The combination of text with imagery has a long history in art – where images were used to create a rhetorical relationship with text to generate layered meanings, subverted readings and visual puns. From early appropriative practices of the Dadaists and Surrealists, to contemporary modes of image construction, the synthesis of text and image can evoke meanings greater than the power of their autonomous function.

This course explores the complex relationship between photographic imagery and text. Through workshops, demonstrations, seminars, lectures and group discussions students will engage in a range of learning activities that explore the conceptual intersection of image and text as a way of interrogating the photographic medium in its current form – referencing the use of the billboard, the zine and the photobook as contemporary vehicles of communication and dissemination. The course aims to extend students skill base, knowledge and creative potential through set exercises and projects, central to the production and advancement of individual concerns and work. Interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and experimental explorations are encouraged.

This course requires knowledge of basic analogue and digital photographic processes.