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. 

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