9th Annual Fine Art Photography Competition Winners
February 28, 2018
ArtSpace Herndon – February 26, 2018 – Competition judge Rahshia Sawyer announced winners of the 9th Annual Fine Art Photography Competition during the Awards Reception at ArtSpace Herndon on Saturday, February 24, 2018. Steven Welti won first place for Escape Your Mind and received a check for $750. Reggie Forster won 2nd place ($350) for In the Shadow of the Anthem. Joe Ditchett won 3rd place ($200) for Gateway. Honorable mentions ($100) were given to Steven White for Preparing To Go In, Jim Turner for Vase and Fall Branches, and Richard Paul Weiblinger for Folds 1501. Merit awards were given to Craig Beyers for Trawler at Dawn and Deborah Lash for Here’s Looking at You, Kid (2).
Miss Sawyer chose 34 photographs for the exhibit from nearly 170 submitted to the competition by 78 professional and amateur photographers in Virginia, Maryland, D.C., and West Virginia. The selected photographs include a wide variety of extraordinary views of nature, people, and places in realistic, whimsical, and abstract forms.
Rahshia Sawyer is a conceptual photographer based in the Washington DC area. She was the 2012 recipient of the Contemporary Talents award from France’s François Schneider Foundation. Exhibited in the 2012 Inaugural Dublin Biennial, her photographs and installations have been included in numerous group shows in Canada, England, France, Ireland, Spain, and the United States. Her work is featured in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Foundation François Schneider, and Radford University Museum. More recently, she was a 2015 Trawick semi-finalist, a 2015 Finalist in the 8th edition of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, and received an honorable mention at the 2015 Fine Art Photography Awards. Rahshia received her MFA from George Mason University in Virginia, and her BFA at the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington DC. Her current projects examine relationships between beauty and humanity and its balanced (or imbalanced) interaction between reality and fantasy.
Event Details:
The 9th Annual Fine Art Photography featuring finalists in the competition will be on exhibit at ArtSpace Herndon through March 31, 2018. For more information, or to purchase sponsorships, please visit our website at: ArtSpaceHerndon.org
Photography Credit: 2018 First Place Winner Escape Your Mind by Steven Welti