The Park City Photography Club says its members took home more than 25 awards from the Utah State Fair this year, including a second-straight “Best in Show.”
According to photo club member Howard Meltzer, the club’s roughly one dozen members won 11 first place ribbons.
“It was great walking around, seeing everyone from our club, which is relatively small, winning so many awards,” he said.
David Breslauer’s “Bobby Sox Trees” was this year’s “Best in Show,” and Breslauer took home the top prize in 2023 too.
“Bobby Sox Trees” is a monochrome work that silhouettes Yellowstone’s dead lodgepole pines in a mist, backlit by the sun or the moon—the viewer isn’t quite sure.
“It was just a terrific photograph. He printed it on white metal, and he had a terrific mat around it, and a frame,” Meltzer said. “It deserved to win.”
Meltzer, Amy Eskind, Tracy Frankel, Alexx Koskella, Liz Dranow and Dave Winegar also earned first place awards in categories such as fine art, humor, landscape, wildlife, cellphone, street photography and abstract photography.
One of Meltzer’s photographs will tour Utah over the next year. The Utah Arts Council selects between 20 and 25 photos every year to travel to schools, libraries, universities and museums.
The traveling exhibition piece is titled “Get Off My Lawn,” and it depicts a bald eagle staring fixedly into Meltzer’s camera in Homer, Alaska.
All the photos are on display at the Utah fairgrounds, upstairs in the Grand Building, until Sept. 15.
Anyone in Utah can enter a photo at the state fair, which has four divisions: open photography, fine arts, monochrome and cellphone photography. The open division is divided into 23 subcategories, and entries are judged according to the photographer’s age and professional level.
Anyone is also welcome to join the Park City Photography Club, which organizes lectures and monthly photo challenges.
“It's a really interesting cross section of people,” Meltzer explained. “And what's interesting is everyone has their own slant on what they like about photography … it's really a great learning experience, seeing all these other ways of looking at things.”
The club has a Facebook page of the same name and meets on the third Monday of every month at the Park City Library, room 101.
