Photography

My name's Simon Murphy, I'm a lecturer in Photography at Glasgow Kelvin College and I also maintain this antique, vintage analogue photo booth down here at Trongate 103.

This booth comes from the streets of Berlin. I first noticed them on a Glasgow Kelvin College photography trip to Berlin. We take the students to photograph architecture. These booths were out in the street, different to where you normally see booths, and when I had a go of them, I realised very quickly that it was a vintage chemical process like a dark room inside.

I started photographing the booths every time we went to Berlin and just taking strips as mementos. But it turned into a project because for me the booth symbolized the power of photography to allow you to cross borders, physically, but also internal borders. You're pushing yourself, challenging yourself, getting out of your comfort zone.

You have to wait five minutes and so you end up speaking to people and making connections and it really opens your world and that's what photography does.

So if you're looking to use the booth, you're welcome to come down. It's in a building called Trongate 103 in the Merchant City. It's open between 10 and 5 most days.

Hello, my name is Simon Murphy. I'm a lecturer in the photographic department at Glasgow Kelvin College and here we run a range of courses from Level 5 to HND.

So my background is I actually went to college many years ago here. Then I had a career in photography, mainly for newspaper and I do many projects, as well as being involved in the Scottish Portrait Awards.

Getting started in photography, having a career can be a little bit daunting but here at Glasgow Kelvin we try to give you as much experience as possible. So experience ranges from model days where we work with local model agencies, photojournalistic tasks where we set you tasks that might appear in newspapers.

We also do a trip to Berlin every year where we photograph primarily architecture. Depending on what level you want to come into photography we would ask to see your images.

So if you have a small interest in photography then maybe the level five course would be for you where you can learn all about techniques and the camera itself. Whereas if you want to go into industry and find out a little bit more about that you might be looking at an HND course. For that course it would be great to see a range of work maybe 15 images of your best work

What did you do in the industry before teaching?

Freelance work primarily, so I've been involved in portraiture, weddings, work for magazines, all manner of publications across the boards.

I have been teaching for 10 years and that was my main goal as I've always wanted to teach, so I, even as a student, I knew I would have to get some sort of industry experience so I spent about 10 years getting industry experience always with a view to moving on to teach.

Why study photography at Kelvin?

I guess we could mention the fantastic equipment we have here and we're still one of the few colleges who practice darkroom techniques so that's kind of quite trendy amongst young people these days so we have a darkroom practice that we encourage.

Any student success stories?

So in the past year, we've had published in this Portrait of Britain book, some students. They've been exhibited all over the UK. We had some commendations at the recent Scottish Portrait Awards and one of our students is currently exhibiting in France so we always encourage students to enter competitions, to exhibit where they can and we just love that aspect of it.

Shaunie: I'm Shaunie Howitt. I just had a few talks today about architecture photography.

As someone who's not done a lot of architecture photography, it's really gave me an insight on what I can do. Obviously, I don't need to be completely perfect.

It's opened my eyes a lot. It's lovely to speak to an actual architect and get her opinion on how she likes the images to be for her website.

Ruslin: Hi, my name is Ruslin, I'm learning about how they collaborate with photographers and how they explain and how they make the imagery and filming for the projects and how it reflects on their ideas, how it reflects on their qualities of building.

Really insightful for us as people who are just establishing photography.

Hello, my name is Mark Cameron and this is my work as part of the final edit show.

I tend to shoot people predominantly whether that's bands on stage. I spent 20 years in the music business before I came to college to study photography. So whether it's bands on stage or whether it's portraits like Lawrence here who we shot on the street in Springburn just very randomly.

It tends to be people that make me want to take the photograph but this image here is part of a bigger project called Illumination that I've just completed for college and this was to tried to push me out of just photographing people into working a bit more of an abstract and a bit more of a sort of just a different way.

So that's why I wanted to show three different images from across the range of the work that I do. And these are just some magazines that I've had printed that show the best of the work so far. And then this is the illumination, the lighthouse project that the big blue picture's from. And that's my work for the exhibition.