Kent's Level 3 finishes with a public exhibition. Here is how a year of work turns into eight prints.
The exhibition at the end of Level 3 in Kent is the part everybody is nervous about and the part everybody remembers. It is also the part that is least well understood before you get there.
You do not turn up with a hard drive on the last night. The selection starts months before, and it is deliberately slow. You will shoot a great deal more than you show, and the work of narrowing it down is a skill in itself — arguably the skill the level is really teaching.
The number is usually around eight prints. Eight is enough to say something and few enough that every one has to earn its place. If a photograph is only there because it was hard to get, it comes off the wall.
The hardest conversation in the whole year is usually about a picture the photographer loves and nobody else can read. That conversation is not the tutor being difficult. It is the difference between a photograph that works for you because you were there and one that works for a stranger who was not.
Then there is the physical side, which people underestimate. Printing is its own craft. A file that looks superb on a bright screen can come out flat and muddy on paper, and you will not know until you have made a test print and stood back from it.
On the night, the room fills with people who did not make the work and have no context for it. That is the point. It is the first time most students see their photographs being looked at by someone with no reason to be kind.
Kent's Level 3 finishes with a public exhibition. Here is how a year of work turns into eight prints.
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