Alaska Positive 2023

About the Exhibition

Now in its 53^rd year, Alaska Positive continues to encourage photography as an art form in Alaska. This statewide juried photographic exhibition is organized and toured by the Alaska State Museum. 

Juror’s Statement

If everything has been photographed, why do we still feel compelled to lift our cameras and make images?

The power of an image is undeniable and can inspire and transform viewers as well as makers. The images I chose to include in the Alaska Positive exhibition this year were images that I may have seen in some fashion before, and still somehow arrested my attention, or showed the subject to me in a way I had not previously seen. It is in this that I think the value of an image can be found.

If you are reading this and are a maker of images my advice is, always, show me how YOU uniquely see the world. Too often we feel we must make an image LIKE that famous one or one we saw and liked. Instead, I would encourage photographers to invest in learning more about their own unique way of seeing and recording our world.

For viewers of photography, I would say, as you move through the exhibition ponder this: what is it that makes you stop in front of one image over another? What are the visual things that drawn you in, repulse, or even challenged you?

It has been my sincere honor and privilege to be this year’s juror.

— Camille Seaman

Gallery

About the Juror

Guest juror Camille Seaman believes “art is not only important; it is necessary for us to communicate what is happening with our planet.” Her photographs concentrate on the fragile environment of the polar regions, providing the message “we are of this Earth, and we only get one.”

Camille SeamanBorn on Long Island, Seaman is of Shinnecock, Montaukett, African American, and Italian ancestry. She was raised to celebrate the interconnection of humans and their environment, a way of seeing the world that shapes her approach to photography today. She has travelled from Alaska to below the Antarctic Circle, photographing the landscape and its inhabitants. Over the last two decades she has witnessed and documented the effects of climate change on the Earth’s polar regions.

Seaman studied photography with Jan Groover and drawing with John Cohen at State University of New York at Purchase, where she graduated in 1992. She has taken master workshops with renowned photographers Steve McCurry, Sebastiao Salgado, and Paul Fusco. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic Magazine, Italian Geo, German Geo, TIME, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men’s Journal, Seed, Camera Arts, Issues, PDN, and American Photo among many others. Her photographs have received many awards including: a National Geographic Award, 2006; and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award, 2007. She is a TED Senior Fellow (2003), Stanford Knight Fellow (2013-2014), Cinereach Filmmaker in Residence Fellow, National Geographic Contributing Photographer, and Artist-in-Residence at Denali National Park (2015). Her published works include The Big Cloud: Spectacular Photographs of Storm Clouds, 2018; Melting Away: A Ten-Year Journey through Our endangered Polar Regions, 2014; and The Last Iceberg, 2008.
 

Juror's Talk

Traveling Exhibit

Haines Sheldon Museum
September - November 2024

Wasilla Museum
January - March 2025

Museum of the North (Fairbanks)
Fall 2025

Valdez Museum
Winter 2025 - Spring 2026

Pratt Museum (Homer)
Summer 2026

Museum of the Aleutians
Fall 2026