Photo feature: Westminster, Photographs and Assisted Self-Portraits by Anthony Luvera

In December 2001 Anthony's friends invited him to help out with the charity Crisis At Christmas. During the time he spent helping give out food, blankets and care to some of the 1,200 who'd gathered for shelter, a project began to take shape. Anthony didn't want to take straight portraits of homeless subjects, in fact he felt very uncomfortable about 'subjecting' a homeless person to his interpretation of them. "I'd much prefer to see what the people I met would photograph."

And from this, Assisted Self-Portraits evolved. Participants not subjects. Anthony sourced 1,000 cameras and processing vouchers. He invited people to take part and held a series of weekly briefing sessions to which anything from 25-40 folk aged from 19 to 90 attended. He did not tell them what to photograph and nor did he instruct them how. The idea of a gallery showing of these photos was reprehensible to Anthony, he wanted to find as public as display as possible, so it wasn't "restrictively limited to an educated, middle class gallery audience."

London Underground Platform for Art agreed to show 12 portraits in advertising spaces from January-April 2005. The project continued to develop and Anthony spent a year working closely with participants to hone a method. Anthony met the participants at a place of their choosing and talked through how to use the equipment. Participants do not have to give their photos over. Those that have agreed (and permission forms have been drawn up specofically for the project) Anthony keeps the negative on file. For those that don't chose to sign it is "always completely respected." The photos documenting the participants' own surroundings are like personal postcards. The archive of photographs taken by participants now contains over 4,000 photos and continues to grow.

Anthony was invited to work with residents at King George's Hostel in Westminster and it is this part of his project which features in the exhibition."It debunks the whole idea of what you usually think of Westminster being about.

Londoners encounter homeless people every day, it's a sad fact of city life. But we shuffle past, feeling uncomfortable, tolerating but never engaging. What these photos do is liberating: they give us permission to stop and stare at those faces, look them in the eyes, and instantly encounter something of their stories and themselves. There are all sorts of people living on our streets, and many of them have taken honest and proud portraits here.

Westminster, Photographs and Assisted Self-Portraits is at Westminster Reference Library, 35 St Martin's Street WC2H 7HP from 12-24 November. Open Mon-Fri 10am-8pm, Saturday 10am-5pm.

www.photoworks.org

www.luvera.com/

Words: Marian Buckley
Photos: © Anthony Luvera