By Michael Howell
Awards were presented last Friday evening in the annual Ernst Peterson “Photograph Montana” Contest at the Ravalli County Museum. This year’s Best of Show went to Donna Huseby’s first place photograph in the People category entitled “Life Changing.” The People’s Favorite went to Greg Dowling for his photograph of two horses along the river bathed in a captivating red-orange aura of smoke filtered sunlight entitled Hamilton Heights. The photo took first place in the Animals-Domestic category.
The contest is named in honor of famed Bitterroot photographer Ernst Peterson. The Ravalli County Museum houses about 22,000 transparencies, slides, and negatives plus prints, correspondence, ephemera, and photographic equipment once belonging to Peterson. Included in this collection are large scale examples of his commercial work. The assortment even includes his paint set, which he used to hand tint some of his photographic works. One of this year’s contest judges, local radio personality Steve Fullerton, mentioned that his mother worked for Peterson tinting his photographs.
The photo contest actually originated as a way to help fund the preservation of the collection and to create a digital archive making the collection more accessible. To date, approximately one-third of the original slides, negatives and photographs have been catalogued and stored in safe, archival quality sleeves and the digitization project is underway.
Each year a presentation of selections from the collection is put together which showcases different aspects of Peterson’s work. The bulk of his work offers a historical glimpse into mid-century rural Montana. But the collection holds a lot more than that and this year the museum chose a selection of photos not really produced for commercial purposes, like so much of Peterson’s work, but from his pre-professional photos shot in China, India and Burma during WWII.
“He took these photos for himself,” said Museum Director Tamar Stanley. “They are unique and compelling photos of people he encountered in his tour of duty.” The photos contain notes to himself that he wrote on the back of them, she said, and show his fascination with people in the countryside.
The Peterson exhibit and the contest photos will remain on display on the second floor of the museum until April 13.
First place winners in the photo contest include:
Scenic – Mike Daniels
Structure – Trisha Chaffin
Animals-domestic – Greg Dowling
Flowers – Bobbi Dye
Older Student – James Gladden
Black/White – James Gadden
People – Donna Huseby
Professional – Steve Slocomb
Professional (Beyond Montana) – John Scott
Beyond Montana – Noelle Smith
Manipulated – Estelle Shattleworth
Macro – Noelle Smith.