Fashion Photography (Professional Placement Year)

Explore, challenge and define the role of the photographic image in fashion.

• This industry-focused course equips you with the experience and skills to establish a successful career in the creative industries.

• Access to excellent photography facilities at our Locksbrook campus.

• Engage with industry professionals, many of whom teach on the course.

Fashion Photography at Bath Spa University gives you the space to explore, actively enquire, challenge and define the role of the photographic image in fashion. Alongside the development of your technical skills and understanding of visual language, you'll explore the critical and ethical challenges facing Fashion Photography in a contemporary and global context.

You'll have the opportunity to take part in numerous industry-focused projects to build your skills and experience of working professionally. Our emphasis on professional development exercises equip you with project management experience, knowledge of marketing and promotion, and advanced skills required in pitching for employment and commission.

More about the Professional Placement Year
A Professional Placement Year (PPY), traditionally known as a sandwich year, is where you undertake a period of work with an external organisation for between 9-13 months. The placement occurs between your second and final years of undergraduate study. You can engage in multiple placements to make up the total time and are required to source the placement(s) yourself, with support from the Careers team.

Your first year will start with an Introduction to Photography skills development. You'll gain an understanding of the principles of interpreting images, and the role a camera can play in establishing identity. You'll explore digital image production alongside analogue practices in our excellent Photography workshops and will be exposed to the variables at play when photographing on location and shooting within the studio.

Embedded within the development of technical skills is a grounding of photographic and fashion movements in a global context. This critical context for your study is established through an Introduction to Visual and Material Culture, Ideology, conceptual, historical, ethical and technical aspects of photographic and fashion practices. You will explore the impact a fashion image can have in various digital or print forms, by analysing the interpretation of images within different contexts.

In Year 2 you will take part in independently-led research projects with a greater focus on industry collaboration. The course will require you to participate in lectures and seminars that are designed to establish the theoretical grounds in which your developing practice is located.

Alongside developing technical and image production skills to industry standard, you will begin to galvanise an understanding of the role your own practice plays within the world and within the fashion fraternity more specifically.

Your final year of study requires you to bring together the advancement of your technical and cognitive skills, alongside your gained experience of industry practices into a comprehensive portfolio of photographic work. This independent and innovative body of work will evidence self-initiated problem solving, an in-depth knowledge and understanding of your contemporary and critical awareness and will require you to regularly reassess your practice within cultural and social contexts verbally, practically and in written form. Your study will end with a major professional project in the form of an exhibition.

Assessment is continual throughout the course, and depending on the module could take the form of a portfolio of photographic work, an exhibition, an online journal, essay or presentation.