Paper for the GSA L&T Conference: Creative Education as a Creative Sustainable Practice, 5th June 2024

This paper recounts the shifts that take place in the context of images and the creative spaces that contain and carry them. Taking examples from a revised curriculum in the Second Year Photography curriculum, the paper takes examples of contemporary practice in the context of the exhibition, the individual publication and the group publication. Following Slavoj Žižek’ s categorization about knowledge, the question is posed about how the photograph functions as a concentrated field of knowledge in different contexts, how artists/teachers encounter and discuss it with the artists/students and how the conversation pivots between the aesthetic event and the learning event in the public domain. The paper examines model of production and making, the navigation of ambition and production and the consolidation of the function of the image in gallery and publishing contexts. Considering the current financial state and the different conditions that govern the thinking and working with the photograph as a primary form of expression, a case is made that new strategies need to be developed to both encapsulate practices in the expanded field of the image, and to consider contemporary tensions in production, learning and teaching and making.