Everyone at FotoWeek is thrilled to launch a new way for even more people to get involved with the festival — a contest for youth, in partnership with The Washington Post. Anyone in grades K through 12, throughout D.C., Maryland and Virginia, can submit their images in four categories: portraits, animals, landscape and sports.

FotoWeek Board Member Irene Owsley is heading up this effort, and told us:

We wanted kids to be involved in FotoWeek from the very beginning. Reaching out directly to the schools and their art programs through a youth photo contest seemed the best approach, and The Washington Post offered to partner with us in this effort.

In the big picture, however, FotoWeek DC is about celebrating great imagery and about this larger community we live in supporting that. In Washington DC, we have not only some very talented photographers but we have amazingly rich collections of photography to visit and to learn from. We need to expose our kids to that, and encourage them to participate. What better way than to bring them into the fold through their own forays into image-making?

I like the idea that possibly, by entering this contest, kids could begin to discern what makes a striking or successful image.

Entering is free, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any fantastic prizes. FotoWeek will choose 37 winners in all, and each one will be displayed at our festival hub in Georgetown and in the exhibition at the Post. First place winners in each age group, for each category, will take home a cool $250, while second and third place get digital cameras. An overall Best in Show prize of $1000 goes to one lucky contestant.

Even better, perhaps, is that the art departments at the schools of the first place winners will each receive a digital camera worth about $300, to keep encouraging creativity throughout the school year. As Irene says, “FotoWeek DC has a definite philanthropic bent, and it is aimed particularly at the schools. It was always in our minds to benefit the community — whether it’s by donating equipment or by other means of enrichment.”

Click over to the FotoWeek web site for the directions for entering the youth contest, and get those entries in before October 24. We’ll be looking forward to finding our future Richard Avedons and National Geographic photographers — oh, and Jay Sumner, photo editor of the National Geographic Kids magazine is one of the jurors, so she’ll most definitely be looking out for them!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 12:14 am and is filed under Competition, Jurors, Prizes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.