Seniors Drew Wallace and Sebastian Gonzalez were recently named winners in the photography category for the National YoungArts Competition. Their success represents the culmination of months of dedication since the fall of their junior years toward this project, a 10 photograph portfolio centered around a main theme that the photographers developed.
The process to obtain this award began officially in January of their junior year, but for Wallace and Gonzalez, their planning began before then, attending the senior honors photography class during free periods and brainstorming themes months in advance. The early planning allowed Gonzalez to pass through the rigorous editing process with a bit more ease.
“I had a Notes app page where anything that came into my mind, I would write it down.” Gonzalez said. “I did that all over the fall and winter of junior year. And so I found that for me, I think I was a little more prepared than everybody else. But even then, you submit your original and you have a critique, and then you do another one next week, and you just keep rewriting it as you go along. Because even as you go along and make new images, you’re discovering new aspects of what you originally thought you were going to do.”
The shifting nature of turning the idea in his mind into a photograph was a major part of Wallace’s creative journey. He indentified it as the biggest struggle he had on the way to completing his portfolio, along with the task of inserting identifiable meaning into his images.
“I think a lot of it is that it’s really hard to intentionally assign meaning to a piece of art before you make it, rather than just making something, looking at it and trying to think about how that might reflect you afterwards,” Wallace said. “This was the first time I consciously tried to insert meaning, and I think most of it was really learning everything before I started working on that. I think the hardest part was taking that idea that I had in my mind and distilling it into something more tangible.”
Both Gonzalez and Wallace drew from very unique topics to create the main theme for their portfolios. Gonzalez used current issues facing artists, namely AI and its ongoing threat to what it means to be an artist as the throughline for his ten image, two-part portfolio.
“I don’t think it’s unusual for AI to be something that an artist is worried about.” Gonzalez said. “The hard part really was figuring out how to convey ideas that are pretty complex through individual images.”
To achieve this goal, Gonzalez expanded his boundaries, going past the content taught at the school and instead looking at more abstract, mixed media projects that other students and previous winners had submitted in an attempt to find a way to communicate his thoughts.
“And in the end, what I have in the final portfolio is that I split it half and half,” Gonzalez said. “The first five are more abstract explorations of concepts related to the issue of AI and art, and a lot of them involved using Photoshop to do surreal things. And then the second five are experiments that I did (with AI) and then I laid out the results and the showing of those experiments on physical paper.”
Wallace’s project leaned much more into the personal side, depicting how one singular event in his life was able to seep into so many later aspects.
“The point of the portfolio was an exercise in introspection, and it was both a way of trying to portray how my mind works and my patterns of thought, and also a personal exploration of that to try to better understand it myself.” Wallace said. “I had a concussion in seventh grade, and after that I was going to a psychiatrist and therapy. I’m still in therapy, I’ve been working on that. I guess there was probably some underlying stuff that I think (the concussion) worsened.”
The effects of this severe concussion would later echo into Wallace’s high school experience, essentially framing how he went about his day-to-day life. It was especially important for him to find a functional medium to show the pervasiveness of the injury.
“A lot of stuff was going on, but it feels like that formed my framework of viewing the world,” Wallace said. “The way I tried to depict it with my photos was through the primary visual metaphor that I used, which was this idea of noise and not being able to filter out what thoughts are important.”
Gonzalez and Wallace’s photo achievements are crowning points of the school’s photography department and show the clear progression pipeline within the program. Their impressive feats underscore both their individual dedication and stand as testament to their growth as photographers.
