Anthony Luvera

Before I start gushing about Anthony Luvera, let me just quickly say...

Happy New Year!

I spent my night with some new friends, eating good food before drinking good wine and watching the fireworks over Bristol from Clifton Suspension Bridge. It was a wonderful way to see out 2012, and see in the new year! So excited for what might happen this year, so many ideas and plans coming up, which I promise to let you know about in due course! 


Back to business. Do you remember me mentioning a few months ago about a project I'm working on at the moment to do with community? Well, I still can't show any images from it yet (but promise they're coming very soon!), but I have been researching into other photographers for the essay side of this work who have also worked with various communities and people. One of those is Anthony Luvera.

Since 2002, Luvera has built an archive of over 10,000 images consisting of documentary photographs of London and Belfast as well as, more importantly, polaroids and assisted self-portraits of, and in collaboration with, homeless people. I was inspired by Anthony Luvera’s technique of becoming a part of the community in order to gain his subject’s faith.

“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.”

Demonstrated in the above images, ‘Assisted Self-Portrait of Joe Murray’, Luvera gives his subjects cameras to document where they live and come from, their view of the world, as well as teaching them how to use the cameras that document them. This then results in a real sense of intimacy in Luvera’s portraits, a personal vulnerability. A mixture of learning and exploring how the subject thinks and feels. It forces the viewer to delve deeper into who the person is and reflect on how they react to the homeless they pass is the street. The gaze of the subject photographed is questioning, searching, and encouraging the audience to give them an answer. To what question remains unknown.

They are beautiful pictures in their simplicity. The normalness of them shines amongst the images we see so often nowadays that are too posed, trying too hard to make the viewer feel something. Luvera is clever in that by just letting the person express themselves, he helps them speak volumes on their own.