When many people hear that I am studying Visual Arts and Film, their first reaction is: ‘Do you want to make films in the future?’ But to be honest, during these three years in Durham, I have gradually discovered that this major teaches me much more than just ‘film’. It taught me to look at images, to look at the overlooked details, and to understand – who is producing these images? Why do they compose them the way they do? And how do these images subtly affect our perception? The film is just an entry point, the most intriguing and resonant opening. But it is only the starting point. What fascinates me is everything behind images.
Image, as the container of ideas, culture and history
The module that impressed me the most was called Photography and Modernity between the Wars. We discussed wartime avant-garde art, Dadaism, modernism, photojournalism, political propaganda, and more.
The course was very dense, with a rich reading list. Thanks to the erudite professor, sometimes a class can travel through multiple cultural contexts and stylistic genres. But it was during this immersion that I realised: an image is not static. It is a node in history, a fragment of the times, a manifestation of ideas.
We analysed compositional choices in wartime newspaper images of the last century, discussing why certain portraits seem to reproduce power while others are doomed to oblivion. These images are not just what we ‘see’ in front of our eyes; they are deliberately (or even unconsciously) shaped by their makers, echoes of ideologies, choreographies of emotions, and the process by which a certain intention is quietly implanted in the senses.
Beyond theory
Apart from classes, I also did a few months of placement at Durham University’s Western Art Collection, as part of my third-year modules. It was the first time I came face to face with and ‘hand’ artworks that had always been kept behind glass or hung on the wall. During specific times each week, I was to assist the curator in archiving paintings, editing exhibition captions, and collaborating on set-ups such as Durham’s annual Student Art Prize. I liked what my curator supervisor once said: curating is essentially a large-scale DIY project, using a third perspective that is neither that of the creator nor the viewer, to shape how people look at art.
The power to interpret an image lies not in the eyes, but in the mind behind them. At that moment, I resonated with the idea that those images, both still and moving, are a collection of artists’ motives, an intertwining of their emotions, intentions, confusions and conflicts of the times. And these images belong not only to the painter, but also to those who later gaze at them, interpret them, and face them in silence. Perhaps we learn, not just from the images themselves, but from the traces humans leave in them: fear, hope, anxiety, a desire for control, and even something deeper …… indefinable.
Many paths, one gaze
I have taken modules in seemingly disparate fields: in People and Cultures I studied how anthropologists have analysed images and rituals in order to analyse the development of communities and societies behind them; in Introduction to Japanese Culture I traced visual traditions from ancient scrolls to modern anime and saw how images continue to encode emotion and the sacred in a particular cultural ethos; and in Violence in German Literature, Film and Visual Art I was struck for the first time by the relationship between language and violence. Image is not just aesthetics; it is also conflict, resistance, a silent but continuous practice of power.
These modules may differ in content, but they all led me to face the same question:
How do we organise the world through vision, and how are we, in turn, organised by the act of looking?
You can be sent further away
Durham’s Visual Arts and Film major is just such an open and deep learning path. You can start with film, but you won’t just stop at film. You could, as I did, begin to ask about the deeper psychological connections between images and people as a result of an exhibition curation or an image analysis assignment.
Why do I recommend this programme? Because it doesn’t teach you to become a ‘filmmaker’ or an ‘artist’, it teaches you to become a person who has a strong sense of images, who can see the structure, intention and emotion underneath the surface. And it was this sensitivity to the motives behind images that eventually led me to the world of psychoanalysis, but that’s another story. So, if you have ever been full of questions, or even a kind of obsession, about the act of looking itself, then I believe you will find something here that resonates with you!
Discover more
Take a look at the BA Visual Arts and Film
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