Care & Defiance | LUNA

“When we choose to love we choose to move against fear ⸺ against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect ⸺ to find ourselves in the other.” - bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

Womanhood means holding multiple things in balance. It means switching roles. It means ducking and diving, dancing and dreaming. Being both tender and tough.

Taking inspiration from bell hooks in viewing love as an act of resistance, Care & Defiance considers the female photographic gaze in all its multiplicity.

The show features work by 11 contemporary photographers selected via an open call, two national photo collectives, POST Photo Collective and The Uk Black Female Photographers Community, a Lisel Haas and Grete Bermbach Archive curation, Rhonda Wilson’s Worth Paying Forcampaign and a salon showcase of images entered into the open call.

Across staged portraiture and documentary images, collage, performance, historical and analogue processes, the works in this exhibition explore identity and community, urban and domestic space, migration, memory and the politics of everyday life.

While women make up 75% of photography graduates, only 15% of professional photographers are women – and they earn 40% less than their male counterparts. Luna is a grassroots network supporting and amplifying women, women-identifying and non-binary people working with photography in Birmingham and the West Midlands.

Luna (formerly Women in Photo Birmingham) are a grassroots network for women, women-identifying and non-binary photographers in Birmingham and the West Midlands. They offer a supportive space to share work, build creative confidence, collaborate with peers and develop skills. They aim to inspire connection with Birmingham via the medium of photography, amplifying underrepresented stories and voices of women in our city and wider region. Award-winning photographer Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora founded Luna in 2023, and it has since evolved into a community with a shared leadership committee joining Jaskirt at the helm in 2025.

Image by Ellie Smith.