The Texas Photographic Society’s quarterly Portfolio Competition with juror Jean Caslin. This competition featured an Emerging and a Mid-Career Photographer every month. TPS defines an “Emerging Photographer” as a person who has not been featured in a solo gallery exhibition and defines a “Mid-Career Photographer” as a person who may have had a solo gallery exhibition, but is not represented by a commercial gallery.

The 2010 Portfolio I competition winners are:

Emerging Photographer

Al Braden (Austin, TX), “Rio Grande/Rio Bravo/Rio Conflict”
“The triptych form may make a powerful realism—but it can only catch attention and hope to start discussion of the underlying issues.”

Marti Belcher (Vienna, VA), “Burma Monks”
“[Burma] is the most religious Buddhist country in the world in terms of proportion of monks in the population and proportion of income spent on religion.”

Bob Levy (Houston, TX), “Who Are The Homeless?”
“It is my hope that these images can begin to break down the prejudice and discrimination against homelessness that is so common in our society.”

Mid-Career Photographer
April Pilley (Lubbock, TX), “To The End, Nature Remains”
“As a child traveling through the country, I became fascinated with the landscape and the people who once lived in the homesteads seen from the highway.”

Louis Smith (Houston, TX), “Bentlight”
“Light can dance with glass in unexpected ways, to form dream-like images from which I can go in many directions.”

Laura Noel (Atlanta, GA), “The Space Between”
“These images are meant to be an elegy for the end of the relationship, but hopefully the photographs capture the greater process of loss and recovery everyone experiences at some point.”