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16 of Our Favorite Photos from THE FENCE 2015

By Ellyn Kail on May 11, 2015

© Pat Swain, Lost Flamingos in the Cloud Forest

© Fran Forman, The Dignity of Other Creatures

One of the best things about the warmer months is visiting THE FENCE, an annual photo event and outdoor installation unlike any other. With 2015 ushering in its fourth year, THE FENCE is a site-specific, 3,400 foot-long exhibition predicted to bring in a staggering three million visitors. An esteemed jury of more than forty leading industry professionals, including Feature Shoot Founder and Editor-in-Chief Alison Zavos, curated the 2015 FENCE exhibitions, which will include shows in Boston, Brooklyn, Atlanta, and Houston, with the Houston Center for Photography hosting its first FENCE exhibition.

This year, THE FENCE will unite approximately fifty outstanding artists working worldwide in an examination of themes of community, bringing together bodies of work that are both astonishingly diverse and of undeniably universal significance. The selected photographers and photographic series can be divided into six larger categories (creatures, home, people, play, streets, and nature), all of which relate in some way to the idea of communities both local and global.

From Anna Boyiazis, who plays alongside the young children in a small Ugandan village, where the AIDS pandemic threatens a large number of orphans, and Timothy Timothy Bouldry, who paints an intimate chronicle of home life in a landfill in Nicaragua, to Andrew Avian Garn, who captures the beauty and empathy of pigeons in the care of wildlife rehabilitators and Pat Swain, who creates mysterious and emotive portraits of displaced flamingoes, the photographers featured in THE FENCE 2015 paint a truly irresistible portrait of what it means to be part of a community, and what’s at stake if our sense of community should be lost. This year, it was tougher than ever to select only a few images from THE FENCE, but here are just a couple of our favorites.

THE FENCE is organized by United Photo Industries in conjunction with its sister event Photoville and in partnership with Photo District News (PDN), Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Flash Forward Festival, Atlanta Celebrates Photography (ACP), and the Houston Center for Photography. The Boston FENCE is open this month, with Brooklyn FENCE fast approaching in June; the Atlanta FENCE will open in August, and the Houston FENCE in November. As not all photographers will be featured in each exhibition, please check in over at THE FENCE 2015 for details. We’ll see you there!

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