Opening reception, July 10, 2009 from 6 - 8 p.m.

Opening reception, July 10, 2009 from 6 - 8 p.m.

This year´s exhibition was juried by Katherine Ware, Curator of Photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.

Ms. Ware previously served as Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she was co-curator and co-author of Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery; served as curator and author of Elemental Landscapes: Photographs by Harry Callahan; and presented shows including Photo Mandalas, The Silver Garden; and The Faceless Figure. Ms. Ware served as Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum during the 1990s and organized the traveling exhibition A Practical Dreamer: The Photographs of Man Ray and the exhibition Vision in Motion: The Photographs of László Moholy-Nagy, both with accompanying books. She has also worked with the photography collection at the Oakland Museum of California and began her career at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in Washington, D.C. She is a frequent juror and reviewer of contemporary photography and has written essays on the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. .


Congratulations to this year´s participants!

Jeffrey Aaronson*
Lisa Adamucci
Bremner Benedict
Ryan Bush
Alejendro Cartagena
Julia Cybularz
C. Leigh Farmer
Tom Foster
Jennifer Greenwell
Lori Hepner
Dave Jordano
Lisa Marie Kress
Laurie Lambrecht
Rania Matar
Monika Merva
Brad Moore
Bruce Myren
Jason Reblando
Beatrix Reinhardt*
Ellen Rennard*
Bethany Souza
Rylan Steele
Susan H. Thelwell
Sonja Thomsen
Tribble & Mancenido
Tu-Anh Pham

* Denotes Juror´s Commendation

Welcome to the twenty-seventh annual juried competition for members of the Houston Center for Photography! It´s hard to know if a selection such as this one reflects the current state of photography or just the juror´s perspective. It is a little of both, of course, but I tend to find my own preoccupations well represented, whether due to my own juror´s bias or because they are shared with many other specialists in the field. Thus, many fine bodies of work were not chosen this year and must await another juror´s eye. The exhibition includes suites of three images by twenty-six artists whose work was drawn from an international field of entrants.
Many of the photographers in the show are engaged in work about assessing our lives now, marked by a time of transition and change. They are composing little love songs to that which is disappearing or to that which is proliferating. My sense is that they are seeking to understand and accept more than to criticize, perhaps with a little sadness and sometimes with humor. Farmers, ranchers, truckers, and itinerant preachers are all a lot less common than cubicle workers these days. A roadside mailbox, marked with the names of successive occupants, is a reminder of a time when the postal service was our primary means of communication with those at a distance. Now a profusion of towers and wires and invisible signals keep us connected. Unfortunately, our efforts to dominate the natural world have resulted in some ridiculous and impoverished landscapes. The sight of a crazily pruned tree marooned in concrete is a normal sight for most of us. Fortunately, the camera can sometimes use such raw material to create something of compositional grace and meaning. Our interiors also appear sterile and unimaginative in this selection, but the impulse to personalize everything remains rampant for teenage girls.
Being only human, our own lives tend to dominate our thoughts, and several bodies of work address more directly the joys and sorrows of our mortal experience by using the human figure. They show us everyday struggles, whether imposed by nature, circumstance, geography, finances, or age. And we see the simple and eloquent pleasures of home, the place where you most belong and the place where you can be the loneliest. The place that can be taken away completely by a terrible storm.
Pictures don´t make the world go ´round, but they do make it a better place, so keep on doin´ what you do!

Katherine Ware, Curator of Photography
New Mexico Museum of Art


More information on artist talks and related programming will be forthcoming.