‘We are mainly valued by students constantly, but never from anyone else. The job of the technician is always backstage…it would be nice to be supported and valued. When I say valued, [that] means professionally valued, not just receiving the odd email saying ‘”well done to all“‘1
This quote from ‘Technician A’ as part of UAL’s ‘surveying the technician’s role’ hit me hard. I already was aware there was a serious ‘lack of contemporary literature on the HE technician’s role in art and design’2 but reading this survey and analysis into my role got me thinking. I’ve been a technician on and off since I graduated in 2015, and I am passionate about the importance of the role within HE. I deeply care for my students, I know them personally, their names, their practices and projects, their hobbies and interests and their personal experience at university, to me, is a huge part of the fabric of my role as an educator at LCC. Student’s interaction with technicians and technical facilities is often deemed ‘paramount to their learning, and their ability to achieve creative potential’.
In 2020, when suddenly in lockdown, our physical spaces and common areas went immediately online and the student community that the technical department creates, a safety net, a small hub of like minded people, was gone. Myself and my colleague Mary were desperate to try and find a way to connect with the students and help them create relationships with one another, we initially started a newsletter ‘the Quarantimes’ and ran bi-weekly ‘focus sessions’ which were designed as light hearted sessions where students and the team conversed around visual culture, setting broad themes i.e: diversity, still life, watching film and tv such as Small Axe , setting short readings or a shooting challenge. It was our only opportunity to hone in on that ‘face-to-face interaction’ and ‘holistic relationship’ that is vital to our role as a technician. Looking back, I feel it was semi-successful, it did only tend to reach a small number of students – as we were limited in the ways we could reach them, but those who attended did start to feel like a cohort of sorts.
To continue to build on this relationship with our students in the ‘virtual world’ the importance of our tech-run instagram page (@lcclondonphoto) was building, we turned our online focus sessions and newsletter into weekly updates, and built on it’s purpose connecting our students with each-other and the wider photographic community.
It is 2025 now, the memories of the pandemic are slowly fading, but the importance of an online presence community for our current students, staff and alumni as important as ever. It’s now a tool for their careers and not just used as ‘social media’. It feels as if we will forever be living in turbulent times, especially within our online spaces. In the last 24 hours alone, TikTok was banned in the US and then reversed by President-elect Donald Trump, on Thursday, ‘big, scary, ruinous things lie ahead’3 Rebecca Shaw wrote in her article ‘I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers’. I thought about how useful a tool Instagram has been for our students and how incredibly engrained it has become in our day-to-day psyche. It’s terrifyingly addictive. Would I be able to find a way to connect with our students outside of the department without instagram? Probably not…
‘Images age us. They will always do this work. They remind us of who and how we are. They will always remind us of our failings and our losses. They are articulations of joy and pain, culturally and politically. They expose us and excite us and increasingly, we are now answering to them as forms of inward and outward complex, contemplative, confessional carriers of our human nature.’4
- Sams, C p.65 Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal / Vol 1 / Issue 2 (2016) How do art and design technicians conceive of their role in higher education? ↩︎
- Blythman, M. , Parker, B. and Tiffin, S. (2008) ‘Forget the academic staff! The contribution to creative learning in practice of technical staff and equipment’, Enhancing curricula: using research and enquiry to inform student learning in the disciplines conference. Lycée Francais, New York.
↩︎ - Shaw, R (2025) I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers. The Guardian. ↩︎
- Sealy, M. , Wishart, L. (2022) Professor Mark Sealy on photography, race, rights and representation, D&AD. ↩︎