Fotopostering Brighton - Take 2: the Seafront - by Luc

Plotting a truly city-wide exhibition of the Queering the Photobooth portraits was an interesting concept, but not one based on the reality of constraints: time, budget, permission and weather...  And, so, the portraits - in their 2nd hanging - all converge down at the seafront: at the Thistle Hotel, in the West Street-to-beach underpass - and, hopefully, on Madeira Drive.

Collaborative Portrait of Kate Turner

The word 'queer' ... by Kate

One of the broad ideas that the project has brought up for me is the question of what constitutes queer. Our group discussions often turn to what we mean by that term and we always find ourselves preserving the openness of it. Nearing the beginning of the project the question for me was how to capture something in line with ‘queer’ and still maintain that openness - to resist fixing it in any way. Week on week the huge spectrum of images, experiences and points of view photographed by all of us has formed a body of work that is multiple and open and resits pinning down queer in definitive terms. It’s been really rewarding to progress through this project with everyone else and I think ultimately it’s that group collective that helps us use queer in that unfixed, uncategorised way that can only ever be more productive than divisive labels and boxed in concepts.

I often end up leaving the workshop with loads of big ideas, all of which are too big to translate, or don’t really come off. This week I'm trying to focus on the every day, on the little things. I'm asking myself why they matter; why these things in particular? At the same time I'm not asking anything at all. I'm putting faith in the idea that such images self-select in the sense that there is something about them that sparks the impulse to pick up the camera. I'm much more open now to just seeing where an idea takes me and trying out different things. For now it’s one last photographing spree before our workshop tomorrow.  

Welcome to not going shopping

not going shopping charts the process of the artist Anthony Luvera working with eleven people to create a photographic work for Queer in Brighton, a project that celebrates cultural heritage of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people in Brighton and Hove. 

The work made by Anthony and 

Jess Bayliss
Raphael Fox
Ten Harber
Sarah Hebben
Harry Hillery
Kelly McBride
Luc Raesmith
Matt Robinson
Kate Turner
Ed Whelan
Charlie Wood

will be shown in an outdoor citywide exhibition in Brighton from February 2014.

On this blog Anthony and the participants will share their experiences, observations, photographs and anything else they find interesting, as a way to document their work together.