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If you are a member of press and want to schedule an interview or speak to Stuart Dance, please contact Stuart at media@stuartdance.com 

He was homeless when he took this picture. Now it’s hanging in a Raleigh museum.

JOSH SHAFFER @ THE NEWS & OBSERVER

Homeless PhotographerWhen he thinks back, Stuart Dance remembers nights when he didn’t have a pillow to sleep on the concrete or under a bush — only a garbage bag full of his dirty clothes, with his camera stowed safely inside.
 
Even when things turned worst — when his drinking lost him jobs and friends, landed him in the hospital, sent him to recovery for a year, got him involuntarily committed, left him homeless and nearly killed him three times — he always kept his camera collection in a storage unit, where his brother helped pay the bill.
 
Dance would walk through Raleigh at night, noticing the angle of buildings on a dark Dorothea Dix Park, seeing the warm light spilling out of Char-Grill at closing time. And when those images caught his eye, he clicked a shutter on his antique Kodak and added them to a gallery no one would see. Read More!
 

For Stuart Dance, photography is a saving grace.

TONIA KAAZ @ ALTER/ANALOG

ALTER/ANALOG“My name is Stuart Dance and I am from Raleigh, NC.  I am a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts and have been involved with the arts since an early age.  I grew up with a darkroom in our house and first began shooting on a Pentax K1000 (which I still use from time to time) and simple, homemade pinhole cameras.  I find myself primary using a Rolleiflex 2.8D these days, along with a Graflex Graphic35, a Lomography Super Sampler, and a Canon IIs2 …but I have an extremely large collection of cameras dating back to the early 1900’s, which I rotate in and out of use. 

Photography has been a saving grace in my life.  I’ve struggled with crippling alcoholism for the past 15 years.  I have literally been on the streets, homeless, broken and lost many times, but somehow always had a camera.  Photography has always been there for me.  It’s the one creative light that has always led me back to finding the self that I thought I had destroyed and forever forgotten.  Photography validated my existence through the years that I thought I had no one and almost literally had nothing. Read More!