Six Feet is growing an incredible archive of images submitted by photographers of all levels from around the globe. Photographs are collected online through our call-for-submissions and through Instagram when photographers use the hashtag #lifeatsixfeet. We are grateful to our guest-curators for their thoughtful consideration and eagerly awaiting your own interpretation of our archive. We welcome your inquiries and ideas.
How do we make images in our homes after we've exhausted our homes as subject for almost a year during social isolation? This practice group, with Frances Bukovsky, Anna Rotty, Beate Sass, Rita Kovtun, and Sara Swaty was an in-depth exploration of making images in the home. Each week was focused on an individual room and posed questions served as prompts for image making and reflection.
In March 2020, when everything shut down, many of us sheltered in place with our children. Time has passed, and we are almost a year into the pandemic. I wanted to revisit the question of are the kids alright. How are our nation's kids reacting, coping, and living during this time of extreme circumstances? How are they handling anxieties surrounding political unrest, schooling, and the ongoing pandemic? The images selected are a second visual check-in to see if “The Kids Are Alright”.
During October and November of 2020, an international group of photographers from diverse backgrounds came together as a peer group to work for six weeks on documentary landscape practice and theory. This group was hosted by sixfeetphotography.com. The following images have been curated by the group’s moderators, Morgain Bailey and Stella Kalinina, from submissions made by the group’s members.
Let Shadows Fall Behind Us is a collection of work by Six Feet Photography Project's Parenthood Practice Group. Established in April 2020, this group has been meeting fortnightly to share with each other the creative ways they have responded to the pandemic as both photographers and parents or caregivers. The group's members span multiple countries and time zones, and have been nourished by their many commonalities of experience.
“Our duty is to experiment” Alexander Rodchenko
Abstraction is often criticized as an intellectual game; however, there is emotion and beauty in these images that show a perspective of the world only possible through photography. By translating limited spaces and changed routines into new explorations, abstract photography works as a remedy for difficult times…
This selection of images was curated by members of our collaborative team - Susan Patrice, Mike Belleme, Frances Bukovsky, and lydia see, and it represents a very small sampling of Six Feet content gathered over the last six months, from our galleries, special features, and images posted to Instagram using our hashtag, #lifeatsixfeet.
Over several weeks, 8 women met each week to consider the theme of nostalgia in their work. Nostalgia is something that encompasses multitudes, both warm and familiar, counterproductive and dangerous. They focused on this difficult to define, elusive and powerful emotion. Through conversations around their personal experiences as women, migrants, mothers, daughters, granddaughters, grandmothers, and as people reflecting on their pasts, all caught between places and homes, they realized early on that each of them felt nostalgia very differently, but as they shared more and more they found many threads and connections through their work.
As a prelude to our upcoming panel discussion about queer experience during quarantine, I asked Julie Rae Powers, Nicole Norman, Keamber Pearson, and Natasha Moustache to share images of their work to be shown in a gallery.
This guest curated gallery was created by Katherine Leonard for her online Zoom talk The Alchemists of 20/20: Photography and Transformation. Here, Katherine Leonard's selected images point us towards personal and cultural metamorphosis.
Under the isolation, modified daily routines, and the changed appearance of the outside world, we are still ourselves, working to understand, manage, and engage with our own personal lives. Life, struggle, legacy, happiness, and connection are still relevant to humanity and are necessary to reflect upon as we strive to move forward into a future of collective health.
This gallery has been curated from the Self Portraiture and Self Representation in Photography practice group, as well as images selected from the larger Six Feet community to demonstrate the versatility, emotion, and power of self-portraiture at this time.
As the curator of this gallery, I chose images from a diverse group of creative minds who used abstraction and composition as their primary communication tools. A focus on these formal elements provides the viewer with an invitation to enter into the prism of the image without needing to focus on a specific interpretation.
This gallery of images visually represents how, as womyn photographers of color, we have collectively gathered ourselves from the fog and confusion of the coronavirus pandemic and put ourselves back together. The photos speak to being in community with each other, valuing and elevating intimacy at home and beyond as we protest injustice and the pandemic of white supremacy while in the shadow of COVID.
These photographs allow us a glimpse into the experience of children during this unique moment of time. They capture nuance and complexity, poignance and humor, and above all, resilience.
During this slow-down, photographers are turning their attention toward the natural world. For some, neighborhoods and yards have become an oasis of beauty, rich with photographic opportunities. For others, a way to befriend creative solitude and create a sense of connection and groundedness in this chaotic and uncertain time.
This guest-curated gallery by Troy Colby explores the ways in which poetry and photography can inspire us, move us, bring comfort, break our hearts, have us fall in love, and even fill in the blanks when our memories fade. Photo by Rene Treece Roberts
This guest-curated gallery by Lydia See encourages a consideration of the poetics of space - how we occupy interior space, how others may be witnessing space, as they know it, change around them, and how our own humanity is affected by our control (and lack of control) over space - space which we perceive as ours, space which we claim, space which we are forced to share, space which is embedded in our identity.
Nostalgia encompasses everything from recalling fond memories of comfort to dangerous and consequential ideologies preventing us from moving forward as a culture. There is a heightened sense of nostalgia in this moment, where we are forced to slow down and both long for the before times, but also imagine futures better than the reality of our own histories.