2020 International Juried Photography Exhibition

The University of Southern Mississippi Museum of Art and the School of Performing and Visual Arts are pleased to announce 2020: International Juried Photography Exhibition, an online exhibit of photographs from a year like no other, 2020.

Whether your photographs address social and racial injustice, the Covin-19 pandemic, community and family, or your own creative quarantine, we encourage you to apply and share your personal perspective from the 2020 experience.

ELIGIBILITY: This call is open to anyone who is 18 years of age or older. All types of photography and subject matter will be considered as long as the photographs were taken in the year 2020. (This is a fully online exhibition. No printing or shipping will be required.)

JUROR: Betty Press is a documentary fine art photographer, who is well-known for her photographs taken in Africa where she lived and traveled for many years. She now lives in Mississippi and has just completed a project called Finding Mississippi, recording "real life" in small communities throughout Mississippi with black-and-white film, and toy and vintage cameras. She taught photography at The University of Southern Mississippi from 2003 to 2015, and she is twice the recipient of a Visual Artist Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission.

Her images have been widely exhibited and selected for many juried competitions. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Shots, Silvershotz, South x Southeast, Lenscratch, ACurator, RfotoFolio, and Don’t Take Pictures. Her work can be found in a number of public collections including Beinecke Library at Yale University, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, The Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, The University of Texas, Austin, Mississippi Museum of Art and The Do Good Fund of Southern Photography.

In 2011, she published a photobook I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb, that portrayed a stunning, life-affirming portrait of the African people and culture. She received a statewide award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters and was selected for Critical Mass Top 50. Her other books/zines include La Dolce Vista, Hub City Impressions and Finding Mississippi.

In August 2019, she moved to Nairobi, Kenya to photograph urban culture and social injustice, but returned to the USA in April 2020 due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Her most recent project, They Were Us: Stories of Victims and Survivors of Police Brutality in Kenya, was selected for Photo Lucida Critical Mass Top 50.

Betty was invited by Lenscratch to curate the States Project for Mississippi. She also helped organize the Do Good Fund Exhibition of Southern Fine Art Photography at the USM Museum of Art and organized several simultaneous local exhibitions. Most recently, she co-curated an online show Virtual Photography 20:20 for One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya.

She is represented by Panos Pictures, London; International Visions, Washington, DC; Fischer Galleries, Jackson, Mississippi; Treehouse Gallery, Oxford, Mississippi; and One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya.

As a former educator, journalist, and avid traveler, Betty Press brings a wide-ranging perspective and appreciation of diverse photographic styles, genres and mediums.