Photographies Vol. 2, No. 2, September 2009, pp. 203–214ISSN 1754-0763 print/ISSN 1754-0771 online © 2009 Taylor & Francishttp://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/17540760903116663

RPHO1754-07631754-0771Photographies, Vol. 2, No. 2, July 2009: pp. 1–13PhotographiesSarah Edge

PHOTOGRAPHY, HIGHER EDUCATION AND

THE SKILLS AGENDA

PHOTOGRAPHY, HE AND THE SKILLS AGENDAphotographies

This article outlines how higher education in the UK has undergone some significant changesover the last ten years in which government departments and policies are linking the “skills” wedeliver to the nation’s economic growth. This is now monitored by agencies such as the SectorSkills Councils. This article takes a first step in considering how photographic lecturers inhigher education have responded to this debate. It moves on to suggest that our relationship toagencies such as Skillset could be most effectively managed through an examination of ourown, historical, ideological and disciplinary positions in terms of the delivery of photographicskills. In this respect the article suggests that such a theoretically informed approach to skillscould, in fact, allow us to engage productively with this new government agenda.

There has been a significant repositioning of higher education by the UK governmentduring the last ten years. This change has been most clearly signalled by the merging ofthe Department for Education and Skills and the Department for Trade and Industry tocreate the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS, recentlyrenamed the BIS Department for Business Innovation and Skills).1 Ideologically, this hasrepositioned higher education – suggesting that it holds a key responsibility for thenation’s economic development and prosperity. Practically, it has created a new depart-ment to oversee and assess the “development, funding and performance” of higher andfurther education in which the criteria for success are to be linked to national prosperity.“Britain”, it proclaims, “can only succeed in a rapidly changing world if we develop theskills of our people to the fullest possible extent, carry out world class research and schol-arship, and apply both knowledge and skills to create an innovative and competitive eco-nomy” in which “The work of DIUS – on further and higher education, innovation,science and technology, intellectual property, and supporting evidence-based policymaking across government – is therefore essential to national prosperity.”2

In 2009, higher education is being examined and judged on how well it meets thisobjective, and the “public eye” has become focused on measures introduced to “prove”its worth in relation to its responsibility. These external measures include the introduc-tion of the QAA benchmarks within present disciplines with a set of key skills and knowl-edges that are positioned as essential for graduates,3 and the Research Assessment Exercise(RAE) that assesses the standard and worth of research undertaken by universities withinallocated disciplines, ranking them and allocating financial support accordingly (currentdiscussion on “impact” as part of the new Research Assessment Frame (REF), defined asthe “economic and social impact of research”, is another example of this shifting highereducation environment4). These two measures have been designed to asses the worth

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and relevance of higher education in order to ascertain how well we are contributing tothe nation’s prosperity. However, the most controversial measure introduced to assessthe value of higher education is the Sector Skills Councils.5

Skillset, photography and the skills agenda

The Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) have emerged as part of the repositioning of highereducation in the United Kingdom as the providers of skills for economic growth. Themost significant government policy paper here was the Leitch report UK Skills: Prosper-ity for All in the Global Economy – World Class Skills, which was published in 2006. Thereport was commissioned by the government in 2004 under the remit to “identify theUK’s optimal skills mix in 2020 to maximise economic growth, productivity and socialjustice, and to consider the policy implications of achieving the level of changerequired”.6 Lord Leitch was then tasked with identifying how to better integrateemployment and skills services at a local level. This was achieved through the SSCs,“state-sponsored, employer-led organisations that cover specific economic sectors inthe United Kingdom” which have “four key goals: to reduce skills gaps and shortages, toimprove productivity, to boost the skills of their sector workforces, to improvelearning supply”.7 There are now twenty-five SSCs in the United Kingdom which arelicensed by the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

