How Tim Pearse won the graduate single image award  

This image may look simple, but a lot of time and craftsmanship has gone in its creation. It is a lith print, made by Tim Pearse, a former BA photography student at Plymouth College of Art.

And it is with this image that Pearse won the singles prize in the recent graduate category of the BJP Breakthrough Awards, which was judged by BJP editor Simon Bainbridge, photography curator Leo Scott, and photographer Laura Pannack.

Working exclusively with analogue and alternative photographic processes, Pearse crafted the image as part of a longer untitled series of lith prints.

“I wanted to create a discourse on constructed memory through the perception of ambiguous form,” says Pearse.

“I wanted to illicit the asking of questions of self… we can look at any object or place and it generate something intangible within ourselves.”

Pearse took the image on a Mamiya RB67 camera loaded with Ilford Delta 100 film, and printed it as a lith print using lith developer, which gives the image its soft, hand-drawn quality, he says.

“I learnt this process while I was at university and have worked with it ever since. I like being part of every point in the making of the photograph, and being able to have complete creative input.”

Tim’s work will be exhibited at the Breakthrough Photography Awards, showcased this June. More details here.

See more of Tim’s work here.