JURY DUTY
NYC4PA WATER PHOTOGRAPHY 2026
Once a year, I have the enormous pleasure of working with the New York Center For Photographic Art (NYC4PA)—an online entity operated by photography duo, Maddi Ring and Patricia Gilman. My role is that of a juror for an open call, and this year the theme assigned was water. These yearly open calls are an absolute delight to judge, as I’m presented with photographs I don’t normally come across, often by photographers whom, I later discover are completely new to me.
Forty-seven individual photographs were selected from the, almost 1,000 images submitted. The process of judging was blind ie; no names were attached to the images during the judging process.
Water is a wonderfully versatile subject in photography. As a symbol, it can represent the polar opposites of life and destruction. It’s a disruptor of physical form (through literal reflection), and it’s also widely utlized, to represent subconsious states of mind and spirit.
As such, the versatility of the subject presents an opportunity to select an equally variable set of photographs for this open call. The selections offer up a wide spectrum of subjects; physical interactions with water, traditional vistas, abstraction, water in different states of animation, color and black-and-white. In some cases the water is the key component of the image, whilst in others it performs a supporting role for something else, such as urbanism, architecture, leisure activiities, fauna, and so on.
The Grand Prize Winner is Fall/Clouds, from the Seeing Through series by Lisa Nebenzahl. This is a diptych, that is at once quite simple, but also sophisticated in its construction. She successfully interconnects literal physical attributes of the natural world, and at the same time, brings about a good measure of abstraction. We see in the photograph; tone, texture, and details of the natural world—with some of the elements laid bare to question. The vantage point of looking down and looking up, is used to good effect; in making each side of the diptych fully integrated, and inter-dependent—as a diptych should be. Time and place is ambiguous, reminding me of the exquisite Equivalents photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. This is a photograph that takes time to reveal itself, and one that I suspect will continue to resonate and alter in its storytelling.
View the Seeing Through series on Lisa Nebenzahl’s website here.
View the NYC4PA Water Photography 2026 award here.