I have been questioning my own creative output as a Practioner both as an Artist and Photographer. It feels like “Groundhog Day ” and I am on autopilot when it comes to commissions or other wise.There are regular conversations around the homogeneous stream of content within the photographic community. This had led me to think how can I disrupt my practice to re wire my brain so I can be pushing the notions of my own Visual Literary by challenging myself. Using a discipline modus operandi of the zoom function on my smartphone and the standard is not allowed. It has given me a new way of looking with intent when I use a standard camera.
I am a Senior Lecturer on MA Commercial Photography at LCC/UAL, my regular mantra to both my cohort and the wider photography students on the different pathways has always been about “Authorship ” – one own vision, style , photographs that resonate but have your own “magic dust ” that is unique.
I have also been thinking about Inclusivity and Accessibility of the Smart Phone that can break down barriers to photographic education. Students marginalised backgrounds may feel alienated or undervalued. Expensive technical gear reinforces class/racial exclusion.
Draft ARP Proposal #1
This Action Research Project will investigate how smartphone zoom photography can be used as an inclusive pedagogical tool to challenge dominant assumptions of visual literacy within photography education. In many teaching contexts, notions of “good” photographic practice are bound up with access to expensive equipment, technical mastery, and Eurocentric aesthetic values. These conventions can marginalise students from racially and socially diverse backgrounds, reinforcing hierarchies of cultural capital and limiting whose perspectives are legitimised in the classroom. By introducing the iPhone’s zoom function—a tool typically associated with everyday, vernacular use rather than professional image-making—this project seeks to disrupt those hierarchies and explore how alternative literacies of seeing and making can emerge.
The intervention will take the form of a workshop in which students produce images exclusively with smartphone zoom. They will be invited to respond to prompts that reflect their lived experience or cultural reference points, followed by a group discussion about what these images reveal about visibility, distortion, framing, and power. Data will be gathered through student reflections, collected images (with consent), and a reflective journal documenting the process. Ethical considerations will ensure students retain agency over their contributions and can choose how their work is represented in reporting.
The project asks: How can smartphone zoom photography foster more socially and racially inclusive approaches to visual literacy, and in what ways does it challenge dominant aesthetic norms in photography education? Through analysis of images and student responses, the project aims to highlight whether low-tech, widely accessible practices can create more equitable participation, broaden the frames of reference for visual literacy, and inform more inclusive approaches to teaching photography at UAL and beyond.
Photographs by Kalpesh Lathigra / Examples of my practice using SmartPhone Zoom Function only