One Day Tampa Bay is an annual 24-hour community photography project to document the lives and light of St. Pete, Tampa, Clearwater, Bradenton and all the towns in between.

In the past, our One Day Tampa Bay project has mostly been a collection of beautiful and fun images combined with a dose of reality. This year, as we all struggle through the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked photographers to include images that represent this new way of life. This project, now in its 6th year, has documented Hurricane Irma, Red Tide, heat waves and more. The year 2020 brought us COVID-19, a divisive election year, the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With no goat yoga, crowded farmers markets or big music events, it challenged photographers who usually have a lighthearted day of sunshine to explore deeper into their community.

On September 19, 2020, nearly 80 photographers fanned out across the region to document a day in the life of our community. These photographers submitted 600 photos which were then culled by our curatorial team to fit into the gallery space.

The works in the show were selected blind, meaning the jury did not know whose work they were selecting; each photograph was chosen solely on the basis of its artistic merit. The resulting exhibition is a snapshot of life in the Tampa Bay region in 2020–this beautiful place in which we live, work, and play, even during these unprecedented times.

We are so grateful to the participating photographers for stepping up and exceeding the expectations of documenting this year, and we do hope we will not see so many masks in 2021.