Colby Snow: “It is dangerous to go alone”

Above of Colby Snow

Photography is a Gift

There isn’t the perfect word to describe Colby. I have engulfed my years in the photography scene for many years, and of those years, I’ve mostly traveled alone. I use the term “mobile and hostile” to explain how and why I travel alone; I move quickly to be unbothered to outside forces. This tactic has ultimately been how I traveled the first two years of my experience with travel photography. Long distance adventures, hiking, and rapid waters, I ventured alone. Most often, these were multiple-day trips alone. In January 2022, I fell while taking landscape photos of a frozen waterfall. I was alone and so embarrassed with myself that I never told a soul until months later. The best I can explain is soreness in my ribs and upper back and headaches from which I did not seek medical attention to these symptoms. It was the first intense that not everything went to plan.

Colby is a good photographer. I traveled alone learning photography because I believed I didn't know anyone with the amount of drive I carried—a task-oriented, dedicated, disciplined attitude. So I thought… I traveled alone to take photos of things, not about things. My fall in 2022 was humbling. I’m twenty-five now, and there might be a fall which I cannot get up from. Humility has been a big piece in my art style and personal life today. While I had spent the years alone to improve myself as an artist, I was not improving as a person. I traveled alone, took portraits, and posted tons but out of arrogance. Colby is a good photographer because he takes photos about things, about places, about people, about their clothes and their pets, about their homes. Colby is a good photographer because his portraits weren’t about the clothes you were wearing but how you wore them. Today, that has been my style as a photographer and as an artist.

Below I’ve attached two portraits Colby has taken of me this year. They’re reminders of humility, those snapshots of me and my life in those moments. I was hesitant to share more of Colby’s work on this page, but the best I can link his Instagram. Today, I never travel alone. Photography is a gift, and it is dangerous to go alone. Colby and I have traveled the broadest scope of Western Pennsylvania. Colby gave me the opportunity to capture the peacock photos, which ended up getting me an honorable mention in Pennsylvania Magazine.

So why the story and lecture? To the artists and photographers out there, learn together—grow together.

Taken by Colby Snow, June 19, 2023

Taken by Colby Snow, January 19, 2023