Introduction

By Ken Grant

In early December last year, I sat in a small Welsh bar with the young Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra. I'd invited him over to talk to the students on the recommendation of a friend who a few years earlier had mentioned his name in passing as one to watch. My friend was right. Rob asked questions, all night, about Documentary, about materials about books, about photographers...he was curious, interested and completely besotted with photography in all its possibilities.

The following day, Rob presented his recent work to students. 101 Billionaires is an ambitious and consistent book project, photographed across the kind of Russia rarely fore-grounded in news or travel pieces. He continued to ask questions, this time asking himself why he worked in that way, what fascinated him about Documentary, what Documentary was, and why he felt motivated to make work. It was a substantial talk, an invigorating moment amongst a season of core lectures our students are offered between October and February each year.

Perhaps it hit a nerve, because Hornstra seemed to hint at the potential for pushing the properties of photography ...whilst quietly inferring there was a need to work with belligerence and relentless engagement if success were ever to become anything like a possibility. He had published his earlier works whilst still a student (-after training in Utrecht with the photographer Corinne Noordenbos), and had quickly enlisted the patronage of the wider photography community to help him finance and refine subsequent books exactly as he wished. Book production is becoming increasingly common amongst students. There is a sense of freedom that the Blurb books era has generated. Yet freedoms, we know, can come at a cost. The rigour of ideas, design -and the very appropriateness of the book as a site to present work has never been any less of an issue to resolve.

A number of the inclusions presented here have been conceived primarily as book projects, and the best examples wrestle with the ideas of narrative, structure and the interplay between scale colour and the page itself to sit as useful and fresh productions. Students have been both fascinated and agitated in the last year by what has risen to consciousness in photographic debate: Paul Graham's recent work, for example, seems as equally in place on the gallery wall as it does within the construction that holds its subjects within the delicate packaging of a book series. Graham's provocative comments on how we use photography have been important. Over the last two decades, his contributions have sometimes connected like the blows of a fighter on an opponent who has prepared for the fight with a stale or out-of-date battle-plan...why use black and white? Why rely on traditional notions of narrative? His questions always seem to challenge any sense complacency whilst developing work that remains engaged and able to speak of the world with urgency and eloquence.

What seems clear to me though, as I listen in seminars or visit contemporaries across Europe, is that these students are clearly aware of the need to reflect on these issues and move forward. If a book is to work, or a series is to successfully sit on a gallery wall, or if a photographer is going to refine a sense of authorship within a portfolio, it needs to progress from what we already know, from what is tired and from what is over -and it also needs to connect. Over recent years, Newport students have collaborated with designers from major publishing houses, they have developed relationships across Europe with international partners to test their work in contemporary debates and they have chosen working methods that sit at the very edges of traditional documentary practice.

Thomas Struth once spoke of how photography might be pursued so thoroughly until technique becomes effortless and understated. What we're left with - if that point is ever truly reached- are the contents, the ideas and the lives that documentary students so often engage with. In the work shown here, we're also left with the student's energy -with the determination to play a part and communicate something they are moved to show us, and just like Hornstra and his eager concerns in that cold night in a Welsh pub, that endeavour is impossible to ignore.

Ken Grant
June 2009