REGENHARDT GALLERY AT SHRODE ART CENTER

Judges Statement

Serving as the juror for this year’s annual Shrode Photography Competition Exhibition at Cedarhurst was both a privilege and a genuine challenge. The 318 images submitted by 75 artists show a remarkable breadth of vision, craft, and inquiry, and speak to the vitality of the photography community in Southern Illinois. From this impressive field, I selected 33 photographs by 31 artists for the exhibition.

My process began with an intuitive examination of every submission, followed by successive rounds of looking, reconsidering, and making increasingly difficult decisions. Throughout that process, I found myself returning to images that embraced abstraction and simplicity, explored the transformative qualities of light, or revealed something unexpected within an otherwise familiar subject. Perhaps surprisingly, even to me, I was repeatedly drawn to photographs featuring power lines and utility poles—structures so embedded in the everyday landscape that they often disappear from our attention, yet through the photographer’s lens they become studies in line, geometry, rhythm, and space.

Across the selected works, there is a compelling range of atmosphere, emotion, and visual language that emerges. Images of the moon, the Northern Lights, and unusual weather phenomena evoke the mystery and unpredictability of the natural world, while movie marquees, reflections, and architectural details reveal a quieter poetry. Together, these works demonstrate one of photography’s most enduring capacities: to heighten our perception, to reframe the familiar, and to make visible what might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Throughout the selection process, I looked for evidence of an individual way of seeing, not simply technical proficiency, but intentionality, curiosity, and a distinctive point of view. The photographs that stayed with me seemed to move beyond documentation toward interpretation: images in which subject, composition, light, and timing coalesced into something more resonant than the scene itself.

Jurying an exhibition is, by its nature, an act of interpretation. The choices made reflect the sensibilities and questions of a particular juror at a particular moment; another juror might have constructed an entirely different exhibition from these same 318 photographs. That subjectivity is not a limitation of the process, but an essential part of it. Inclusion in, or absence from, an exhibition can never serve as a definitive measure of an artwork’s significance or an artist’s potential.

To every photographer who submitted work: please keep creating. I was deeply impressed by the experimentation, rigor, and commitment evident throughout these submissions. Keep photographing. Keep looking. Keep taking risks. Most importantly, continue to trust and cultivate your own way of seeing, regardless of what any one juror, myself included, decides on any given day.
Congratulations to the artists selected for this year’s exhibition, and my heartfelt appreciation to everyone who entrusted me with their work. It has been an honor to spend time looking closely at the world through your eyes.