In this political and cultural climate the funding of higher education in the UnitedKingdom is now firmly linked to the impact it can make in relation to national prosper-ity and the economy. The Higher Education Funding Council (website confirms how itis “committed to enhancing the contribution higher education (HE) makes to the eco-nomy and society”, where it “provide[s] specific funds and support that encouragesthem to do this more effectively”.8 This is a substantial cultural shift in terms of howhigher education is perceived within the United Kingdom and it is something thateducators of photography cannot afford to ignore. The power of this discourse is thatpositioning education as the “saviour of the nation” can be evidenced through the launchof the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) Economic ChallengeInvestment Fund, which offers financial support for “the higher education (HE) sectorin its contribution to address the country’s economic downturn”.9

This repositioning is also evident in the physical structures of universities, with increas-ing importance being given to both the Office of Innovation and the Office of AcademicEnterprise,10 while anyone glancing through the adverts for academic vacancies will havenoticed how experience of engagement with the creative industries is now essential formany senior-level positions. Furthermore, there is an increased interest in the universitycontext in assessing skills delivery (transferable, subject and industry), which are matchedagainst teaching and learning, employability and entrepreneurship policies.

This issue of Photographies has been commissioned to raise debate on the current stateof teaching photography as a subject in the context of recent changes in education, cultureand technology. The context I have mapped out above, I would suggest, is having or isgoing to have a significant impact on the current state of photography education in theUnited Kingdom. However, before moving on to examine how we might engage withthis changing set of circumstances (in which the various bodies that now monitor our

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success as economic drivers – the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), RAE, HEFCE andthe SSCs – award our funding accordingly), there is another factor to consider in relationto photography education. In Britain, photography is positioned as part of the “digitalrevolution” and thus falls within government concerns in relation to the nation’s digitalliteracy. In January 2009 the government published an interim report titled Digital Brit-ain. The report both notes the need for different levels of upskilling in digital technologyand also elevates the professional skills of creativity and digital production, proclaimingthese as essential for the future British economy. “The digital economy”, it notes, “reliesupon these hybrid professionals who can bridge technology, creativity and business.” Inconfirming this, the report also emphasizes that there “is more work to be done tostrengthen the understanding of the ways for education and business to work together tocreate the skilled workers and leaders which businesses need”. The way forward, it sug-gests, will be by “working with the Sector Skills Councils to develop some practical actionpoints for Government, higher education and work sectors for the final report”.11 Thusthe future of photographic education in the UK digital environment is to be partiallymoulded by this partnership between government, the related photographic industriesand higher education. This article, then, will make an attempt to open up a debate on howwe might be able to engage constructively in this partnership.12

Photography, photo imaging and skillset

Responsibly for reviewing the delivery of photographic training and education fallsunder the remit of the Sector Skills Council for Creative Media, known as Skillset. ThisSkills Council is interesting because it is has already created a formal relationship withthe higher education sector through the creation of the Screen Academies for film andthe Skillset Media Academies (these include the delivery of photography/photo imag-ing). This is a relationship that is, apparently, the first attempt in the world to create aformal relationship between higher education and its related industry. The SkillsetMedia Academies were established in 2007 after a year-long application and inspectionprocess. One hundred and seventeen higher education institutions applied for this “kitemark” of approval and seventeen were successful.13 A panel made up of industry repre-sentatives inspected each institution’s curriculum, resources and staff profiles to gaugethe course’s overall relevance to industry. This process heralds a new competitivenessbetween educational institutions, in which industry operates as the approver of somecourses. In the now highly competitive market of higher education, this approval isregarded as a valuable marketing tool by most universities. It also operates as a signpostthat those universities are meeting the government’s skills agenda.

