Coventry University
2016/2017
Many of the assignments are similarly whimsical, but despite their seeming playfulness, they are a fundamental attempt to re-address the way we see photographs. A common theme among the contributions is the idea that before you can get creative, you need to be destructive, which suggests established approaches have gotten tired. – Colin Pantall
phonar, an abbreviation of PHOtography and NARrative, is an ongoing undergraduate photography project, run out of the Coventry University Photography department. It is a core course component of the Photography degree program, and students share assignments on social media as they complete them, while working towards the creation of a cross-cohort publication.
#phonar2016/7 is partially based on participant response to The Photographer’s Playbook; 307 Assignments and Ideas, edited by Gregory Halpern and Jason Fulford (2014). This course will use this resource to construct tasks that facilitate both an investigation into photography and narrative, and also into the development of a broad spectrum of photographers’ narratives. It will also be formed around intensive workshops that address stages of photographic narrative structure: finding, making and sharing.
The images here were made by students in the 2016 iteration of the module. See more at phonar.media, Twitter, and Instagram.