We are proud to announce the Rfotofolio Selections for 2025. This year we were honored to have Melanie Walker, educator and artist “extrodinaire” as our guest juror. Melanie, we appreciate your time and thoughtful choices. Thank you! We asked Melanie to select her top portfolio and Works of Merit. This was no easy task.
Be it color or black and white, street photography or abstract, you inspired us with the amazing work that you created. If your work does not appear here do not be discouraged. There was so much wonderful work that we could not select simply because we are limited to a certain number.
Thank you for entering this years call. By doing so, we are able to see work that we might have missed. Your donations help support Rfotofolio and the grants we give each year.
Statement from Melanie Walker
Thank you so much for trusting me to be the juror for the 2025 Rfotofolio Call. It has been an honor to see the work submitted and I have to say that it was very difficult making decisions with so much wonderful work to choose from. If it was possible, I would award prizes to everyone who submitted work which I always consider to be an act of bravery. It was interesting to see the range of approaches in content, concept, materials and processes. I was struck by the number of portfolios that blurred the boundaries of traditional genres. The experience of viewing all of the work was inspiring and eye-opening as well as daunting. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to review these wonderful portfolios and send many thanks to everyone who submitted work.
Selections from Melanie Walker
2025 Rfotofolio Selection
Robert Treat
“There is something hauntingly compelling about this portfolio; something that lives in a world before words. It leaves one in a suspended state of disbelief asking questions that lead to more questions. The work is timeless leaving the viewer traveling between past and future, experienced in the now. I would like to experience the scale of these works in person. Who are the inhabitants of these fragile landscapes? Are these forms natural or made by humans…not that we are separate from nature…Is this a newly discovered planet that has not yet been altered. The work conjures a narrative that is left for each viewer to decide for themselves.
This body of photographs is most compelling in its transformation of an everyday, domestic material into expansive, imagined landscapes that hover between the monumental and the fragile. By using flour to mimic geological forms, the work destabilizes expectations of scale and permanence, inviting viewers to reconsider how landscapes are constructed, represented, and consumed. The fine particulate quality of the flour lends the images a sense of impermanence and vulnerability, subtly undermining the authority often associated with traditional landscape photography. Formally, the restrained palette and attention to texture create a quiet tension between abstraction and recognition, allowing the photographs to oscillate between terrain and surface. Conceptually, the work gains depth through its material choice: flour evokes sustenance, labor, and domestic space, complicating the history of landscape imagery as a genre tied to conquest and ownership. While some images verge on formal repetition, the series as a whole succeeds in reframing landscape as something provisional, intimate, and contingent—less a fixed place than a momentary arrangement of matter.” Melanie Walker
Works of Merit
Barbara Hazen
This body of photographs is compelling in its ability to transform utilitarian wooden hat blocks into emotionally charged portraits of labor, inheritance, and time. The body of work seemed to be a unique approach to portraiture. By isolating and closely observing the blocks, the work elevates them from tools of trade to bearers of biography, allowing the grandmother’s presence as a milliner to be felt rather than illustrated. The accumulated wear—nicks, stains, softened edges—reads as a visual record of repeated gestures and skilled hands, suggesting a life structured by making. Formally, the photographs succeed in balancing sculptural clarity with intimacy; the blocks are rendered with enough precision to emphasize their distinct personalities, yet with a sensitivity that resists fetishizing craft. Conceptually, the work is strongest where it acknowledges absence: the grandmother is never shown, yet her history is inscribed in the objects themselves. At times, the series risks slipping into nostalgia, but its restraint and attention to material detail ultimately ground the work in a thoughtful meditation on intergenerational memory, women’s labor, and the quiet persistence of handmade knowledge.
Work of Merit
Suzanne Theodora White
” This body of photographs confronts the Anthropocene through a material language of rupture and accumulation, using crumpling, layering, tearing and other interventions to mirror the fractured condition of contemporary landscapes. The physical manipulation of the images resists the illusion of photographic neutrality, asserting instead that the land—like the photograph itself—has been acted upon, stressed, and reshaped by human forces. Creases function as fault lines, tears read as wounds, and layered fragments suggest sedimentation accelerated beyond geological time. Formally, the work is dense and restless, compelling the viewer to navigate surfaces that refuse a single, stable vantage point. At its strongest, the series collapses distinctions between image and object, implicating photographic practice in the same extractive impulses it critiques. Occasionally, the visual intensity risks overwhelming the conceptual clarity, but this excess also feels appropriate to the subject: a world defined by accumulation, damage, and unresolved tension. Ultimately, the work offers a poignant meditation on the Anthropocene, framing landscape not as a passive backdrop but as a contested, scarred, and materially unstable site of human consequence.” Melanie Walker
Selections from Rfotofolio
Thank you to all of the artists that particpated in this years call. Your work spoke of nature, personal experiences, dealing with change, and careful observations.
Making our selections was challenging but in the end we went with the work that spoke to us both. Artist statements were both articulate and supported the portfolios, and we appreciate the effort. Photography is the perfect media to give the viewer a new experience, to see something that may only exist in the artist mind, brings something to our attention that we may miss in everyday life, and to appreciate the space around us.
You inspire us. C.R. and J.R.
Selections from Rfotofolio
Brian Kosoff
Work of Merit
Willie Osterman
Work of Merit
Walt Duddington
Work of Merit
Leland Smith
To learn more about Melanie Walker please visit her page by clicking on her name.
To learn more about these photographers please click on their names.