On the ground, however, the relationship between Skillset and those deliveringphotography education seems to be less optimistic. The Association for Photography inHigher Education (APHE), an organization made up of those involved in the delivery ofphotographic education in the United Kingdom, has posted two reports on discussionrelated to Skillset.14 These suggest that there is a general anxiety about the role ofSkillset, based on the following: its lack of understanding of the higher educationenvironment; its posing of additional quality assurance pressure on top of the QAAbenchmarks;15 and concerns over competition through course accreditation schemes that

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will result in the creation of a two-tier system (this has already happened through theSkillset Media Academy Networks noted above). Most notably, I would suggest, thesedebates reveal how the academic community is unsettled by the role being given to indus-try (via Skillset) to act as approvers of the skills being delivered in “academic” courses.16

The symposium connected to this issue of Photographies, held in London in March2009, confirms how academics are internalizing the government-led agenda I have out-lined in my opening. Participants discussed the current shift towards photographycourses marketing themselves via commercial distinctions such as documentary, fash-ion or fine art rather than just photography. The increasing pressure faced in the highereducation environment in addressing student employability through employer engage-ment and the curriculum was also raised. The positioning of universities as “businesses”with the related need to generate income and prove customer satisfaction was deemedan area of concern, as was the apparent mismatch between students’ expectations of aphotography education and academic requirements.17

While the symposium was marked by concern with all aspects of the repositioning ofhigher education in the United Kingdom, in which Skillset is a major player, Skillset wasnot discussed. It is possible that the reluctance to engage with Skillset expressed in earlierdebates held by the APHE has grown into a reluctance to even acknowledge its existence.Whatever the root cause, this lacuna is significant given the increasing role that organiza-tions such as Skillset play in setting the agenda for the future of photography education.Therefore, it is necessary to explore whether a more constructive response to Skillset ispossible (because it is not going to go away), and, if so, whether it is possible to find somecommon ground to allow us to engage with this “skills” debate productively.

The Skillset website has links to a dedicated “Photo Imaging” page, which offers theuser a search facility for higher education courses delivering photography; forty-four atundergraduate level and fourteen at MA level. The majority are titled BA HonsPhotography while others, as noted above, reference specific occupations such as press,documentary or commercial photography and wildlife photography. A further searchconfirms that on their prospectus page most courses reference the acquisition of profes-sional skills for employment and many list specific occupations such as journalism orfashion as the potential career outcomes of their courses. In this respect the “skills” andemployability agenda is already being used as a marketing tool for most of ourphotographic courses. So on one level course publicity is tailored to recognize the needfor specific skills that meet the requirements of employment while we as academicsremain reluctant to recognize how we might best take ownership of such requirements.There is a clear need, therefore, to move on from this impasse. My suggestion is that inorder to move this debate forward it is essential to shift towards a more informed criticaland theoretical examination of our positions as educators of photography. The photoimaging search page offers a good starting point for this in that it offers a simple means toaccess what type of photographic education is currently available. It identifies how pho-tography has been delivered primarily from within two different academic disciplines,namely media and communication (media studies) and fine art. I would contend that thepedagogies of these two disciplines are informing different academic approaches to thedelivery of skills. It is necessary to examine these different traditions, as well as somepopular misconceptions about each, in order to gain a clearer picture of the state ofphotographic education and how best to map future strategies and policy responses.

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On one level, current understanding is informed by the perception that mediastudies has a direct relationship to the media industries, making it akin to engineeringor computing.18 However, this assumption belies the fact that media studies is a quitedistinct academic discipline, often delivered with no production work at all.19 Photog-raphy delivered in a fine art context, in contrast, is conditioned by the traditions of thisdiscipline; this has led some with a cultural studies perspective to criticize it for itstendency to separate production from its social conditions – and I will return to thisbelow. Such misconceptions indicate the pressing need for dialogue between these twodisciplines. It is here that a coherent agenda crucially must be set because Skillsetfocuses only on skills; it does not recognize disciplinary approaches. The photo imagingprofiles for the various career path lists are: high street, advertising, press, fashion, cor-porate, scientific, medical photographer; what is absent is fine art photographer.20

What I suggest here is that by importing critical theory into the debate on skills wemight be able to engage more productively with agencies such as Skillset. This is bestundertaken at ground level through an examination of how each discipline hasapproached photographic education.

