To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.
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After a week that included several days at Focus on Imagining, a photography assessment exercise, a day of videoing and an evening with a rather pleasant bottle of Rioja, Jose and I made a rather tired spectacle as we picked our way through the barricades awaiting the Lib Dem spring conference to make our way […]
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Back from Focus on Imaging, we are now into full on assessment at the OCA. Focus is a show that stirs mixed emotions for me. It was great to meet so many of our photography students and we certainly had plenty of discussion with potential students, however the content of the show doesn’t really do […]
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Our latest Blog of the week is Photosynthesis by Eileen Rafferty. It is a brilliant learning log because Eileen isn’t afraid to take risks. She pushes herself to take photographs in places or situations in which she doesn’t feel comfortable and she owns up to herself (ie reflects on) these feelings in her blog. What […]
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“Good morning white man”. The standard salutation, normally said with genuine warmth, that you will receive in Burkina Faso. A reminder of where you come from, which, to all intents and purposes, might as well have been a different planet. I’m back from Burkina after working on a collaboration with Bristol-based charity Tree Aid in […]
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The Big Issue in the North is a magazine covering current affairs and the arts staffed by a small team in Manchester. As you might know, the OCA is an education charity based in Barnsley which aims to widen access to creative arts education at undergraduate and graduate levels. What the two organisations have in […]
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One of the most frequent questions we get asked at the OCA starts with a statement and goes something like this: ‘I have been a photographer all my life, do I have start at the beginning?’ Although this is a straight forward question it is one which is extremely difficult to answer. We are absolutely […]
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Last week I joined 12 students who attended Alan Whetton’s photography study visit to Bradford. For me the highlight of the afternoon was the curator talk about From Back Home, the work of Anders Petersen and JH Engström their joint project to photograph the Värmland, the central western area of Sweden from which they both […]
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‘…Get out as early as you can. And don’t have any kids yourself’ Unless you subscribe to Phillip Larkin‘s particularly dour view of the world, it is difficult not to be moved by CJ Clarke’s winning entry in the BJP’s inaugural Open Shutter Prize One of the judges, Dominique Green, is quoted in the BJP […]
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Just in case you are wondering, this is not a post about digital editing. The colours of the sky and the water in the above photograph may have been ever so slightly corrected, but this is most definitely not a post about digital manipulations. The opening image is a photograph I took somewhere in the […]
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Our latest blog of the week is Art Photography or photographyselina by Australia based student Selina Wallace. Selina completed Art of Photography last year and is currently studying People and Place. Her blog is a good combination of documenting her work through the course projects and reflections on photography informed by her wider research. I […]
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