Genesis is proud to support students as part of our commitment to the next generation of creative professionals. We have forged relationships with some of the best universities across the creative industries to offer current and graduating students support through discount, bursaries, mentorship and career development opportunities alongside our own award, The Genesis Imaging Postgraduate Bursary Award which launched earlier this year.
This year sees students awarded bursaries for final year projects across a diverse range of subjects, which we celebrate here:
Francesco Catania ‘Silent Figures’
The Genesis Imaging Bursary with University of Westminster, comprised of £150 of production services, mentoring and support.
I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. I am alone… but then, all of a sudden, I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me! What does it mean?
J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Silent Figures explores the private life of couples, through their often silent or unvoiced dynamics. The “Home” is where people feel relaxed and safe, where they find their own dimensions, without wearing a mask or needing to perform a certain “persona”, consciously or unconsciously. However, within the couple, there is a tension between how one might act and be when entirely alone with one’s individual self, compared to the shared self that may still perform roles or compromise their identity. This project, therefore, aims to depict this solitude of the self within a couple, as opposed to depicting the shared self of the lover’s discourse.
The project is made by working with real couples, merging their reality with staged scenes as a photographic performance of identity.
About Francesco Catania:
Francesco Catania is an Italian photographer and artist based in London. His photography explores human identity and representation, creating a space in between fiction and reality.
Ji Cheng ‘Left Handed’
The Genesis Imaging Bursary with University of Westminster, comprised of £150 of production services, mentoring and support.
Studies suggest that approximately 10% of the world’s population is left-handed. Tools and procedures are mainly designed for right-handed people, therefore a lot of left-handed people are inconvenienced and forced to switch their hands in daily routine. By capturing left-handed life and asking right-handed people to do left-handed things Ji Cheng focuses on the construction of left-handed identity and the question of being “perfect or normal”. Also, it is about exploring the relationship between the majority and minority through collecting the representations of left hand in different areas.
About Ji Cheng:
Ji Cheng (b. 1995) is a Chinese photographer who is currently studying in the UK. After attaining a Bachelor Degree in Visual Communication from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, and one year exchanged study on Camera Arts in Switzerland, she decided to explore more on multiple media in Documentary Photography.
Jade Fantom ‘The Pit Ponds’
Awarded the Genesis Imaging and Lakeside Arts bursary of £1000 of production for a solo exhibition, to be exhibited at Lakeside Arts centre in 2019, alongside mentoring and support.
The Pit Ponds is an investigation into the landscape of a former mining industry situated in the Ashfield region of Nottinghamshire. Traces of the site’s history are apparent in the photographs, acting as an important reminder and homage to a working community and the loss of an industrial heritage. The project serves as a preservation and tribute to the land in its current form before its inevitable erasure by contemporary development. Childhood recollection of place is also addressed in the work, as the land was once naively used for social gatherings by local children. The Pit Ponds is dedicated to the photographer’s late grandfather and great-grandfather who worked together at Bentinck Colliery.
About Jade Phantom:
Jade is a 21-year-old photographer based in Nottinghamshire with a strong passion for landscape photography and travelling.
www.jadefantomphotography.weebly.com
Cheryl Newman ‘Lover’
The Genesis Imaging Bursary with University of Westminster, comprised of £150 of production services, mentoring and support.
“The series began from my wish to examine my memories of a nude man’ who lived with his mother in a very conventional 1960’s bungalow. This faceless young man with an erection, sporting a pair of Jesus sandals has become part myth with the passage of time. My work explores the representation of memory. Lover, the village of my birth, acts as a metaphor for real and imagined events. Through the use of documentary, constructed images and text, these memories and relationships are described and manipulated. Focusing on my early teenage years I use the images in a narrative context to revisit and reveal my story and to develop a personal visual language.”
About Cheryl Newman:
Cheryl Newman is an artist and independent curator of photography living in London. Her personal practice examines identity, place and the fallibility of memory. Cheryl is the 2019 Curatorial Director of PondyPHOTO a public arts festival in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India. She serves as a jury member for several photographic awards globally and is a nominator for the Deutsche Borse Photography prize. For more than fifteen years she was the Photography Director of the Telegraph Magazine where she raised the profile of the magazine commissioning intelligent and inventive photography worldwide. She is a visiting lecturer at the Bilder Nordic School in Oslo and lectures at universities in the UK.