Photographic meaning, history, theory and the place of skills

Numerous theorists and publications have confirmed the way in which photography hadto struggle to negotiate its social and cultural meanings when it “appeared” in the earlynineteenth century. Price and Well note how the structuring “debate about the natureof photography as a new technology” centred on “how far it could be considered asArt”.21 This debate had to also establish the kinds of photography which could not beclassified as artistic. In this respect the very formation of photographic meaning was cre-ated from within two distinct fields of signification, namely the mechanical and commer-cial versus the creative and artistic. Such distinctions, as we are now aware, were notintrinsic to photography but rather were being defined outside its frame. What this meantwas that it was necessary for art photography to mobilize signifiers created elsewhere inthe field of painting (shared subject matter, anti-realist techniques, soft focus, blurring,double exposures). These practices were marked as essentially different from the com-mercial practices which have been examined elsewhere.22 Consequently, the art photog-rapher was located as quite different from the commercial photographer, who waspositioned at the lowest level, being defined both in class and value terms as an itinerantworker.23 This historical legacy has impacted on how we deliver photographic education.Wells has noted how the result has been that “the history of photography as Art focusesnot so much upon photographic communication as upon photographs as objects, reifiedfor their aesthetic qualities” in which the history of photography “tends to be presented asa history of ‘great’, or ‘ master’ [sic], photographers”.24 What this has produced, accord-ing to Wells, is an approach to teaching that divorces “photography as fine art from thelarger history of photography with its ubiquity of practices, but also rarely engages withthe broader political issues and social contexts”.25

I would suggest that this tendency to separate art photography from photography’ssocial and cultural position is a structuring element in this discipline’s response to theskills agenda. Such a theoretically informed approach to what currently informs

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photographic education should also be mobilized in relation to the place of the artist orworker. Discussing the place of art photography during industrialization and thecreation of class difference, Simon Watney explains how “the artist/photographer” waspromoted “as someone somehow outside of this mass, untainted by its values, gazingonto the spectacle of the world, a privileged observer who observations are supposedlyof only ‘artistic’ significance”.26 Critical approaches to the study of artistic photographyhave confirmed how this has resulted in a further split between creative expression andintellectual intention in which “thinking” is further split. In this context the photogra-pher as “artist is viewed as transcending ‘mere recording’ of events, offering a uniqueperspective or insight into people, places, objects, relationships, circumstances”.27 Inthis context it is the role of the art critic or academic to articulate the “creative worth”of the art photographer.

To my knowledge there has been far less academic examination of the “legacy” thatinforms the relationship between photographic theory and production in the disciplinaryapproach taken up in media studies (though there has, of course, been research on the ide-ological differences between high and popular culture) and to this end I will have to offersome of my own thoughts. In media studies, because production work is connected tocommercial or popular photography, it does not carry the status of artistic production andconsequently the student/maker is not regarded as employing the same intellectual proc-esses. Moreover, because media studies primarily examines the commercial uses of pho-tography – press, documentary, advertising and so on, or popular cultural artefacts such asfamily, historical or tourist photographs – this has resulted in a split between those whotheorize about the media – the academics – and those who contribute to the media –professional photographers (including students). While little work has been done to exam-ine this hierarchy in terms of popular/commercial photography, feminist critics have notedin a slightly different context how such divisions tend to locate the consumers of low cultureas mass drones, while the media academic, whose work it is to decode these messages, isconfirmed as a superior intellectual through the process of locating ideological inscription.

To put it bluntly, or offer this up as a polemic, in fine art it would appear that the artphotographer can be positioned as an “intellectual” only if what “he” does is located as quitedifferent from the everyday photographic practices of the commercial photographer, whilein media studies, which cannot avoid studying the everyday uses of photography, academicor intellectual standing is signified by being above the ordinary consumers or commercialphotographer. Thus within both disciplines the ideological position given to popular orcommercial photography contaminates the ideological positioning of the artist or aca-demic. My point is, then, that as academics teaching photography it is essential that weinterrogate our own belief system because, I would suggest, the hierarchical subjectpositioning that we engage with in relation to skills, the commercial and training isinformed, on one level, by the “protective” discourse of “snobbery”.28

