What is Minnesota Exposure?

You don’t take a photograph, you make it. - Ansel Adams

Minnesota Exposure is a group of photographers looking to create opportunities for other photographers in the state of Minnesota and the regional area.  It is our goal to provide a chance for photographic work to be shown, sold, and produce greater exposure for the photography community.

The mission of Minnesota Exposure is simple: Provide more opportunities for regional photographers.  As photographers ourselves, we are well aware of the difficulty experienced trying to make a living or extra income from our hobby or passion.  With this in mind, we are creating a process, a channel if you will, for opening doors to what we all want: a chance to grow as an artist and get paid for our work.

Why Minnesota Exposure?

There are a lot of local organizations that are willing to give you some exposure online in exchange for use of your images.  We plan on taking that to a higher level.

• First, we are using real people to judge images in our competitions.  There will be no rewards for gaming online systems.  Each photo selected and used will be based on the merit of the image.
• Second, we are partnering with local companies and groups to provide a way for your art to be displayed and sold.
• Third, we are partnering with local groups to provide a list of workshops and classes available in your area to make it easy for you to invest in yourself.
• Fourth, we will be building relationships with local charities, commercial art buyers, and ad agencies to help them source images for their endeavors.
• Fifth, we will be publishing annual books from the competitions, and our ultimate plan is to publish a digital magazine.

How?

We will be curating our photo pool via competition.  Competition can be a photographers greatest asset as she is working on getting better.  Via our online competitions, winners and runners-up will be featured on our site, Facebook page and group, and added to our image pool.  We will be using this pool of images to create mini-gallery installations at coffee shops and other small-venue storefronts.  This is how the process works:

1. Photos are submitted online via in the Minnesota Exposure Facebook group.  First place winners and the runners up will upload their images to Minnesota Exposure so we can add them to our pool.
2. First place winners of online competitions will be invited to submit their photo into a print competition at the Twin Cities Photography Group studio.  In order to be invited to participate in larger, more formal, galleries, the print competition is required.
3. Photos added to the Minnesota Exposure pool will be made available for mini-galleries and online catalogs for digital image consumers.
4. Winners of print competitions will be invited to learn to show at galleries and display their work.

 What does it cost?

Cash?  None.  Blood, sweat, tears, and passion?  That will depend.  It’s a matter of perspective.  All you have to do is produce good work.  If you do that, or get your skills to that point, you’ll be successful.  You’ll get out of it what you put into it.

What about Copyright?

This is an important detail.  First, you retain the copyright to all submitted works.  By submitting your work, you are agreeing to allow Minnesota Exposure to reproduce and modify your work for use on any Minnesota Exposure online properties.  We WILL NOT allow your work to be used for any commercial works, or derivatives sold without compensation to the artist.  In the most plain language: We may need to copy and modify your image so we can fit it on our web sites.  We will also need to print the image for use in the mini galleries.  We ask that you provide a short description of the photo, tags, and a brief artist statement when photos are uploaded.  An account will need to be created for this.