Summer of the White Fox, and After

‘Lyrical and raw, tender and terrifying, Mark Alice Durant’s Summer of the White Fox, and After is an exacting meditation on grief’s many faces. This marvel of enchantments is an ode to threshold moments and liminal spaces. You don’t have to believe in transformation: it will change you for good.’  Christine Hume

‘Summer of the White Fox, and After slayed me, left me on the floor. It is an incredible investigation into the intimate, the everyday, and the private while simultaneously exploring the vast, the existential, and the unknowable. It is a love story to life, to beauty—a love story to photography.’  Cig Harvey

‘Summer of the White Fox, and After is a striking and uncanny convergence of words and pictures; a peripatetic memoir propelled by both the unforeseen twists of loss and grief, and surprise encounters with the extraordinary. At its heart, Durant contemplates this question: “If photography can make the mundane mysterious, what does it do to something that is already enigmatic?” Rebecca Bengal 

‘In Summer of the White Fox, and After, Mark Alice Durant combines photographs and text to produce something remarkable: a deeply personal narrative, addressing the sublime and the harrowing, that pictures and posits what drives, eludes, terrifies and, ultimately, sustains us.’ Marvin Heiferman

For six weeks, in the summer of 2019, a mysterious creature appeared every evening in Durant’s Baltimore neighborhood. Was it a biological anomaly, an apparition, a portentous sign, or all the above? The visitation of this ghostly entity prompted a season of reverie; in the dimming twilight, as the vulpine creature darted in and out of sight, Durant reconsidered his own life narratives, and questioned his insatiable desire to photographically capture the otherworldly visitor.

In 2020, as the COVID pandemic forced a global redefinition of our notions of personal safety and collective responsibility, Durant faced his own serious health crisis as well as the illness and death of beloved family members. Durant’s episodic account of his hospitalizations and his dwindling ability to understand what was happening to and around him is as vivid as it is harrowing. Grief, fear, tenderness, wonder, dark humor, and the comforts of art and nature are inextricably bound in this photographic and narrative exploration of trauma and mystical transience.