In this respect my suggestion is, then, that the current government pressure onacademia to address its relationship to the skills agenda and commercial practices of“work” can best be dealt with by returning to a theoretical approach to the photographic.In 1982 Victor Burgin’s highly influential text set itself the task of identifying the need fora more theoretically informed approach to the study of photographs, explaining how thiscollection of essays represented “contributions towards photography theory” andnoting that the “articles collected here are diverse in approach, the present state of

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underdevelopment of photography theory precludes a more homogeneous collection, butthey share in common the project of developing a materialist analysis of photography”.29

While in 1988, in discussing the emergence of his own critically informed approach to his-torical photographs, John Tagg acknowledged the synergies between critically informedapproaches to art history and his own work on nineteenth-century photography, citing theimportance of the approach taken by T. J. Clark in his “attempt to synthesise historical anal-yses with his readings of French Marxism, semiotics and psychoanalysis” coupled with his“rethinking of issues of realism, urbanisation and representation, the relations of class to cul-ture, and the conditions of production and reception of specific works of art”.30 This modelis driven by a desire to understand photography as specific form of communication thatmakes no distinction between art photography and commercial photography.

However, such an approach was not fully endorsed by photography educators andtheorists, and the tendency to isolate different parts of the photographic message indifferent disciplinary approaches is still problematic. Most recently this has been evi-denced in the “disciplinary” restrictive approaches to examining the shift to digitalimage-making (which, as noted in my opening, is also a key issue of concern for the skillsagenda). This has created a tendency for theorists to select just one aspect of this shift forinterrogation, examination or even adulation (one example of this is the recent concernto examine digitization and the loss of materiality in isolation from other factors31). Suchconcerns over the danger of isolating these technological shifts from the overall photo-graphic message was voiced early on in the debate when Druckery asserted that suchapproaches cannot afford to “simply ignore theoretical questions of representation thatthe field of photography and film have been grappling with over the last two decades”.32

My suggestion is, then, that if we approach the skills agenda as part of a desire toreturn to a more critically informed and holistic study of the photographic message amore positive relationship with “skills” delivery may be possible. Moreover, locatedwithin this historical tradition, academics are placed in the “driving seat” in relation toskills and industry rather than the other way round.

This is because theorists such as those cited above remind us that we must notprivilege certain forms of photography or isolate some genres or photographic practicesfrom others. They argue that for photography to be understood it needs to be locatedwithin its specific social, historical and cultural environment. Basically, a culturallyinformed photographic theory proposes that photography can only really be appreci-ated if it is connected to its everyday uses at any one time. This question is not so farremoved from the questions being posed by the skills agenda, which are: what is therole of the photograph and photographer in contemporary society, and how can highereducation help educate students for that role?

My advice is, then, that as photographic theorists and educators we need to adopt asimilar approach to the skills agenda and not separate it from the theoretical questionsof representation that have been central to both subjects for a number of years. If weare to consider how any photograph signifies at any one specific moment, we need toconsider everything that acts upon it to give it photographic meaning. If all types ofphotography are approached as forms of communication and all photographers as themakers of that communication, then the distinction between art and the commercial isredundant and the problem of skills versus theory is irrelevant, because skills, orprofessional skills, are also a fundamental part of the photographic message.

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There is some theoretical material here to help us deliver a photography educationwhich offers skills in an integrated academic context if we are prepared to do thetranslational work this will require. There are numerous texts on how the professionalcodes of family photography signify, or how documentary or fashion photography oradvertising function as a genre.

There are, however, very few academic texts that have really interrogated the ide-ological role of professional skills. Stuart Hall’s seminal text on the “Determination ofNews Photographs”33 is unusual, and I would suggest there is some very interestingwork to do here for photography academics. Furthermore, there are also key momentsin the history of photographic practice when these “false” distinctions have brokendown which can act as a catalyst for debate in relation to a cross-examination of thetheory/practice divide from within either discipline. A few examples might be: thenineteenth century, when photography was engaged in its own discursive construction,and commercial and art distinctions were unstable and in formation; or the 1930s, whenthe distinction between academic (those who study photographic communication) andthe photographer as maker or worker collapsed; and finally those key historicalmoments when political agendas and photographic communication converge, such asthe in the work of feminist or black photographers.

