CONSTRUCT
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CONSTRUCT is a publication by socially engaged artist Anthony Luvera, featuring work created between 2018 and 2022 in collaboration with people who have experienced homelessness in Birmingham.
The project was commissioned and is published by GRAIN Projects.
Anthony Luvera is one of the UK’s foremost socially engaged photographers, having pioneered various forms of collaborative portraiture and dialogic approaches to creative practice, including his ‘assisted self-portrait’ methodology. To create an assisted self-portrait, Luvera meets each participant in locations that are important to them over multiple sessions, to teach the individual how to use digital medium format camera equipment with a tripod, handheld flash, cable shutter release, and laptop. The final portrait is selected by the participant.
CONSTRUCT features 21 new Assisted Self-Portraits; photographs created by participants; documentation of Luvera and participants working together; an interview with the artist; and newly commissioned writing which explores Luvera’s approach to socially engaged practice and reflects on the right to housing in the UK today. The publication features contributions by Joseph Anderton (Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, Birmingham City University) and Halima Sacranie (Director of Housing Research at the Centre for the New Midlands).
To create CONSTRUCT, Luvera was embedded within the support services of SIFA Fireside, Birmingham’s main day centre for homeless and vulnerably housed adults. The artist began by working in the kitchen, preparing and serving meals, before inviting participants to explore photography through regular meetings and workshops. Using disposable cameras to document their experiences and camera phones to share images, more than 50 people took part in the project. Throughout the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, Luvera continued working with participants via online platforms, post, telephone, and email. CONSTRUCT was curated for a largescale outdoor exhibition in Birmingham’s Snow Hill Square in autumn 2022, providing a space that was accessible to all and allowing the work to be seen in direct dialogue with the city.
By centring the voices of people with lived experience of homelessness and housing instability, Luvera’s creative practice attempts to shift the narratives surrounding the experience of homelessness and bring housing justice issues to light. CONSTRUCT is a depiction of the artist’s deep commitment to photography and collaboration as a means of addressing social inequality whilst critically acknowledging the problems of representation. The relationships Luvera forms with participants and the process of their work together is as much a part of the artist’s practice as the images and other artefacts that are exhibited and published. In this way, Luvera upends traditional approaches to documentary photography in order create a more nuanced representation of the experience of homelessness and the individuals participating in his practice.
CONSTRUCT marks 22 years of Luvera working extensively across the UK with people experiencing homelessness, grassroots support and campaigning organisations, and charities in places such as Belfast, Brighton, Colchester, Coventry, London, and Manchester.
The CONSTRUCT publication will be launched at The Photographers’ Gallery in London on the 31st of October 2024.
CONSTRUCT was commissioned and published by GRAIN Projects, working in partnership with SIFA Fireside. The project is generously supported by Arts Council England, National Lottery Awards for All, Birmingham City University, the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University, and individuals via a Kickstarter campaign.
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