Shades of Talent: FWCD’s Black and White Images Exhibition

This year marks the 37th consecutive year for Fort Worth Country Day’s Black & White Images Competition and Exhibition. Sponsored by the FWCD Visual Arts Department, Black & White Images provides a forum for exhibiting student photographers from regional private and public high schools, allowing them an opportunity to exchange ideas, receive recognition and display outstanding photography.

The exhibition is on display in the Lou and Nick Martin Campus Center from Monday, January 27, through Friday, January 31, with a reception on Saturday, February 1. Twelve FWCD students have accepted works in six of the 10 categories.

Those students are:

• Bella Castillo-Lerma ’28
• Callie Chu ’27
• Anna Chung ’28
• Leo Hatem ’28
• Jordan Jones ’25
• Max Kaufmann ’25
• William Marlow ’26
• Genevieve Rudner ’27
• William Runyon ’26
• Ashton Theesfeld ’26 
• Mason Tuomey ’26
• Avery Williams ’28

The 2025 competition consisted of 463 entries from 13 of the finest photography programs in the DFW metroplex. The exhibit features 94 images. 

For the competition and exhibition, each school may submit images in the following 10 categories, which includes two new categories this year:

• Architecture
• Experimental
• Landscape/Cityscape
• Nature/Animals
• Photojournalism
• Portrait
• Still Life
• Darkroom Print
• Short Film

The new categories are Darkroom Print and Short Film. Upper School Photography Teacher Emily Arnold, who is hosting the Black & White Images for the first time, shared that she added the categories after a recommendation from Sil Azevedo, FWCD's former Photography Teacher. 

“I added the categories into the prospectus just to see what would happen,” Arnold said. “A lot of questions started coming from teachers thinking, like me, what's the file size requirement? What are the guidelines? And I thought, there aren't any, they just have to honor the competition and be in black and white. I hope that it gave people a lot of freedom to create.”

For darkroom prints, there were 23 submissions from one school, and short film had 11 from two schools.

This year’s adjudicator, Ian McVea, will speak to the students and their families at the February 2 reception. An Irish-born, Texas-based photojournalist and photography educator who grew up in Ireland, India, South Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Ethiopia and Algeria, McVea developed a love for photographing the world around him. He joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1989 as a staff photographer, later becoming a photo editor and Director of Photography before leaving the paper in 2012. After leaving the paper, he began a full-time career teaching commercial photography in the Arlington ISD.

McVea’s images have been published by Time, Newsweek, Life, NYT Magazine, USA Today, and Sports Illustrated – among others. His negatives are archived at UT Arlington. Several of McVea’s images have been part of recent exhibits at Texas galleries and art museums and have received honors from the Dallas Press Club, National Headliners, Houston Press Club, the Texas APME, the Texas Photographic Society, the Fort Worth Professional Photographers Association, and the Society for Newspaper Design. He is happiest shooting black-and-white film with medium- and large-format cameras.