Analog Forever Magazine is pleased to showcase 32 images in this month’s online exhibition, entitled “Through Many Dangers,” curated by Heather Snider, the Executive Director of PhotoAlliance!

The curator writes: The theme of this show undeniably carried a heaviness, but also an invitation to respond to heaviness, inspired by the song Amazing Grace. It was challenging to narrow down a selection of photographs because the more images there are, the more light enters, and a collective truth comes into focus. For each photograph included here, there were often several other artists who shared a similar sensibility or approach. With this curation, I have tried to present exemplars of the many means through which photographers responded.

Operating inside the trauma and enlightenment of the past two years were a sea of triggers and buzzwords as we all tried to capture with language an experience unprecedented in our lifetimes: danger, illness, alienation, perseverance, heartbreak, suffering, hope, despair, disaster…but enough with words, we have photographs! Looking through all of the amazing work submitted to this call was a deep dive into the lives of others, an experience at once communal and alienating, like the pandemic itself: always full of contradictions.

As a whole, this collection captures the solitary feeling that pervaded the hours, the introspective experience of it all. Whether we lived alone or with others, isolation took on new meaning during this time. It was a time of reckoning: with our society, humanity, biology, ourselves, and our planet. The photographs here swirl together a grasping at the unfathomable and an obsessive focus on the surface of things, the details, the immediate. They confront the constant disorientation in the conflation of days, time, seasons, space, and relationships and a dissolution of familiar markers. Sunsets and sunrises blur into an extended gaze. We have already come… and we are still searching for what will lead us home. 

~ Heather Snider

GALLERY 

About the Curator

Heather Snider is the executive director of PhotoAlliance, a non-profit based in San Francisco. She has worked for 30 years in the field of fine art photography, beginning her career at Vision Gallery in San Francisco and including tenures as the director at Scott Nichols Gallery and SF Camerawork. Heather has written about photography extensively for national and international publications and curated numerous exhibitions in the United States, China, and South Africa. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees at Center for Photographic Art (Carmel). 

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