A drug and alcohol recovery service in Brighton will open its doors to the public this Autumn for an exhibition of photography, turning a space normally associated with treatment and support into a temporary venue for the display of photographic work.

The exhibition marks a departure from the institutional settings in which recovery services usually operate. Rather than staging the show in a gallery or arts centre, the service is inviting audiences directly into its own building — a decision that places the photographs within the environment in which the lives behind them unfold. For visitors, that means encountering the work on the site where recovery itself happens, rather than at one remove.

Brighton has long sustained a distinctive photographic culture. The city hosts the annual Brighton Photo Biennial, the UK's largest dedicated photography festival, and is home to a network of photographers, collectives and independent exhibition spaces that have repeatedly used unconventional venues — seafront arches, vacant shops, community buildings — to show work. An exhibition inside a recovery service extends that tradition of taking photography out of the white cube and into spaces with an immediate social function.

The organisers have framed the open-doors approach as an invitation to the wider community. By welcoming the public into a facility that many residents would otherwise never enter, the exhibition doubles as an act of institutional openness: the service becomes visible, and the photography becomes the means of that visibility. It is a model that arts and health organisations elsewhere in the UK have increasingly explored, using exhibitions as a bridge between clinical or support settings and the communities that surround them.

No details have yet been announced about which photographers will feature, whether the work has been made by people using the service, or what themes the exhibition will address. Those questions will shape how the show reads. Photography made within recovery contexts can range from documentary work produced with participants to self-portraiture and collaborative projects, and the curatorial framing — who holds the camera, and who is being looked at — will matter a great deal to the result.

What is already clear is the timing and the intent. The exhibition runs this Autumn in Brighton, and the recovery service is explicitly positioning it as a public event rather than an internal display. That choice carries weight: it treats photography not as decoration but as a form of public address, and it treats the recovery community not as an audience to be reached but as one capable of hosting.

The full programme, including opening dates, participating photographers and any associated events, is expected to be confirmed as Autumn approaches.