Wind-whipped snow on a Montana highway. A friend’s legs and an empty above-ground pool. Household window blinds rendered to the point of abstraction. To award-winning photographers from Sonoma Valley High School, art is just a shot away.
“Everything is an opportunity,” said Keith Thompson, one of 13 high school students chosen for a prestigious photo exhibition. “It’s like looking at life through a lens.”
The 10th annual Zone of Focus is a juried exhibition of photography for high school students, sponsored by Santa Rosa ArtQuest. The awards, including Thompson’s honorable mention in the Digital category, have been announced for the show, running May 8 to June 20 at Sonoma State University.
Though primarily regional, SVHS Photograph Instructor Andy Mitchell said the show received more than 400 entries from all over the country. Now his tenth year at the school, Mitchell teaches four photography classes. Participating in Zone of Focus is not a requirement, but he points to it as a meaningful goal for dedicated students.
“After December I start talking it up,” he said. “The second semester is exciting. Everything starts clicking. The first semester they’re learning the process. By the second, they really start bringing in quality work.”
For his classes, as well as the school yearbook and newspaper, Mitchell oversees a 24-station dark room where all film and photographs are developed by hand. In a digital world, those skills “make all this quality work even more impressive,” he said. “Most students had never picked up a roll of film, never used a film camera.”
Layne Ergas didn’t know much about it when she chose photography as an elective class. “I never thought I’d like it,” she admitted. “But I love it.”
Ergas prefers fashion “and the fashion of everyday life” over abstract photography. She was awarded Second Place in the Portrait category for a shot of a friend’s long legs sticking through a rip in an empty plastic pool. “I just saw it, and it looked cool. We started messing around with shots, and I came up with the idea.”
While Thompson captured a moment in time and Ergas used existing elements to create one, Alejandro Tinajero used technique to manipulate his final result. By maximizing the contrast, both in the camera and the darkroom, he turned a set of mundane window blinds into an unrecognizable abstract. The work took Second Place in that category.
“I was looking around the house for something, to make it look different, “ he said. “I wanted people to ask what it was. And they did.”
Other local students chosen to show in Zone of Focus are: Lacey Cirimele, first place for the landscape category; Aria Watson, third place for still life; Kelsey Knego; Brooke Dagner; James Fanucchi; Shirley Morovich; Sean Hammett; Emily Hawing; Nonie Cobb; and Jenni Marioni.
The school’s Zone of Focus entrants will also be part of an exhibition at the High School during Senior Project Week, May 18–20.
