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HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION OF THE COLLECTION

RIT Library began its Photo Purchase Prize Awards program in 1981 to provide a visual history of RIT's School of Photographic Arts and Sciences and to complement its well-established Fine and Applied Arts Purchase Prize Awards program. Each year up to nine works are purchased for the collection, chosen from the Student Honor Show, a juried exhibition open to students in all departments of the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences. A rotating committee of two faculty members from the school and the Art and Photography Librarian makes the annual selections, attempting to capture in its final choices not only the best work in the exhibition, but also the diversity of the show as a whole. A complete list of the Photo Purchase Prize Award Committee members is included here after the catalog of the collection. The Photo Purchase Prize Collection is a permanent part of the RIT Archives. The collection includes pieces by 125 RIT students executed in a great variety of photographic media--traditional silver prints, photo-etchings, platinum prints, and even a kinetic sculpture made with photographic transparencies. The collection is available to all institute visitors for examination and study in the Archives and Special Collections Reading Room on the third floor of the RIT Library building.

CATALOG OF THE COLLECTION

This catalog is a complete record of the Photo Purchase Prize Collection through the 1996 awards. Each entry includes the following information: artist's name, the title of his/her work, the type of print (or other medium), the unmatted size of the work in inches, the year it was made, and the year the work was awarded the Purchase Prize.

PHOTO PURCHASE PRIZE AWARD COMMITTEE MEMBERS