ECAL is introducing a new master’s degree in Photography as from the 2016 academic year. Relying on massive use of photographic images – a key element in today’s visual communication – this two-year programme, unique in Switzerland, gives students with a related Bachelor’s degree an opportunity to develop projects in the long term. It especially pushes the boundaries of applied research in contemporary photography with an emphasis on digital, web and network manipulation, new forms of books, shaping images on various media, interactive exhibition design, up to and including the moving image.
Taking advantage of ECAL’s numerous collaborations with economic, industrial or cultural stakeholders, this training allows students to regularly rub shoulders with influential figures in fine art photography and commissioned work. Structured around practical lessons and workshop weeks, the programme fosters privileged encounters. As for theory, visual analyses and text productions also guide students towards the clarification and disclosure of project concepts. Finally, workshops, labs, studios and the availability of a state-of-the-art print shop ensure that the projects initiated are given concrete form.
The skills acquired and research conducted during the course give students the necessary tools to produce a wide-ranging innovative project, with significant opportun-ities in terms of dissemination and visibility. Through its pragmatic, artistic and applied nature, the Master Photography ensures that each graduate, based on their specific strengths and inclinations, finds a place in the top networks of contemporary photography.
English
Master of Arts HES-SO in Design, major in Photography
4 semesters
120 ECTS
Open space MA Photography Digital Printshop Technology Center Photo Studio Editing/Scanning Room
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Develop a personal project during one semester which may possibly extend over the whole duration of the studies and up to graduation.
Collaborate with a brand, magazine or media in the fields of fashion and design; understand the issues at stake in applied photography for art direction, styling and production.
Understand still life studio photography with advanced skills in lighting and HD digital photography.
Create and produce a personal photographic book (editing, sequencing, printing, binding, etc.) that could be presented at international fairs (Offprint Paris and London); know the photographic publishing market (financing, production, distribution).
Learn about 3D software (computer generated imaging) in relation to its photographic simulations.
Acquire skills and develop projects in Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (XR).
Participate in research programmes with practical experiments related to image technologies.
Broaden your referential skills, structure your discourse and acquire curatorial skills in contemporary photography.
Benefit from portfolio readings with curators from major institutions and international artists.
Take part in weeks of workshops supervised by practitioners from all over the world with the aim of carrying out collective or personal projects.
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Research project with Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet
From February 3 to 19, 2023, on the occasion of Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions in Tokyo, ECAL is exporting the exhibition resulting from the Automated Photography research project, which explores the aesthetic and conceptual potential of automated photography.
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Research project with Milo Keller
Following the success of the exhibition resulting from the Automated Photography research project at Paris Photo in 2021 and then at the Galerie l'elac in 2022, the ECAL is exporting this project to Plateform-L in Seoul from 17 September to 8 October 2022, through an immersive audiovisual exhibition.
Research project
The Automated Photography research project (2019–2021) is conducted by Milo Keller in the framework of the MA in Photography at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne. It is a continuation of the research project Augmented Photography, equally conducted at ECAL (2016–2017), which aimed to question the mutability of the digital image, transformed both in its physical materiality and in its virtual expression.
Research project
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Diploma project by Clemens Fischer
Designed as a laboratory, this work consists of camera installations that speculate on a future where imagery is created and consumed without us being present. The camera becomes an independent actor that will have to learn to work, fail and interpret by itself. Equipped with minimal gear and tasks, the machines created are thrown into existence to find out their purpose and connection to the world around them. Clumsy, naive but at the same time heavily charged with our nostalgic heritage, these installations invite us to reflect on a temporary, improvised state of photography and our own importance as its creators.
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Diploma project by Robin Bervini
Mention Excellent Prix Elinchrom “Until I Stop Trying to Get Out of My Skin” is a spatial and virtual reality installation that depicts the artist’s personal struggle in seeking his identity as a mixed-race man in Southern Switzerland. Surrounded by white family and friends and knowing only local culture, the artist identified as white, but the continuous questioning of his origins and prejudices made him doubt his belonging. The installation puts the viewer in the artist’s shoes: by embodying his avatars, the viewer meets the artist’s alter-egos which are the embodiment of his ideal selves at various stages of his life.
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Diploma project by Alina Frieske
Abglanz is a German word used to describe a ‘pale reflection’ or a ‘distant echo’. The project investigates the value and accessibility of personal visual information online. Fragments of images taken from social media platforms are reconstructed into a new scenario. Thereby, the original meaning of the images is put into another context. The work becomes an allegory of display, questioning how we are reflected and recognized behind the screen. It is presented in a panoramic view in order to guide the attention through the collection at large.
