State of the Art Gallery was founded by a group of photographers. In the very first year the gallery existed, the members held a juried photo show, inviting photographers from the greater Ithaca community to present their work with the opportunity to win cash prizes. Thirty-three years later, the annual photo show is upon us once again. 

David Watkins has been a member of the Gallery since 2005. When he joined, there were only around 3 other members who were photographers, so he naturally fell into helping out with the photo show. At that time, everything was administered completely by mail. The back room of the Gallery, aka the Salon, was covered in tables stacked miles high with over 300 letters, containing contact information and fees paid. Framed photographs were propped up against every wall, and David would be joined by three or four other members to judge which pieces would be included in the show. Picking their way across the mazelike room, they sifted through copious amounts of images to finally emerge days later, beards long and hair matted, having decided upon a sensible 70-90 pictures to hang. Things are a lot easier nowadays.

Six or seven years ago, the Gallery made the decision to move the process of jurying shows to an online format. This period involved David receiving hundreds of photographs via email, compiling them onto a thumb drive, and bringing them over to gallery member Stan Bowman’s house, as he had the biggest screen at the time. The jury would discuss the images together, and vote pieces into the show. It involved a large amount of emailing on David’s end but saved a lot of trees and sheltered jury members from having to face the photographers whose works did not make it into the show while they picked up their rejected prints. This mostly online model worked well enough, but the process of jurying shows moved completely online in the nick of time.

In 2019, the president of SOAG, Susan Larkin, tasked David with distilling the photo show process into a numbered set of rules, in the event that he is hit by a bus and cannot run the proceedings anymore. Susan is ever the pragmatist. He was just finishing collating all the information that had become second nature to him when Eva Capobianco got involved. Eva runs the invitational show, and she was fed up with the time-consuming process as well. Putting their heads together, she and David researched the different ways galleries accept online submissions, and discovered that the best website to use was called EntryThingy. It has an impressive back-end operation with a plethora of different options in terms of how entries can be submitted and viewed. They adopted the use of the website in 2020, which proved to be a timely choice as the world soon made the startling shift to almost exclusively existing online.

The process is much less laborious now, and David only has to stand sentinel over his computer in the last forty-eight hours before entries are due. In his experience, 85% of artists, time and time again, wait until those last two days to submit their work. But the majority of the work is done by the website, and he and the members who jury the show are able to do so from the safe comfort of their own home. The website features a ranking tool, allowing jurors to vote on each piece on a scale of 1 to 5. David doesn’t let anyone choose a 3, as it’s too noncommittal. 

Once the show is hung and ready to be viewed, an independent judge with no relationship to the jury or tie to the gallery, is brought in to assess the images. Faculty from Ithaca College, Cornell University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and other nearby schools and businesses have served in this position before. They are given the freedom to choose how the prize money is divided, and they award the winners on the opening night of the show. 

This year, the photo show is happening in person once again. On the day of our interview, in late April of 2022, David didn’t have too much hands-on work he was dealing with leading up to the show. He monitored the gallery’s PayPal account and mailbox periodically to check for fees coming in, but other than that, his stress levels are far lower than they were in past years leading up to the opening. One facet he is looking forward to most keenly for this year’s show is the opportunity to see many local photographers, from Rochester to Binghamton, whom he’s become friends with. Throughout the years they’ve built up a large network, and spend as much time socializing as they do discussing their pieces. And after two years of relative isolation, it’s high time we socialize once again.

Bringing one of State of the Art Gallery’s longest-standing traditions back to its walls, the 33^rd Annual Juried Photography Show runs from June 2nd to June 26th.