Ever seen a photo move?

Jamie Beck and artist Kevin Burg make cinemagraphs by using GIFs, a type of picture format similar to a JPEG which has been around since the invention of home computers. Only now with broadband internet are they brining it to life with a startling effect.

It is, in their own words, "something more than a photo but less than a video." Two artists have created a new way to record your special moments - pictures with movement. The 'cinemagraphs' look like still photos but actually feature a subtle area of movement designed to grab your eye and keep you looking. The effect is slightly eerie - but utterly captivating. In one shot of a crowded square, bodies are frozen in time, but one man quietly turns the pages of his newspaper. Another photo of a restaurant terrace is brought to life by the reflection of a taxi going past in the window.

In most cases Miss Beck shoots the photos and Mr Burg adds on motion-graphics over several hours of painstaking editing. The more complex ones take an entire day to pull together. To see these exciting cinemagraphs click here!

PHOTO SCULPTURES

Off Camera is a survey of photographic works which have been drawn or painted upon, animated, collaged or made into sculpture. These works set aside photography's 'normal' conventions, cast off the limits of the medium and rely on invention when a straight representation of the physical world fails to meet their needs or expectations.

The photography is neither pristine nor conventional. In much of the work, the photo themselves are 'wrong', taken with homemade cameras made from discarded objects, printed with dirty negatives, pulled from a common photo booth, torn or found. Some works 'fix' the print, highlighting an area with line or hand-colouring that may be out of focus or need extra attention. Other pieces remove crucial details and focal points entirely or use mark-making across the surface of the print to obscure an event of revel an imagine pattern or interior landscape.

Constraints of the print are ignored and the artist takes a variety of liberties including extending the edges of the image by adding on paper, drawing or painting, collaging with other materials or creating a new, subtly transformed image by combining two or more photographs. Select works also free the photo from its two-dimensions by folding, cutting and shaping prints into sculptures, while others interrupt the image's stillness through animation.

In total, the works challenge our vision by making visible that which is not apparent, posit the impossible, confuse genres, subvert photography's traditions and factual claims, and manipulate reality and meaning.

A2 Enhanced Image Assignment

In the first half term our A2 Photography students worked on a theme from their Summer Assignment to create enhanced images. The brief was simple: to combine more than one medium, reference other photographers/artists and their outcomes must be produced by developing work from the Darkroom opposed to digital experiments.

Each student created a set of images that were developed for example with ink, paint and acetate. Some of their images were photomontages, vignettes or just simply re-edited in Photoshop. Check out our Flickr Page for more examples of the great work that our photography students have been producing!