Welcome to no. 23 in our series Poignant Pics, where we've asked photo curators, educators, collectors, and makers to share a brief essay on a photo that has significantly changed the way they think or look at the world.

In this issue, our editor Diana Nicholette Jeon writes about two of Anne Silver’s images and how she felt when seeing them for the first time.

Killing Me Softly…

"Strumming my pain with his fingers / Killing me softly with his song/ Telling my whole life with his words."

The lyrics from the often covered Killing Me Softly describe Lori Lieberman’s experience when she stumbled upon Don McClean playing at the Troubador in the early ’70s. When I saw Emergence and Le Drapeau Blanc on Instagram, it was as if these lyrics had become images. I felt as if my soul was exposed, and that Anne somehow knew everything I had experienced during the terrible, interminable period of the last three years. I feel pain, surrender, never giving up, piecing things back together, the resilience of the human heart all radiate from these images.

If one of the aspirations of an artist is for people to see their work and experience specific feelings, then Anne has mastered this skill and brought it to life via this newly emerging series.

- Diana Nicholette Jeon

Bio

Anne Renée Silver is an American artist who lives in France. Her formal training is that of a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.  She spent 15 years in practice as a feminist psychotherapist whose specialization was working with survivors of sexual violence and people suffering from depression.  As an artist, she is mostly self-taught but has taken classes with Laura Valenti and Sal Taylor-Kydd. She is also an alum of the Pigs Fly Retreats. 

In her art, Anne explores themes of intimacy, loss, vulnerability, resilience, transformation, spirituality, and healing.  She is keenly aware of the healing power of art. She has known significant losses in her personal life, including the death of her teenage son in 2008 and some traumatic medical procedures, the most recent of which was a modified radical hysterectomy in 2019.  Anne is drawn to the tactile nature of physical art objects and loves working with her hands. She enjoys making cyanotypes, encaustic photography pieces, handmade artist books, and embroidered photos. Red threads literally run through much of her work. The hand-embroidered self-portraits shown here speak of her on-going medical struggles and of the healing process.   Each piece is an archival pigment print on washi paper, hand-torn, hand-embroidered, and painted with coffee.

Anne’s work has been published by Diffusion Annual, Shots Magazine, the Hand Magazine, among others. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, in the US, and in India. Anne is the author of Pénombre, a book of analog photography and original poetry.

More of her work may be found on her website.

Diana Nicholette Jeon is a Honolulu, HI-based artist and an editor at One Twelve publications. She was awarded her MFA in Imaging and Digital Art from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County in 2006. Jeon's work has been extensively exhibited; venues include the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, the Griffin Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Hawaii State Art Museum, and the Museo de Lamego. Awards include the Lensculture 2020 BW awards, four Hawaii SFCA Purchase Awards, the International Photo Awards, the 11th Julia Margaret Cameron award, the Pollux Award, and the Mobile Photo Awards. Jeon’s art has been featured in a wide array of publications, including Artdocs, Gente di Fotografia, SHOTS Magazine, the Art Photo Index, and Lens Culture.