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Diploma project by Mahalia Taje Giotto
My degree is the result of years of obsession related to my body and the gender I was assigned at birth. I began my hormonal transition on 13 November 2020 and have since been living a new relationship with my body that I had been waiting for for almost 30 years. The photo book I created for my degree represents these last two years, the obsessions that haunt me in relation to my body, its appearance, the relationships which it allows me to have with others, desires that consume me and how all this chaos is experienced on a daily basis. The use of texts, concrete, abstract and strange images illustrates the changes I have made to my body over the years. The sculptural approach to the book is a reflection of this transition, both literally and conceptually.
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Diploma project by Karla Hiraldo Voleau
As long as I can remember there has been a running joke in my family: one should never date a Dominican. My interactions with Dominican men have been anyway always limited, since I was treated as an outsider, as a tourist on the island. Eventually, family prohibitions and prejudices only pushed me to gain my own insight into the Dominican culture. Engaging into a performative process, I went on to pursue an immersive investigation as a tourist that travels in search for love. www.khiraldovoleau.com
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Diploma project with Simone Niquille, François Zajega
“Counter Faith” addresses a personal narrative with the aim of understanding the driver behind the construction of gated communities in Indonesia, while the violent events of 1998 remain unresolved in the nation’s damaged belief system. Single-channel video, 10'34"
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Diploma project with Bruno Ceschel
Growing up between apartments in the same complex, a familiar feeling would remain in the empty homes, encouraging transformation. Such is the experience of inhabiting a body, fluctuating from one state into another. In “Apartamento”, this oscillation takes place in potential constellations around gender binarity. The male/female dichotomy is replaced by a dichotomy between gender and its negation. This renunciation however, is a perpetual shift, a gathering of questions rather than answers, a set of daily contemplations in the face of psychic constructs.
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Diploma project by Sara Bastai
RAM 1.0 is a collaborative project between myself and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is a fictional account of my life, based on my personal visual archive, but constructed and mediated by AI. The project explores the concept of memories and the importance of the construction of an archive in the digital realm. Focused on the interaction between images and text, I let AI analyse my memories and then reinterpret the captions to create new images. New memories are created in the form of five different books and five slide shows on a modular installation. Floating between human and non-human, the dialogue between myself and the machine comes into being and enables you to immerse yourself in a new data set of my memories through the gaze of technology.
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Diploma project by Augustin Lignier
Container is a project about alienation. From the camera, the machine, space, images, the medium, and from an idea. Through the medium of photography and performance, I build rules to experience the relationship with the apparatus. By seeking to push my body to the limits, I experiment on the camera and the body like a black box in a white cube. The rules are inputs and the images the output. Attempting to understand the reaction of a repetitive action on the videos. Focusing on the obsession of pressing the shutter button on the images. Using this action as a solution. To see the pictures, the viewer has to perform the same action as the performer. The experiments give the power to the machine. Producing images, performing, recording and exhibiting are one thing.
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Diploma project by Justinas Vilutis
«Body without organs» revolves around an encounter between the functionality of the surface and delving inside the producing body that operates entirely by respiration, evaporation and fluid transmis-sions. By drawing parallels between the chaos and shapelessness of objects that seem to be losing outlines and melting into one terrain – residing in a state of becoming organs, as well as images of bodies in a state of pain, discomfort and extasy, the project explores the becoming of the organism itself.
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Diploma project by Philipp Klak
Mention Bien Randomness is a crucial quality in artistic practice. This project addresses the issue of the extent to which machines can help further enhance and overcome the human aspect by programming an image and randomly generating unlimited variations of the same scene and the same type of object. During my time at ECAL I developed an interest in studying hidden processes and structures. For this project, and in reference to the history of photography and in particular to the Bechers’ typologies, I randomly generated images with the help of a fully automated system.
