55th Alaska Positive exhibit showcases photographers across the state
- Jasz Garrett
- 59 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Photography exhibition continues to highlight the role of Alaska photographers in modern visual culture
By Jasz Garrett
Juneau Independent
A photography exhibition that opened in December at the Alaska State Museum will run through mid-March 2026 before going on a statewide tour. This year was the first time in about a decade that the juror was from Alaska.
“They’re usually nationally, internationally renowned photographers,” said Jackie Manning, curator of exhibitions at the Alaska State Museum. “So having a juror that grew up in Alaska, who is from Juneau, is actually pretty rare.”
Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, who began their photographic career in Juneau working in their father’s small-town camera shop and darkroom, Juneau Photoworks, was this year’s juror for Alaska Positive.
The Alaska State Museum organizes the biennial statewide juried photographic exhibition to encourage photography as an art form in Alaska.
An exhibits committee surveys photographers and asks former jurors to recommend candidates for the juror of Alaska Positive. The last juror from Juneau before Helmar was photographer Larry McNeil. The museum’s show began in 1970 and is a biennial showcase.
In November, Manning and Aaron Elmore carefully prepared the 37 photographs by 33 photographers for the now-open exhibit. Museum staff ask photographers to matte and print their photographs, but they are glazed and framed in-house. The state museum has an exhibit shop in the back.
Framing a show as a photographer is one of the most expensive parts of it. For many of the artists, it was their first time making a print so large.
“It was really exciting to see the work in person,” Helmar said. “This place is really special. The Alaska State Museum — the exhibitions are world-class shows that are put on here. We’re really lucky here in Juneau to have people like Jackie and Aaron who build the frames.”
The top award, the Juror’s Choice Award, went to Katie Ione Craney of Fairbanks for the digital photograph titled “what we carry in our pockets (for Jenny Irene).” The Awards of Recognition went to Amber Johnson of Anchorage for “Ice Studies #8018,” a C-type print and Petra Lisiecki of Anchorage for “Real/Ethereal - The Swimmer,” a C-type print.
“Her career (Jenny Irene) was taking off in a big way,” Manning said, taking care not to scratch or smear Craney’s print. “Nationally, internationally recognized photographer from Alaska, and she passed away in a plane crash this last summer that really shook up the art community in the state.”
Helmar reviewed the digital images before requesting that 55 be printed and sent to Juneau for a final in-person review during November.
Overall, 198 submissions by Alaskan photographers were received. There is no theme or size requirement – photos can even be taken from outside of the state, as long as an Alaskan photographer captured them. Photographs with different print techniques are accepted, such as C-print, silver gelatin and digital. The museum, in addition to framing and hanging the photos, lights the show and finishes the labels and juror’s statement.
Elmore has been helping organize Alaska Positive for the last six exhibitions. While cutting plexiglass in the museum’s color printing lab, he said he noticed digital photos are more common than they used to be.
“We’re seeing that change, right? There’s way more digital prints this year even than when I started chemical process photographs back 10 years ago. So it’s definitely shifting. We got a learning curve increasing with some photographers like that.”
Helmar still prefers the darkroom.
During the final in-person review in November, Helmar gave a livestreamed lecture at the museum and presented a slideshow showcasing their film photography. They work in large and medium format film.
“You go away to school in New York City and you come back, and you think, ‘What do I know?’” Helmar said to the audience in the museum’s lecture hall.
“This is a town that not only supports the arts, but produces artists,” Helmar said. “Growing up here, and later living here as an adult, I was lucky enough to be friends with people seriously committed to their work.”
Born in Juneau, Helmar is now a lecturer on art, film and visual studies at Harvard University and Columbia University’s Visual Arts Master of Fine Arts program. They received a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of Alaska Southeast in 2013 and a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art from Columbia University in 2015. They studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022 and received a 2025 MacDowell Fellowship.
“I’m impressed with the people who show up for arts and culture in this town,” Helmar said. “I don’t think it’s a mistake that our people who grow up here can go on to make work all over the place.”
Audience members sighed, murmured, gasped and laughed in recognition of places and people featured in Helmar’s ongoing “Polaris” collection, which includes film photographs of downtown Juneau as early as 2014, such as apartments above the Imperial Bar and Grill, the oldest operating bar in Alaska.
“I miss the character of places where my grandfather may have drank with your grandfather,” Helmar said, showing a photograph of the old Arctic bar. They talked about how places have memory and how they were inspired by the people of downtown Juneau while working as a bartender.
The last slideshow of photos Helmar showed during the lecture was a collection of self-portraits they took during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it wasn’t possible to photograph other people. Helmar took 100 self-portraits in 100 days on 4-by-5 film.
Helmar’s work has been shown at PARTICIPANT INC., the Jewish Museum, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Gaa Gallery, the National Museum of Iceland, and is in museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
They called judging the Alaska Positive show “one of the coolest things I’ve done in my life so far.”
Helmar not only chose the work for Alaska Positive, but they also helped with the layout. The guest juror said they thought cohesively about what the photography says about the body of the work, “like a group of poems or thinking musically about how they might sound next to each other.” The layout is recommended to follow the same format at the museums where the exhibition will travel.
Helmar encouraged Alaskan photographers to apply to the next Alaska Positive, noting that in the first exhibition they applied to, they didn’t make it into the show.
“That did not stop me from reapplying,” they said. Helmar’s work was featured in the 2012 Alaska Positive.
Submissions for the next Alaska Positive will open in the fall of 2027.
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356.
