Another person I interviewed for my BJP article on collaboration (the whole article is in the November issue - or on the ipad version. ) was the ever thoughtful, energetic and talented Anthony Luvera.
So it seems only natural to follow the previous post - which was essentially about reclaiming art from consumption - with this one where Anthony explains why he is interested in reclaiming photographic representation from the politics of (media) consumption as well as how he showed the work he and others had made on the London Underground. Fabulous!
Anthony
Luvera – The Artist
“There is this preconceived notion of a homeless person
as a bum or a down-and-out” says photographer and academic Anthony Luvera, “but
I’m interested in the experience of homelessness as a transitional thing, as
something you experience and then move on from.”
Luvera’s work with
homelessness and changing how it is represented began in December 2001
when he was invited to photograph in London for Crisis, a homeless charity. “I
was really interested in the critical writing of people like Abigail
Solomon-Godeau, Allan Sekula and A.D. Coleman. They question the context and
meaning of documentary photography and how it is represented.”
“So when I was
told how I could help these people and how amazing everything looked, I wasn’t
interested. I could have stayed two weeks and made amazing pictures that people
hadn’t seen before. But I wanted to develop relationships with people, to hear
the stories that they told and to make those relationships a central part of my
practice.”
So Luvera rejected conventional top-down documentaries of
the poor and gave the homeless people he met cameras to document the people and
places they found important. He also
trained them how to use large format cameras and became an assistant in their
making of Assisted Self-Portraits.
“Over the next five years, I worked with 250 people and ended up with an archive of over 10,000
photographs. When I showed this work on the London Underground, suddenly I
started getting these weird requests for images. I got requests from a bible
manufacturer and a Hollywood costume designer. This got me interested in the ethics of archives
and what they are for and that’s how I got involved with Belfast Exposed.”
In Belfast, Luvera combined his academic with his
photographic practice, the latter of which is collected in his recently
published book, Residency. “I’m
interested in identity because it’s a
process that is always in flux. I’m not interested in why people are homeless
so much as what they think about being homeless and being represented as
homeless.”
“In London, I would ask people to take me to a place that
was important. In Belfast that had a whole different resonance. If you’re from
Belfast you’re from a particular area that carries economic, religious and
political weight. So for the homeless in Belfast, there is a double whammy of
exclusion because homeless people find themselves excluded from places both
socially and politically.”
“There was also a level of suspicion of me as a
photographer that I hadn’t experienced before. As a community, Belfast has been
exposed to the polarising gaze of photography. Many people I met had memories
of photojournalists being at events – this person parachuting in, taking
pictures and leaving. Then they would
see pictures of Belfast represented as a rabid, warring place when the reality
was very different.”
Through his work Luvera hopes to change the politics of
representation and the relationship between the people and places involved in
the production, exhibiting and publication of images. “In Belfast I wanted to involve the participants in every part of the
process, from the photography to the exhibition where pictures were put at
eye-level so the viewer would look them straight in the eye. People are used to
looking at homeless people from above.” With his work In Belfast and London,
that’s a perspective that Luvera is helping to change.
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