Seth Jones | Reporter
The Texas Photographic Society is currently displaying its international competition, The TPS 25, at Baylor’s Martin Museum of Art.
The Texas Photographic Society is displaying its international competition, The TPS 25, at Baylor’s Martin Museum of Art.
The Texas Photographic Society received artist submissions from multiple countries across the globe, but only works from the United States and Canada are showcased in the exhibit.
The competition features photographs from 25 different artists as a way for the TPS to celebrate its 25th anniversary of the annual competition.
Allison Syltie, director of the Martin Museum of Art, said she admires the broad range of subject matter and recognizes that the competition has something for everyone.
“There’s so much to look at in here, so many different types of photography, that someone will surely find something they really like in here,” Syltie said.
Jennifer Spry, educational coordinator for the Martin Museum of Art, said she agrees with Syltie in that the exhibit’s variety creates a unique display for visitors that many exhibits lack.
“It’s kind of like a living laboratory to be able to see works from 25 different people at one time that they can come in and talk about,” Spry said.
Spry also added that she sees the exhibition as an opportunity for students to see that artists can make a living doing what they love and produce something to be proud of.
“It’s always great for our students to have an opportunity to see contemporary artists who are living and breathing and surviving,” Spry said.
The museum is located on Baylor’s campus in the Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center where many students majoring in art have classes. Spry said she feels this gives photography professors a great platform to show their students a range of different styles and subjects within the display.
“This does help to really feed into the photography classes that they offer here in the department of art,” Spry said. “[Professors] are really interested in how they can show students the different processes and different perspectives.”
The competition includes many photographs that were created through different printing processes, some of which date back to the late 1800’s. One example is the gelatin silver process, which is a fairly primitive form of photography that dates back to the 1880’s.
Michael Darough, an assistant professor of art photography at Baylor, said he certainly views the exhibit as a chance to show his students some of what they learn in class, along with some things they don’t, in the real art world.
“I’ll take my students there, and we will look at different processes. Some of them we do in class, some of them we don’t, but it opens up the conversation about the processes as well as the different subject matter in the image,” Darough said.
The exhibit will be on display until Nov. 13. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
The Martin Museum of Art is free and open to the public. For more information regarding upcoming events, visit their website.
