Lens-/light-based Media

In this area of study light is not the thing you photograph. Light is the material, in the same way that charcoal is a material and clay is a material, and the camera is only one of several tools for working with it. Lay a fern on light-sensitive paper in a darkened room, switch on a bulb for thirty seconds, and you have made an image without a lens, a viewfinder or a single decision about exposure settings. Project a slide across a room and the beam itself becomes an object hanging in the dust.

This is not a photography course. Pearson runs Photography as its own endorsement, with its own note, and that is where the camera is taught as a discipline. Here, lens and light work sits alongside drawing, painting and print as one more way of making a fine art image, and the only question that matters is the same one you ask of any medium: what does light do that paint cannot? This note answers it through cameraless image-making, projection and light as material, and the moving image used as a work of art rather than as a film.