An essay review of a graduate year “Project Proposal” by “photography” student, James Bown.
In July 2025, James Bown graduated from the BA (Hons) Photography at the University of Derby. His final year was marked by a written proposal that was, by any measure, anything but ordinary. Prescribed as a “Project Proposal”, James’s Un-Proposal declared its intent “to create that which cannot be depicted: in this case, a pointed circle”. What might appear flippant at first glance is in fact a tightly crafted piece of intellectual mischief, one that exposes both the limitations of the photographic medium and the narrowness of higher education’s fixation on employability. As his tutor, I want to use this essay to review his work as a case study in how brilliance flourishes when students are allowed to wander beyond conventional routes.
Universities are often guilty of confusing education with vocational training. Across the UK, institutions are increasingly assessed on “graduate outcomes”, a policy environment that rewards the measurable over the meaningful (Brown and Carasso 2013). When universities reduce education to the production of basic skills, they effectively strangle the possibilities of academic inquiry. James’s project demonstrates the opposite: that by pursuing a divergent, seemingly impractical trajectory, a student can arrive at insights into the photographic medium that no set of employability metrics could predict or measure. His proposal describes photography as “a plodding moribundity that ails all things photographic”, and his solution is not to tweak the practice but to abandon it entirely in favour of the “anti-photographic”. In so doing, he performs what Barthes once suggested, that the photograph is never separate from its referent (Barthes 1981), by crafting its theoretical opposite: a visual nothing.
His writing insists on a complete, “unabashed, uninfringeable and unrelenting freedom”, a call that should shame those institutions that view students primarily as consumers to be delivered to the labour market.
This act of deviation requires bravery, especially in a sector where students are constantly reminded of debts, job markets, and the supposed risks of studying the arts. For many, including those who are the first in their families to attend university, the pressure to conform to safe, recognisable outcomes is acute. To reject those pressures in favour of creating impossibilities is not just artistic mischief, it is intellectual resistance. bell hooks reminds us that education is a practice of freedom, not conformity (hooks 1994). James’s refusal to be corralled into safe, employable territory is a vivid demonstration of that freedom. His writing insists on a complete, “unabashed, uninfringeable and unrelenting freedom”, a call that should shame those institutions that view students primarily as consumers to be delivered to the labour market.
Yet it must be noted that, many professionals or academics would not recognise the value of James’s approach. What they might see as unserious or overly playful was, in fact, a meticulously constructed and deeply rigorous body of work. Every intentional device — from the impossible pointed circle to the fictitious bibliography of unwritten books — was anchored in academic theory, literature and philosophy. The entire project was underpinned by extensive reading and critical reflection. It is precisely this foundation that makes the humour and subversion not only entertaining but intellectually robust.
What is striking about the Un-Proposal is not just its content but its form. It reads with the energy of a stand-up routine, yet it is densely layered with critical references and knowing parody. In the contextual section, James cites “fifteen books that have not yet been written”, including Th_ Sm_ll B__k _f V_w_ls Wr_tt_n _nly W_th C_nst_n_nts. The joke, of course, is that impossibility can be more generative than possibility. His “production schedule” offers further satire: “w/c 24/3: Try this… w/c 31/3: Ignore this… w/c 26/5: Get older”. Such passages might be dismissed as unserious, yet they are deftly written acts of critique, challenging the managerialism of higher education’s obsession with measurable outcomes and project timelines. Lisa Le Feuvre has written persuasively that failure is not the opposite of success in art but its vital condition (Le Feuvre 2010). James takes this further, proposing not just to risk failure but to embrace impossibility as the very method.
To read the Un-Proposal aloud is to hear its humour resonate in rhythm with its critical force. When James writes that the only resources needed are “sugar, spice, and some things nice”, along with the “unexpected intervention of a swarm of hummingbirds”, the effect is both absurd and profound. It recalls the un-art of Kaprow and the anti-poetry of Nicanor Parra. By insisting that freedom itself is the most vital resource, James aligns with a long lineage of avant-garde practitioners who knew that the truest art often emerges from refusal.
The university sector would do well to pay attention. Here is a student who demonstrates not only technical acuity but critical brilliance, humour, resilience, and ambition. Yet under current regimes of assessment, such work risks being undervalued precisely because it cannot be tallied against employability metrics. This is a profound irony: in a knowledge economy, what employers supposedly desire most is creativity, adaptability, and innovation. James’s work provides these in abundance, but only because he was willing to step outside the narrow pathways that the institution ostensibly wants him to walk.
In reviewing this work, I want to celebrate not only James Bown but the larger point his Un-Proposal embodies. Divergent processes, academic deviations, and subversive proposals are not distractions from higher education, they are its very lifeblood. The bravery of students like James challenges us as educators to defend intellectual risk-taking against the encroachment of managerial strangulation. His work reminds us that to embrace impossibility is sometimes the most generative act of all.
In closing, I should admit that James’s project also strikes a chord with my own professional mischief. Among trusted colleagues, there has long been a playful fantasy to rename our degree not Photography but Anti-Photography. This imagined title better reflects both the contemporary practice of our students and our own critical impatience with the idea that a medium should be defined by technical repetition rather than conceptual adventure. James’s Un-Proposal does not just join this conversation, it amplifies it with a clarity and humour that makes the case far better than any staffroom joke ever could. His work is both parody and prophecy, challenging us to embrace the impossible as a necessary pedagogical tool. Art Achtung!
James Bown is now a student of MA Writing at the Royal College of Art.
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.
Brown, R. and Carasso, H. (2013) Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education. London: Routledge.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Le Feuvre, L. (2010) Failure. London: Whitechapel Gallery / MIT Press.
