STEVEN HAUSLER • Hays Daily News
Brenda Meder, left, and Andrea Crees talk about hanging selections for the Five State Photography Exhibition on Tuesday at the Hays Arts Council. The show will open Friday.

By JUNO OGLE

juno@dailynews.net

While the Hays Arts Council decided not to do anything special for this year’s milestone anniversary of its Five State Photography contest, in a quarter-century it has become one of the most highly regarded contests in the region.

"Being from Hays, Kansas, I suppose it feels the need to prove itself over and over again, and it doesn't have to," said Gary Mark Smith, the photographer who served as this year's juror. "It's 25 years in. It's the biggest show going in middle America."

The 157 entries Smith chose for the exhibition, including those that earned a total of $1,500 in cash prizes and honors for juror's merit, will be on display Friday at the Hays Arts Center, 112 E. 11th, as part of the HAC Winter Gallery Walk.

The winter gallery walk begins at 7 p.m. at a variety of locations, most of them in downtown Hays.

"It would have been really cool to give out $2,500 instead of $1,500, but that's a big difference when you're an organization like us," said Brenda Meder, director of the HAC.

"We get amazing work from outstanding photographers with the way it's set up, so let's not risk compromising something else," she said of the decision not to have a big commemoration of the silver anniversary.

"I don't know if it would have made a big difference in our entries anyway," she said.

The number of entries totaled 426 this year.

"It is a little bit lower than the last couple of years, so the numbers were down a skosh. But in light of the economy, I was happy with where they were," Meder said.

"The one thing that wasn't down was the caliber and quality of the work. It's really outstanding."

The show has increasingly seen more entries from eastern Kansas, particularly from Lawrence, where juror Smith has had his studio for 30 years.

"Lawrence is thought of as the art community in Kansas, and in a lot of ways it is. The Hays show is very highly thought of" there, Smith said.

He attributes that in part to the fact that a photograph's presentation -- not just the image -- is part of the entry.

In most juried photography shows, entries are submitted on slides or, increasingly, as digital files.

In the Five-State contest, entries are submitted as framed or matted prints in all sizes.

And several of this year's winners are big. Literally.

"Many of the photographs that were big deserved to be big," Smith said.

"That's another indication of how people take this show seriously. If you're going to make a piece that big and put that much money into the framing, you're making a statement with the size of that thing.

"A lot of the winners I picked were large because I recognized that piece deserved that presentation size.

"I really think it was a wonderful show because of that. If everything were perfect, I think that would be the way you enter every show -- enter it as the way it will go up on the wall rather than just a representation of it in a slide," he said.

Smith's picks also have another commonality.