What I am suggesting as a pedagogic approach to the delivery of skills is that weencourage our students to theorize all aspects of what they do, whether it is part of fash-ion photography, commercial photography or art photography.34 How they mobilize thisknowledge can be varied and unique; it may allow them to become more professionaland skilled or to interrogate and engage with the codes and meanings of the professionaland commercial.35 This latter position has mostly been adopted by the arts; however, thisis positioned primarily as part of the intellectualizing hierarchy I have mapped previouslyand where changes are, I have suggested, required. Furthermore, within the UK agendaof skills and economic growth, the commercial and artistic have been merged as part ofthe creative industries36 – a designation that repositions artists as workers and locatestheir production within the current social and political environment.

There are, of course, enormous ideological differences between these two drivers –which are, to put it bluntly, the UK government, its agencies and their need for growthin the economy through a partnership with higher education, and those academics whohave driven the radical and challenging traditions of “leftist”37 photographic thought.38

To conclude, I will turn to John Tagg’s most recent publication in which he draws thework of Derrida and Foucault together to examine the current state of play in relationto the study of photography from a fine art tradition:

Inside and outside, event and context, work and setting, the structural and theempirical: these coupled terms – familiar to us as those that fix the polarities of aninterminable methodological debate in art history – are radically displaced byFoucault’s conceptualization of the discursive event and the discursive field. Yetthe effects of these dualisms persist with all that depends from the separation theyinscribe, between the pure interiority of form and the determinant exteriority ofcontext and “social” history. To understand what supports this seemingly insur-mountable separation, we must look to the apparatus that keeps it so squarely inplace.39

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In this article I have attempted to draw the theoretical approach summarized here byTagg to open up a space for a productive discussion on the current governmental drivetowards “skills” which is impacting on the delivery of photography in higher education.

Notes

1 The Department’s role is to:

Sustain and develop a world-class research base: Maximise the exploitation of theresearch base to support innovation across all sectors of the economy: Raise andwiden participation in Higher Education: Raise participation and attainment by youngpeople and adults in post-16 education and learning: Tackle the skills gap amongstadults, particularly equipping people with basic literacy and numeracy: Increase thesupply of people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

(http://www.dius.gov.uk/about_DIUS/what_we_do.aspx)

2 Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, <http://www.dius.gov.uk/about_DIUS/what_we_do.aspx>.

3 “Subject benchmarks” are described as statements that

provide a means for the academic community to describe the nature and charac-teristics of programmes in a specific subject or subject area. They also representgeneral expectations about standards for the award of qualifications at a givenlevel in terms of the attributes and capabilities that those possessing qualificationsshould have demonstrated.

As fields of study, communication, media, film and cultural studies are dis-tinguished by their focus on cultural and communicative activities …

The benchmarks include the following:

Graduates will demonstrate the ability to: produce work which demonstrates theeffective manipulation of sound, image and/or the written word: competences inthe chosen field of practice: demonstrate the development of creative ideas andconcepts based upon secure research strategies: understand the importance of thecommissioning and funding structures of the creative industries and demonstrate acapacity to work within the constraints imposed by them: produce work showingcapability in operational aspects of media production technologies, systems, tech-niques and professional practices: manage time, personnel and resources effectivelyby drawing on planning, organisational, project management and leadership skills.

(www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/honours/default.asp)

4 <www.hefce.ac.uk/Research/ref/>.5 They are controversial, I would suggest, because both the RAE and benchmarking

are perceived as being managed by the academic community while the SSCs areseen as the “voice” of the “industry”.

6 <www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/prebud_05_leitch.htm>.

