Six Feet: Boundaries, Belonging, Becoming

Six Feet is a collaborative, artist-led photography project that began as an urgent call to photographers of all levels to share personal and intimate images from within the Covid-19 pandemic. Through this act of making and sharing, we quickly became a community of practice for hundreds of photographers around the globe.

The intimate pathways created by these images became access points into the familiar and the forgotten as we recreated our relationships to personal, social, and civic boundaries. Here, Six Feet became a metaphor for both distance and closeness. For some, the familiar became an oasis of beauty where the long-ignored was remembered and reevaluated. We defined our isolation, created photo-biographies of self, pushed the edges of our craft, and navigated the comforts and dangers of nostalgia.

As we practiced together, each photographer offered new ways of looking at and making meaning of our shifting world. Together we have created imperfect communities of belonging, rejected the idea of “othering,” and exposed gross inequalities and injustices worldwide. We have grieved immense losses, made profound and straightforward images, and created a collective visual narrative of this time that touches both the pain and possibilities of hope, community, and strength.

While we don’t know how long the pandemic will last, we do know that this is a time for open eyes and continued courageous engagement. It’s a time to question, absorb, respond, and record. The 105 photographers featured here have taken up the challenge to share photographs made during an extraordinary period. Six Feet: Boundaries, Belonging, Becoming reflects a phenomenal outpouring of emotional and creative responses. This is our collective visual story.

A printed catalog of this exhibition is available through MagCloud.

Take a tour of the gallery via a virtual walkthrough.

Click on any photograph below to see a larger image. Hover over the enlarged image to see the artist’s name and instagram URL.