BFAPhotography

You’ll access the resources you need to build skills in film and digital photography at CCA. Dialogue and open critique are at the heart of our close-knit community. Through the study of historical and contemporary aesthetic movements, you’ll learn to think critically and speak confidently about image-based art. A photography degree is your time to make connections, learn professional techniques, and discover related creative fields.

Work with professional editing software

Prepare for a versatile career in photography by mastering in-demand digital editing skills. You’ll use Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro by Apple, Capture One, SilverFast, and other software programs to achieve the highest quality results. Your digital skills will constantly evolve as industry standards change. Learning to be efficient and adaptable in our studios will help you hit the ground running in any professional setting. Many of our graduates have found work at local photography labs, studios, and other venues.

Create a culminating portfolio

Your conceptual investigations in the program will help you build a cohesive portfolio for graduation. Senior project tutorials, which give you the freedom to explore your areas of interest in depth, encourage risk-taking throughout the creative process. You’ll receive structured critique from your classmates and faculty mentors while you prepare to mount and present your work in CCA’s end-of-year exhibition.

Chair Aspen Mays has been called a “Postmodern mystic.” Her work challenges the expectation of photography as a documentary and categorical medium, and her research explores the visualization of knowledge in both visual art and observational sciences. She is interested in the fantasy of objectivity in photographic processes, the artifacts and archives of these processes, and the desire for transcendence in the ordinary and prosaic.

Mays' solo exhibitions include Tengallon Sunflower and California Dreaming at Higher Pictures in New York and Every leaf on a tree at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She was included in a national survey of contemporary art, State of the Art, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Art Papers, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Mays’ publication (made in collaboration with Dan Boardman) Where We've Been, Where We're Going, Why? was shortlisted for the First Photobook Award by the Aperture Foundation and Paris Photo in 2016.

BA, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Our students graduate with extensive experience in photographic methods, theories, histories, and contemporary practices. Open to collaboration and familiar with cutting-edge digital tools, they find opportunities in commercial photography, exhibition design, art direction, and more. Some work in fast-paced technology and marketing environments, while others work for galleries and nonprofit arts organizations.