RCA Photography

A Bigger Book Fair hosted by Peckham kicks off TONIGHT at 6pm! Come visit the RCA MA Photography table full of wonderfully creative projects!

May 15, 6pm-10pm
May 16-17th, 11am-6pm

Day 1 of Photo London!

If you have a chance between now and May 17th, come visit the RCA Photo booth in Photo London’s publishing fair! Or if you’re around the Peckham area, we will also be in A Bigger Book Fair, May 15th-17th.

Congrats to everyone who is selling and exhibiting photo books! 📕📸📚

📸 ~ .m.sk

The RCA MA cohort of 2025-26 is en route to and next week, along with work all the way from Kyungil University!

Beautiful beautiful beautiful poster designed by from the current cohort.

We'll be presenting work from the archive, new work, material explorations, and playing around with the medium of Photography itself.

See everyone there!

Ian Costello is a current student on the MA Photography program at the RCA for 2025/26.

Ian is a classically trained photographer based in New York City and currently completing his Masters in Photography at the Royal College of Art, London.
Ian's practice transforms the lens into a poetic compass. Through his signature photographic abstraction, he opens portals to both the micro and macro wonders that define our planet - revealing textures, patterns, and perspectives perhaps overlooked, yet profoundly felt. His work is a meditation on scale, perception, and the infinite beauty hidden in plain sight.

RCA Photo x Mack Publishing Lecture Series - Nicholas Muellner
Tuesday 14th April 4-6PM 
Gorvy Lecture Theatre, RCA Battersea

Join us on 14th April for a special lecture at the Royal College of Art by writer and photographer Nicholas Muellner, a leading figure in the image-text field and founding director of the MFA Image Text program at Cornell University.

Muellner’s new book Love in a Time of Allegory asks how we can still feel, desire, and imagine in an age of relentless realism. Moving between images and text, Muellner’s illustrated essay turns to allegory as a way of thinking through politics, love, and meaning when private life is inseparable from public crisis.

NICHOLAS MUELLNER (b. 1969) is a writer and photographer. He is the author of In Most Tides an Island (2018) and Lacuna Park (2021), both published by SPBH Editions, and is regarded as a leading figure in the image-text field. He is Associate Professor of Art and the founding Director of the MFA Image Text program at Cornell University. His books have been widely exhibited and acclaimed for their experimental integration of photography and literature.



All welcome! Ticket link in bio.

Photography Tutor Sean Cham and alum Yiding Chen have been selected as a 2026 Foam Talent 💫




The exhibition at Foam’s museum in Amsterdam will be on view from 6 June – 26 August 2026, alongside a publication in Foam Magazine’s Talent Issue #68 (both in print and online). The exhibition will then travel to Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Frankfurt in 2027.

Images - Sean Cham

Current MA student shares his self published book “The Moroccan Revelations”.

Hand stitched on Khadi Paper
12x16 Gelatin prints

Current MA student shares his self published book “The Moroccan Revelations”.

Hand stitched on Khadi Paper
Etching & 12x16 Silver Gelatine Prints
Photographed in 2023-2024

DARKNESS: A Photography Conference
March 19th-20th
School of Digital Arts, MMU

https://www.schoolofdigitalarts.mmu.ac.uk/events/darkness-a-photography-conference/

photography

With lectures by Rut Blees Luxemburg and Sarah Jones and a performance by Tom Lovelace



This conference examines the significance of darkness, proposing to invert our thinking about photography and remind us of the image’s many entanglements and consequences, buried possibilities and repressed impulses. Drawing together artists, researchers, writers, curators, the conference makes visible the many resonances of darkness as a necessary subject in approaching photography’s elaborate material, industrial, psychical and social roots and interconnections.

Photography tutor Alice Butler’s new book is available to pre-order 💌

https://www.dukeupress.edu/close-writing

In Close Writing, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved q***r feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared “beloved,” reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.

Olivier Richon’s new book The Devouring Eye: Photography and the Mouth is out now with SPBH Editions.

Framed through a psychoanalytic lens, Richon proposes that photography is less a neutral act of observation than a form of visual incorporation. If looking maintains distance, the mouth abolishes it. The camera becomes a devouring organ, where the object is dissolved, digested, and made into an image. The desire to see becomes entangled with the desire to consume. Through this reading, photography is revealed as an insatiable medium – one that satisfies and frustrates our appetite for representation in equal measure. The Devouring Eye invites us to reconsider how we relate to images, and how deeply they live in us.