RCA Photography MA Mentorship Award

RCA Photography MA Mentorship Award

Since 2005 Metro Imaging and the Royal College of Art have offered a one year bespoke Mentorship Award which has supported graduates as they continue their creative journey.

This year the competition was incredibly high with a record number of students participating. We are proud to announce the winners of this year’s awards are Yiming Zhu and Lina A.

Yiming Zhu （b.1999) is an artist based in London and Guangzhou. She is studying photography at Royal College Art, UK. Her practice combines installation and moving images on the basis of photography. Her work starts from reality and focuses on the relationship between consciousness and human behaviour. How to express life experiences in a metaphorical way is the focus of her work. Through fictional memory elements, subconscious metaphors and imagination to form internal and external transformations, the audience is invited into a constructed visual narrative.

Lina A. is a multimedia artist, born in Russia in 2000, currently based in London, UK. Lina’s practice explores the notion of cultural politics of emotions through fragmentation of identities and interchanging points of view. Based around language, landscape, and archives, her imagery reveals bleak Eastern European sites and deals with the contrast of both homely and unwelcoming places and narratives.

The award is recognised as an important programme in support of UK based arts education. The scheme offers one to one practical experiential in lab sessions with some of the worlds top technicians and printers; Professional Development evaluation and advice together with Marketing, networking and Social Media profiling. For more information on our student services and the mentorship programme please follow the link here.

All images ©YimingZhu and Lina A. 2023

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We offer the following types of printing

Partial photo of a face covered in hundres and thousands printed on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper which is available in both gloss and a semi matt finish.

C Type Professional Photo Printing

We have been printing the highest quality C-Type prints for decades and digital C-Types produced on our Lambda have the archival and tonal benefits of traditional photographic papers, with the advantages of digital photo printing. C-Types are a conventional photographic print from a digital file, and as such is the most suitable option when printing a colour photograph.

Printing linking you through to our giclee printing service.

Fine Art Giclée Printing

We have Hahnemuhle and Canson Giclée Certified Studio staus and with over 30 years experience in photographic printing we use the most advanced inkjet technologies. Giclée is a gallery-quality inkjet print onto fine art watercolour paper. This is most suitable for art illustrations, but can also be used for colour and B&W photographs.

This a picture take of a very large black and white ilford fibre based print of two people.

Black & White Printing

We have worked in collaboration with Harman Technology to develop genuine B&W silver gelatin Fibre-Based and Resin-Coated photographic prints from digital files. The Resin-Coated is suitable for most types of B&W printing, and Fibre-Based is ideal for exhibition quality.

Picture of a Duratran. Duratrans are a real chromogenic print on translucent material and are then mounted on lightboxes.

Duratran Printing

We produce Duratrans at a quality level unmatched by anything else out there. Duratrans have to be lit from behind, so need to be mounted in a rear lit display, or we can produce led lightboxes, which are conventional photo frames containing the Duratran and led panel.

Metro called it Direct to Media. Essentially this is a UV printing machine that can produce very large, up to 3m x 2m prints on any flat material less than 10cm thick. So we can print on wood, metal, slate and pretty much anything you can think of.

Direct to Media Printing

Direct to media printing is exactly that; we print your image directly to a substrate of your choice. Be it paper, card, aluminium, Perspex, canvas, wood, slate… Our Jetrix UV inkjet flatbed printer can print on any flat surface up to 3m x 2m, less than 10cm thick. To ensure your material is suitable, we can print test prints around A4 in size.

This is a print on adhesive vinyl. The vinyl is on a roll and 1.2m wide, but it can printed in multiple pieces in order to cover a wall.

Vinyl Printing

Vinyl Phototex is chosen for its high-quality Giclée finish as well as its ease of application to wall or mounting material due to its self-adhesive properties. We can print on vinyl using our direct to media printer, in strips of 1.5m x 3m and these can be applied to the wall in the fashion of wallpaper to cover a complete wall or interior.