Analog Forever Magazine - Online Group Exhibition

We are excited to announce that our June 2022 online group exhibition, “Through Many Dangers,” is being curated by Heather Snider, the Executive Director of ! The deadline for submissions is May 31st, 2022! To enter, all you need to do is read and respond to the following prompt with your analog photography. The best of these images will be showcased in an online show, beginning June 13th, 2022. Good luck!PhotoAlliance

When I was a kid, I lived with my grandparents for a few years in rural Virginia. One of my formative memories from that period is of my grandfather singing “Amazing Grace” at our tiny local Baptist church on Sundays. I was mesmerized by the emotional resonance of his bass voice as this otherwise reserved Southern gentleman bellowed the words with all his heart. It was his favorite song. He told me so, and it was clearly true. During services, I anticipated the moment in the middle of the song when he sang the line…”Through many dangers, toils and snares, we have already come….” making everything around me seem to quiver. As I grew older, I came to understand the long, wide reach of this song, over many years and peoples, and I was recently brought to tears by Aretha Franklin’s performance in the documentary film (2018 release, 1972 performance), if you haven’t seen it you must!Prompt: Amazing Grace

Throughout the last two years, with many difficult challenges and times of despair, “through many dangers…” has circled round in my thoughts, as lines like that tend to do. I’ve pieced apart the idea of “through” and what it means to be “through” something: to be in it and moving out of it at the same time, a journey, a passage, a process. And all the dangers we have experienced, on scales at once intimate and incomprehensibly vast, often unbearable, and yet time marches on taking us with it.

For this exhibition, I’d love to see visualizations of dangers in both literal and cathartic spirit, and the experience of getting through it: what you’ve seen, what you’ve felt, how you have coped, or not, with any of the many challenges of the past two years.

A special thank you to my friend Rachel Phillips with whose permission I share this image of hers, published in one of her enchanting risograph ‘zines from late 2020, which I latched onto sometime in the thick of it all and continue to revisit in my mind’s eye.