"The worst part of being a juror on any contest is deciding whose deserving work will not be recognized and rewarded.  Believe me, in my years as an artist, I have made many submissions myself, only to receive the obligatory “unfortunately your work was not among those selected by our judges” and various blah blah blah.  It sucks to find a contest, put together a submission, and then wait weeks or months to get the disappointing news, via the “you should keep trying!” letter. 

In this case, LA Photo Curator creator Laurie Freitag has done a lot to mitigate this by contributing a percentage of the entry fees to charity and taking the further step of posting the submissions in an online exhibition of the show, regardless of who wins.  Those very cool elements are a big reason I wanted to be involved with this program as a juror.  I enjoyed the process and appreciated seeing how people interpreted my theme for this contest.  In the end, there was great work by artists like Jenny Peters, Joann Chaus, and Sylvia de Swaan, among others, that I wanted to recognize but simply did not because I had to make tough choices.  The technical acumen and artistic flair in the submissions was consistently high, and it was an honor to look at your work and participate in Laurie’s corner of the art world."