Hilton Head Island senior wins prestigious photography award

Capturing, producing and sharing images of her photography has taken Jessica Smith to the top.

Jessica, a senior at Hilton Head Island High School, was selected to attend the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts/YoungArts Week in Miami, where she won the Silver Award for her photography.

"It is the biggest award you can win as an art student in high school," said Patty Schoelkopf-Lewis, photography instructor at Hilton Head Island High School.

"This is a high-end competition and is almost unheard of in regular public high schools," Schoelkopf-Lewis said. "Most of these winners come from magnet, charter or art high schools."

The Silver Award included $5,000 and a week in Miami, where she studied in the Miami Art Museum with students in nine disciplines including: dance, visual arts, vocals, chamber music and jazz bands.

Jessica plans to spend her money on a medium-format camera and save the rest to help pay for an art college. College scouts attended the Miami events, and she's applying to several art colleges with an acceptance to Savannah College of Art and Design.

Her interest in photography was heightened by images from the Holocaust Museum on an eighth-grade trip to Washington, D.C. "I remember how gruesome the images were, but it was intriguing," Jessica said. "I wanted to know: Who is this person, what is his or her story?"

"The emotional toll a photograph can have on a person is really intriguing," Jessica said. "I wanted my photographs to have that same effect."

Her siblings are the perfect subjects for her love of portrait photography, she said.

In her freshman year, Jessica focused on photography in art class, and by her junior year she was completely immersed in the art.

The magic she made in the darkroom hooked her interest as a freshman.

"The darkroom was cool, I liked the hands-on traditional process right away," Jessica said. "You had to get the exposures right, and there was a lot of technical stuff going on. I really liked the connection between me making the prints and seeing it go from a negative to a print. That's a really cool process. I would like to stay with black and white, but it is expensive."

While in Miami, people were drawn to the contrast and emotion of her work. "They really loved my black-and-white stuff," Jessica said.

Two of her days in Miami were spent shooting photos at South Beach and Little Havana, where she shot portraits and also found herself branching out to shoot scenes of men playing checkers on the sidewalk.

She credits her dad, Rufus Smith, by surrounding her with photography, which she sees herself doing at home and hopefully abroad.

"I have to see what else I have to offer," Jessica said.

This story was originally published February 27, 2012 at 9:25 AM with the headline "Hilton Head Island senior wins prestigious photography award."