“Greta Snider is an experimental filmmaker. Her earlier work on 16mm includes a collection of audio and visual experiences that combines photography, found footage, and her own experiences of the San Francisco punk scene in the early 1990s. Her work includes experiments with simultaneous soundtracks (Blood Story, 1990), engaging personal accounts of a scraped-together journey with friends (Portland, 1996), and an audio travelogue of the San Francisco punk scene.

Greta’s more recent work includes, in collaboration with Johunna Grayson, a series of slide show projections comprised of hand-processed photographs and stereoscopic images. The series is described as an update on the “campy Viewmaster format”, riffing on the concept of the travelogue to present the unseen and underground aspects. Subjects range from forgotten aspects of the everyday (“old man bars,” flowers, parts of the body) to the extreme (a Viewmaster series of atomic test blasts). Snider’s films explore the importance of small memories, retrieving pieces of ephemera from the underground and re-presenting them on screen.” (https://canyoncinema50.org/collection/filmmakers/GretaSnider1529691643811)

Snider’s Flight (1997) an assemblage of her father’s photographs of airplanes, birds, trains, and flowers, and snatches of his handwriting, is act of preservation and mourning. Snider imprinted these images onto the film via a cameraless technique similar to Man Ray’s rayographs, in which objects are placed on film stock and exposed directly to light.

A Small Place (2017) “is an homage to those surviving solitary confinement, and was inspired by the testimonies shared by Sarah Shourd (et al) in the essay collection, Hell Is A Very Small Place.”