Soho Photo Gallery is pleased to announce that its July exhibition will feature the top three winners of the gallery’s 16th annual juried National Photography Competition. The show’s distinguished juror, Lyle Rexer who is a columnist for Photograph magazine, a teacher at the School of Visual Arts, and a well-known curator, selected these photographs, as well as 34 other images, to be in this year’s exhibition.

In previous years, this competition has drawn entries from all over the United States and 2011 was no exception. 305 photographers located fromMassachusetts to Alaska submitted more than 2,000 photographs. The juror ultimately chose work from 26 photographers to be in July’s exhibition.

Soho Photo is pleased to present the work of Melissa Cacciola who is July’s guest exhibitor. Primarily self-taught, Cacciola explores a range of 19th century media, from wet-plate collodion to Van Dyke brown. Through portraiture, her work offers an archaeological flashback, a way of seeing ourselves as we might have appeared in a pre-digital age. In this portfolio, Chemical Chimera, 22 tintype portraits of New York artists, musicians, writers, and dancers are offered as a kind of confessional before the camera. Original, unreplicated, and solitary, these images rebel against the notion of art in the age of electronic reproduction.