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Diploma project by Joanna Wierzbicka
What is a body, where does it start, where does it end? How do we experience having a body and being a body, especially among other bodies? How can we resituate ourselves within earth others, and rethink relations on a wider level between human and nonhuman actants to account for a more ethical living? The project aims to interrogate the notion of bodily matter, recapture our corporeality and challenge the assumption that our bodies end at the skin. Instead, they are redefined as radically open systems, human and non-human assemblages, corporeal chimeras, microbiotic multi-species in the constant process of becoming. Matter, when recognised as an active agent, helps to acknowledge infinite interactions within complex networks of agency between various porous corporealities and entities. Trans-corporeality disrupts divisions between a body and the world. Bodies leave traces everywhere, ascribing themselves into various corporeal, technological, political narratives, but also traces are ascribed onto bodies - mediating and altering their flesh. As captured by Haraway in the figuration of compost - we are always becoming with others, together creating a lively matter of compost, composing and decomposing each other. “Nothing is connected to everything, everything is connected to something” takes a form of an installation, a speculative self-portrait as compost, built out of images of my own body (made with different apparatuses including Scanning Electron Microscope, digital microscopes) mixed with still lifes of food and different materials representing the transformation and movement, as in compost. Additionally, sculptures are accompanied by the video that expands on the idea of corporeal companionship and brings in the notion of uncanny-like lump of flesh covered with skin. It is a performative act, a result of wondering how to become a microorganism, a bacteria and if I am already enough of one. All the parts of installation, exploring the line between oppositions such as human/nonhuman, internal/external, self/the other, refer to the definition of an abject and are meant to translate that moment, or a sensation - how a breakdown in meaning, something expelled from “I” eventually comes to define “I”.
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Workshop with Area Of Work
This workshop is an introduction to 3D creation software that allows you to create images with photographic qualities that are not photographs.
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Other with Milo Keller, MAP
In Summer 2019, thirteen students of ECAL Master in Photography supervised by Milo Keller, traveled to Japan to develop thirteen personal projects in collaboration with Taisuke Koyama and TOKYO PHOTOGRAPHIC RESEARCH. From still and moving images to computer-generated photographic visuals, students’ artworks explore a wide variety of aspects of the Japanese megalopolis which is, once again, undergoing major transformations in preparation for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. Some projects focus on concrete aspects of the city, from the destruction of small residential houses to the construction of the gigantic Olympic village and the conquest of new territories by the sea. Other works investigate particularities of Japanese culture such as food in a family setting, the desire to generate humanoid robots, the confusion of child and adult worlds in manga, Pichinko Gambling , the reinvention of Ikebana and the rising stars among young girls. Finally, works seek to visualise more abstract concepts such as loneline
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Workshop with Milo Keller, MAP
Utopia is invisible; only utopians can see it. A class of 12 students from the Photography Master at the ECAL/University of Art and Design of Lausanne, in residence at Casa Corti in Pellio, Val d’Intelvi (Italy), elaborated the concepts of utopia and community. Identifying the malaise of a generation trapped in social networks, confused between reality and the virtual sphere, and in need of establishing new values, the group developed a range of different strategies: morning meditation sessions, walks to Monte Generoso, shared meals and discussions to produce photographs and videos which, while gradually shifting away from reality, reach imaginary dimensions that oscillate between utopia and dystopia, figuration and abstraction. --- Students Emidio Battipaglia Robin Bervini Jasmine Deporta Anja Karolina Furrer Alessia Gunawan Christian Harker Johanna Hullár Philipp Klak Doruk Kumkumoglu Jelly Luise Igor Pjörrt Gedvile Tamosiunaite Curator Milo Keller Assistants Florian Amoser Calum Douglas Graphic Design Nicolas Polli biennaleimmagine.ch https://casacorti.org/
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Workshop with Golgotha, MAP
Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is everywhere. More real than reality, the images created by 3D software are mainly used in the advertising and entertainment industries. The photorealism of these photographic visuals blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual. Guided by Golgotha studio, students from the Photography Master’s at ECAL have explored potential advantages and drawbacks of these particular processes by investigating their illusionary powers. During Paris Photo, an immersive installation will guide visitors through a labyrinthine space, a physical translation of the complexity of our relationship to photographic media. https://vimeo.com/302879066
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Workshop
What does a global city look like? Over the course of one week, thirteen students of the newly-launched Master in Photography program at ECAL/ University of Art and Design of Lausanne, Switzerland were invited by Lorenzo Vitturi to explore London. The city’s diversity makes it unique as a global capital of the arts, economics, scientific and technological research and developments. 37% of the city’s inhabitants were born outsidethe UK, the highest foreign-born population of any city in the world with over 300 languages spoken. London is the contemporary Babel. Each student was assigned a different area of London in orderto engage with, observe and discover the diversity and specificities of various different cultures, contexts and realities. The work presented here is the result of three intensive days of shooting, one night of editing, one day of printing, endingwith a performative presentation during Offprint at Tate Modern, where the images are combined and sequenced in order to reveal a new vision of London. During Offprint, our thirteen students transform into merchants,lowering their prices as the evening approaches to aid in a successful sale, advising their customers not to combine still-lifes with portraits, or not to place studio-lighting next to natural light etc.
