Today I received some news I wasn't expecting.
My photograph Valley of the Shadow has been named an Official Selection in the 2026 International Photography Awards and has advanced to the final round of jury voting. The final results will be announced during the week of August 24.
For me, what makes the recognition meaningful is the photograph that received it.
Valley of the Shadow
I made this photograph on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
It was about fifteen degrees below zero. Everything was covered in frost, the sky was a solid gray, and standing alone in that landscape was an abandoned Catholic church.
The place hit me harder than most places I photograph.
There was something about the cold, the silence and that dark church surrounded by a nearly colorless landscape that carried an overwhelming sadness. The building seemed very small beneath that enormous gray sky, alone on the prairie.
But my reaction wasn't simply sadness over an abandoned church.
Standing there, I couldn't separate the building from the complicated and often cruel history between Christian institutions and Native people. Christianity has been a source of faith and meaning for many people, including Native people, but churches and Christian institutions were also part of a history in which Native cultures, languages, families and beliefs were subjected to enormous pressure and harm.
I wasn't trying to make a photograph that explained all of that. I don't think a photograph could.
I was simply standing there in the cold, looking at this abandoned church, and feeling the weight of the place.
The phrase that kept coming into my mind was from Psalm 23:
“the valley of the shadow…”
And the title stayed.
What the Recognition Means to Me
I've entered several photography competitions over the last year, knowing that the odds of receiving recognition in international competitions are not particularly good.
Part of the reason I've entered them is to find out where the work stands outside my own circle.
It is difficult to judge your own photographs. I know what happened before and after the shutter clicked. I know what I saw, what I felt, how cold I was, and why I stopped there in the first place. A judge sees none of that. They see the photograph.
That is why having Valley of the Shadow reach the final round of the International Photography Awards means something to me.
It doesn't make the photograph better today than it was yesterday. And there is still another round of judging to come.
But someone who knew nothing about that morning, the cold, the place, or what the photograph means to me found something in the image worth stopping for.
For a photographer, that is worth quite a bit.
— Jason Widdoss
Jason's Light Works | Opera Lucis