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7 The SSCs are currently undergoing a review process in which industry is beinggiven an increasing voice in higher education developments:

Education and training are changing, and striving to become far more responsiveto your needs as an employer … Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) enable you to haveyour collective voice heard. SSCs are about to go through a rigorous process todetermine whether their licence from the UK Government and the devolvedadministrations should be renewed. As SSCs represent employers, your viewsare being sought on how they are performing. This is important because the UKGovernment and the devolved administrations are giving SSCs increasing levelsof influence over skills policy, qualification reform and the way in which learningprovision is delivered.

(www.ukces.org.uk/Default.aspx?page=4702)

8 Higher Education Funding Council, <http://www.hefce.ac.uk>.9 Higher Education Funding Council, <http://www.hefce.ac.uk/econsoc/challenge>.10 My own experience is that in the past these departments tended to engage with

those subjects where a tradition with industry and research has been easy to iden-tify, such as Engineering or Biomedical Science. However, as part of the economicshift to a “knowledge-based economy”, this has extended into what are now termedthe “creative industries”.

11 Digital Britain: Interim Report, Jan. 2009, Department for Culture, Media and Sportand Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform: Section 5.1 Edu-cation and Skills.

12 In 2004 the Journal of Media Practice posed a number of questions in relation to thisshift. However, on the whole, the academic inquiry seems to be very limited. SeeRoodhouse 33–42.

13 There are now nineteen Academies in the United Kingdom; <www.skillset.org/training/san/>.

14 <www.aphe.ac.uk/feedback%20from%20Skillset%20me.doc>; <www.aphe.ac.uk/APHE%20Mins_Skillset.doc>.

15 It is interesting that only the Art and Design benchmarking was referred to.16 There were some representatives there who were already working with Skillset and

who felt strongly that we needed to engage with the SSCs. David Bate concurredwith my own position that “we should not take all of this personally – we are justpart of a wider and more general government agenda that is affecting many otherprofessions” (www.aphe.ac.uk/APHE%20Mins_Skillset.doc).

17 There was also an extended discussion on defunct technology in relation to ana-logue production, which was marked by our own unease in relation to our ownchanging skills base. It is worth noting that this came primarily from those whodeliver photography in a fine art context rather than media.

18 The current government agenda here is to improve this relationship through partnershipslike the Council for Industry and Higher Education (www.cihe-uk.com/index.php).

19 Thus while Skillset and government policy now asks higher education to engagedirectly with industry, what if there is no clear industry to engage with? For human-ities subjects this offers some real challenges for the future in the United Kingdom.

20 Artist as a career falls under the Creative and Cultural Skills group; however, thereis no specific mention of photography on its website (www.ccskills.org.uk/).

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21 Price and Wells 13.22 See Green-Lewis; Tagg, Burden of Representation; Sekula; Warner; and Pultz as examples.23 Linkman 49–68.24 Wells, “On and Beyond the White Walls: Photography as Art” 253.25 Ibid.26 Watney 154.27 Wells, “On and Beyond the White Walls” 255.28 This divide is evidenced in the recent debates in which the technical shifts of the Inter-

net, now commonly referred to as Web 2.0, have instigated a discussion around theneed or not for a Media Studies 2.0. This debate is, surprisingly, being driven prima-rily by a skills agenda perceived as the mismatch between the skills of lecturers whodeliver production and their students – a problem of “catch up”. However, if, as I havesuggested, we debunk the hierarchal separation between those who make and thosewho think, the need to “catch up” does not rest solely with those staff concerned withthe delivery of production skills but rests with all staff whatever their specialism, forthere is no area of the media untouched by “Web 2.0”. Such an approach is beginningto be argued for by some academics in events such as “The Challenge of New Media”conference in which Martin Lister and Jon Dovey, “offered a powerful sense of a newgeneration of teachers and researchers able to redraw the border of our discipline”;see report from ADM-HEA Networks Magazine 7 (Summer 2009).

