It is an old cliché for photographic academia to reject commodity culture as being antithetical to a creative agenda, just as it is standard practice for professional photographers to dismiss the trifles of photographic education as not engaging with the ‘real world’. And yet the machinery of professional photography, in a cosmopolitan sense at least, does allow a semi-permeable membrane between ‘Art’ and ‘Commerce’.

This symposium will examine how self-initiated ‘personal work’ has become much more transparent and present in the commercial sphere in recent years and how this relationship can enable photographers and photography, to profit creatively as well as professionally in this new landscape.

With guest speakers James Gerrard-Jones, Cian Oba-Smith, Emma Bowkett and Polly Brown, closely followed by music from Dean Chalkley, kickstarting the opening night of FOLD, a UWE graduate photography showcase.