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Workshop
To celebrate the launch of a new master’s degree in photography at ECAL in 2016, the first year students worked together with Taiyo Onorato and Milo Keller (Head of Photography at ECAL) in Berlin for one week to produce a book about the city’s architecture in turmoil. Using the wide streets of Berlin as a blank canvas, the students were encouraged to interpret rather than document the spaces of the vast metropolis and build their own story of its distinctive character. The picturesdepict the shift that Berlin has undergone in the past, from the perspective of unexpected encounters, vacant spaces, countless construction sites and shared revelations. The book was printed and bound at Helmut Newton Foundation during the C/O Berlin Book Days, 29.9 – 2.10.2016. Participants: Johannes Bauer, Vilhelm Björndahl, Senta Simond, Nicolas Toulotte, Laura Zoccarato, Marc Asekhame, Calum Douglas, Bastien Gomez, Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Yuliya Khan, Stéphane Mocan, Eunwook Nam, Shin Young Park, Robert Swierczynski, Maria Tasula, Justinas Vilutis, Maria Grazia Grasso The book has been produced in collaboration with C/O Berlin for the Book Days 2016.
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Collaboration with Maxime Guyon
Following a collaboration with the Swiss avant-garde brand On, ECAL is proud to present the interdisciplinary work carried out jointly by the 2nd year students of the Product Design, Photography and Type Design Masters.
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Collaboration with MAP, Charles Negre
During the first semester of 2016/2017 academic year, the students worked with Charles Negre on the relationship between conceptual projects and applied works and how to appeal to a client’s needs as opposed to developing a project without constraint. The students collaborated with HYT, a luxury watch brand which gave a frame to develop a laboratory of ideas. The correlation between past inventions and avant-garde technology is a key aspect of this project as well as how science can be turned as a visual emotion. The subject focus on still life, however, following the motivations of each student, other photographic forms became relevant. The context of the brand gives the students the oppportunity to develop conceptual and unexpected visions within the realm of the subject, however the end goal is an understanding and realization independent of the brand.
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Collaboration with MAP, Charles Negre
‘There are many known connections between food and medicine but there is one quirky link which has not yet been explored: the culinary art of medical training. Despite all the fancy technologies available to educate doctors today teachers still turn to the kitchen fridge or pantry to train students in the skills of their profession. Grapes are perfect for practicing fragile skin suturing. Neurosurgeons learn how to measure the pres-sure of a robotic drill on eggshells.‘ We collaborated with The Gourmand, London based magazine initiated by art director David Lane.
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Collaboration with MAP, Charles Negre
For the applied photography course, first year students were challenged with a commission for citizenM hotels. The students created several images following the client's guidelines. A selection of pictures was then printed as postcards and on plexiglas support to decorate the hotel's rooms. Students: Sara Bastai, Maeva Bosko, Sally Jo, Natalie Maximova, Joanna Wierzbicka, Olivia Wünsche, Manqin Zhang.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
Collaboration with Robin Bervini, Milo Keller, Kylan Luginbühl, Pauline Saglio
Co-produced by Fisheye and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux - Grand Palais, the Palais Augmenté festival takes place inside the Grand Palais Éphémère. Exceptionally, in partnership with ECAL, augmented reality projects will be accessible from this point, on the façade of the Grand Palais Éphémère on 19 and 20 June 2021.
Photographer of architecture, design, fashion or still life, Documentary photographer, Photo artist, Art director, Photo editor, Director of photography, Teacher…
Alina Frieske, Alessia Gunawan, Maxime Guyon, Johanna Hullár, David Luraschi, Eunwook Nam, Nicolas Polli, Senta Simond, Justinas Vilutis, Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Shin Young Park…
Milo Keller
Adjoint artistique
Clément Lambelet
Assistants
Giacomo Bastianelli
Mahalia Taje Giotto
Claus Gunti
Milo Keller
Anniina Koivu
Mariama Attah
Bruno Ceschel
Cactus Digitale
Rachel de Joode
Kim Knoppers
Elisa Medde
Marco de Mutiis
Charles Negre
Nora Al-Badri
Area of Work
Ann Christin Bertrand
Alain Biber
Giulia Bini
Harm van den Dorpel
Felicity Hammond
Cécile B. Evans
Christophe Gaillard
Golgotha
Ethan Greenbaum
Dominic Hawgood
Joe Hamilton
Felicity Hammond
Lauren Huret
It’s Our Playground
Jonas Lindstroem
Lesley Martin
Alix Marie
Mazaccio & Drowilal
Lauren Moffatt
Simone C Niquille
Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs
Lonneke van der Palen
Danaé Panchaud
Antje Peters
Philip Schuette
Ada Sokół
Lucy Soutter
Thomas Traum
Anne de Vries
Letha Wilson
Qiu Yang
Francesco Zanot