29 Burgin 1.30 Tagg, Burden of Representation 22.31 See Edwards and Hart; and Lager Vestberg 49–66.32 Druckery 17.33 Hall 226–43.34 In this respect the delivery of high-quality production skills should be seen as media

literacy. Photography students should be given the visual literacy skills to be able toexpress their academic ideas.

35 Such a conceptual model is already in use in higher education to assess the intellectualquality of photographic work in the United Kingdom. It is used by the UK’s RAE inwhich photographic practice can be submitted for either panel (UOA 63 Art and Design/UOA 66 Communication, Cultural and Media Studies). Both RAE documents describethis output as practice as research: practice based, practice led and practice as research,noting how “All outputs of practice-as-research are welcomed by the sub-panel, providedthey meet the definitions of research as defined for the RAE” (61) but recommend that300 words are used to “clarify the research content of such outputs” (61). “The statementmight include: a brief description of the project and its stage of development; a rationaleoutlining questions addressed; a summary of approaches/strategies undertaken in thework; a digest of further evidence” (<www.rae.ac.uk/> 56–57).

36 There has been a notable amount of academic study on what constitutes the creativeindustries over the past few years. However, once again, these studies operate under aform of academic isolation: while they can project the kinds of business or industry skillsa creative worker might need, they offer no thoughts on how these might be delivered.

37 Simon Watney, in “On the Institutions of Photography”, notes how “The revolutionin critical theory which has taken place in Britain since the early 1970s has alwaysbeen, in effect, a dialogue with Marxism” (141).

38 This is a strange dichotomy that we find ourselves operating within, which in mymind most readily comes together in our role as educators of young people in two

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ways, but there may be more I have not thought of yet. Firstly, in order to allowthem to engage critically and radically in a subversive manner with the codes andconventions of photography in the mainstream; this is also motivated by myposition as a feminist, often termed as “working against the grain”. Secondly, thatyoung people now graduate from our education system with substantial debt,which, realistically, can be paid off only by gaining employment.

39 Tagg, Disciplinary Frame 245.

Works cited

Burgin, Victor, ed. Thinking Photography. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982.Druckery, T. “Second Generation Slackers.” Afterimage 4 (Oct. 1991): 17.Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs Objects History: On the Materiality of

Images. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.Green-Lewis, Jennifer. Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism. Ithaca,

NY and London: Cornell UP, 1996.Hall, Stuart. “The Determination of News Photographs.” The Manufacture of News. Ed.

Stanley Cohen and Jock Young. London: Constable, 1981. 226–43.Lager Vestberg, N. “Archival Value: On Photography, Materiality and Indexicality.”

Photographies 1.1 (2008): 49–66.Linkman, Audrey. “The Itinerant Photographer in Britain 1850–1880.” History of

Photography 14.1 (1990): 49–68.Price, Derrick, and Liz Wells. “Thinking about Photography.” Photography: A Critical

Introduction. Ed. Liz Wells. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 9–61.Pultz, John. The Body and the Lens: Photography 1839 to the Present. New York: Abrams, 1995.Roodhouse, S. “Connectivity and Responsiveness to Vocational Higher Education to

Promote Workforce Development.” Journal of Media Practice 5.1 (2004): 33–42.Sekula, A. “The Body and the Archive.” The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of

Photography. Ed. R. Bolton. London: MIT P, 1989. 343–86.Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London:

Macmillan, 1988.———. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis:

U of Minnesota P, 2009.Warner, Mary Marien. Photography: A Cultural History. London: King, 2002.Watney, Simon. “On the Institutions of Photography.” Photography Politics: Two. Ed.

P. Holland, J. Spence and S. Watney. London: Comedia, 1986. 187–97.Wells, Liz. “On and Beyond the White Walls: Photography as Art.” Photography: A Critical

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Sarah Edge is a full-time senior lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Ulster.She is the Head of School of Media, Film and Journalism and Director of the NI SkillsetMedia Academy. Her research areas include: class and gender in Victorian photogra-phy, gender and identity in Northern Ireland, and pedagogies of photography education.She is also a practising photographer and regularly exhibits her work.