leader James Elliott can also be contacted via email at jelliott@aub.ac.uk, (we recommend using your student email to do so, as personal emails can be caught in spam filters) we also have teams links for individual conversations, and groups based upon unit of study.

On the course you will be expected to independently explore what photography might mean to you alongside analysing and evaluating the cultural, social and political impact of the discipline. To prepare you for research at this level each unit has a bespoke reading list of ebooks that will be available to you together with other recorded audio and video content. These ebooks are provided via your AUB student login.

Although not the compulsory, the following books provide a valuable baseline upon which to develop your ideas:

Barthes, Roland, and Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. Vintage Classics. Vintage Books, 2000.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: An Influential Essay of Cultural Criticism ; the History and Theory of Art. Translated by Harry Zohn. Adansonia Press, 2018.
Berger, John. Understanding a Photograph. Edited by Geoff Dyer. Penguin Classics. Penguin Books, 2013.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin on Design 1. Penguin, 2008.
Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Fourth edition. Thames & Hudson World of Art. Thames and Hudson, 2020.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Pearson Always Learning. Penguin Books, 1979.
Zakia, Richard D. Perception and Imaging: Photography--a Way of Seeing. 3rd ed. Focal Press, 2007.

AUB Library has access to a broad and relevant range of contemporary periodicals and magazines, all of which are accessible through the Library website. Below are a selection which are available online.

Your first classes

We'll be interacting with you via the discussion forums on Canvas from Monday 22 September. These forums can be accessed either via the Canvas Student app on your devices or the browser based version of Canvas accessed via my.aub.ac.uk.

We’ll contact you via Canvas to introduce your tutor and to invite you to the first webinar, a link to which will be available on the seminar page of the Week 1 content for the unit as well as being sent via an announcement.