Saturday 18th October
10 AM – 4.30 PM
Birmingham City University, The Parkside Building, B4 7BD
£50.00 (plus booking fee) | Book your ticket here

GRAIN Projects is excited to be delivering a day designed to advise and support the development of photographer’s portfolios. Reviews and presentations will be led by expert and experienced professionals from the photography sector.

We will be joined by Clare Hewitt, Chris Hoare, Kavi Pujara and Niamh Treacy.

During the first part of the day our guest reviewers will give short presentations on their practice and advice for developing your career, this will be followed by one to one portfolio advice and reviews. At the end of the day, there will be an opportunity for everyone to share their work with each other as part of a Portfolio Walk.

The price for this event is £50 and includes one to one time with each of the reviewers, a total of 4 reviews. The event is limited to 10 places.

Schedule:

• 10.00 AM – 10.50 AM, Introduction and short presentations from the guest reviewers
• 11.00 AM – 4.00 PM, Participants will be assigned 4 x 20 minute reviews, seeing each reviewer once
• 4.00 PM – 4.30 PM, Portfolio Walk

Tickets:

• Portfolio Review Day – £50.00 (plus booking fee)
• Portfolio Review Day & Symposium Ticket (17th October, details here) – £65.00 (plus booking fee)

Book your ticket here.

Reviewers:

Clare Hewitt (b. 1983) is a photographic artist based in Birmingham, UK. After completing a degree in Law at Oxford Brooks University, she went on to study Commercial Photography at Arts University Bournemouth.

In her most recent work, Everything in the forest is the forest, Hewitt has spent five years with a community of 12 oak trees at The Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR FACE) learning how they thrive through connection and communication, to inspire similar behaviour amongst human beings. Everything in the forest is the forest is currently being presented as an Impressions Gallery solo touring exhibition throughout the UK. The exhibition includes a biodegradable photobook, produced with support from Arts Council England and Impressions Gallery.

In 2019, Hewitt was the recipient of the GRAIN Bursary Award. Her work has also been exhibited at Peckham 24, Landskrona Foto Festival, the National Portrait Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, and the Royal Photographic Society, amongst other spaces. Her clients include New Yorker, Guardian, Photoworks, Oxfam, New Statesman, and The Wire.

Chris Hoare is a photographer born in Bristol, 1989. Within his practice he is interested in areas of society that he feels are overlooked in some way, with a particular interest in themes of identity and place. Although his projects have taken him as far as Australia (The Worst Poem In The Universe) or across the industrial heartlands of England (The Red Wall). It is in Bristol where Chris continues to develop his ideas, which in turn has become an archive of the city as he sees it.

His work has been recognised through a number of prestigious awards, most notably the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize (2019), whereby two of his portraits were exhibited at The National Portrait Gallery (UK). In the same year he was selected by Paris Photo as part of their annual Carte Blanche award, being one of four students picked across Europe by the festival as part of the award.

Kavi Pujara (b. 1972) is a British Asian photographer based in Leicester, England. His long-term
documentary projects explore community, migration, and the idea of home, often drawing on his own lived experience. Through a blend of observation and lyrical storytelling, his work reflects on belonging, identity, and the complex ways memory and place shape one another.

Pujara’s photographs are attentive to the quiet, everyday moments in which larger social histories reside. His practice increasingly engages with sound and other narrative forms, expanding the ways in which stories of culture, displacement, and resilience can be told.

Niamh Treacy is the Producer for FORMAT International Photography Festival and QUAD’s Exhibitions Programme. QUAD is a cultural hub in Derby which runs FORMAT, the UK’s leading international contemporary festival of photography and related media.

She has reviewed internationally for organisations such as Les Rencontres d’Arles, Belfast Photography Festival, Uganda Press Photo, Hamburg Triennial and LCC and has juried open calls for FORMAT, UPPA, Zealous, New York Centre for Photography and the United Rugby Championship.

Niamh is part of the FORMAT and QUAD curatorial team curating shows both internationally and nationally such as; [Re]Source, Lishui Photography Festival (2023), Radical Souls, FORMAT23, un/natural, Lishui Photography Festival (2021), Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Awards, QUAD (2021), #massisolationFORMAT, Derby Museum and Art Gallery (2021); FUTURE FOCUS, QUAD Gallery (2022) and Bruce Asbestos, Eye of Newt 2.0, QUAD (2022).