Portfolio advice for MA Fashion Photography applicants

Portfolio Requirements

For the MA Fashion Photography course you’ll be able to upload your portfolio via the UCA Applicant Portal.  

You should submit a 30 page portfolio that demonstrates an ongoing photographic practice and a strong interest in fashion image making. Your portfolio may include editorial work, personal projects, experimental fashion photography, fashion film, publication-based outcomes or art-based bodies of work. We are looking for evidence of visual authorship, conceptual intent and critical engagement with fashion cultures, identity and representation.

Process material, research and development work may be included where it supports your ideas and shows how projects evolve. Technical skill is important, but originality, experimentation and critical awareness are equally valued.

Focus on a small number of strong projects that clearly communicate your visual language and creative direction.

As part of your portfolio, you should include a 500 word project proposal. This should outline the area of practice you are interested in developing on the course and demonstrate how your ideas connect to relevant historical, contemporary and cultural contexts.  Your proposal should include:

• the background and motivations informing your interests
• the focus or questions you wish to explore through your practice
• the critical, theoretical or cultural references that inform your thinking
• the methods, processes or approaches you anticipate using

The proposal will help us assess how you think, research and develop ideas for postgraduate studies.

Use of AI 

Your portfolio must contain your own work. We understand that some of your portfolio may include work created in part or whole by AI. You must acknowledge this by adding ‘AI generated’ to the relevant section(s), stating how you used AI to create images, and adding a link to the original image with the date it was created (where possible).