This Year's Best Nevada Photos Are Now Hanging in Your Local Library

The 14th annual Focus on Nevada Photo Contest wrapped its spring showcase months ago. Now the winning images are quietly touring Clark County library branches through mid-September, adding one more year to a visual record of the state that started back in 2012.

A Contest Built for a State That Keeps Changing

Every spring for the last decade and a half, Desert Companion, the magazine published by Nevada Public Radio, has asked Nevadans to point a camera at their own state and send in the results. The Focus on Nevada Photo Contest traces back to roughly 2012, and this year's edition marked its fourteenth run, a long enough stretch that the contest itself has quietly become part of the state's visual history rather than just a yearly event.

The premise has stayed simple across all fourteen years. Anyone can enter, no subscription or membership needed, and the categories are broad enough to catch almost any kind of Nevada image: black and white work, artistic and abstract compositions, plants and animals, landscapes, scenes of town and country life, and a category called Storyteller for images that suggest a bigger narrative than the frame itself can hold.

That openness is part of why the archive matters. A contest that only invited professionals would end up with a narrower, more polished record. Because Focus on Nevada pulls from hobbyists, students, and working photographers alike, the resulting collection ends up looking more like how the state actually sees itself, warts, wonder, and all.

This Year's Winners

The 2026 grand prize went to Jarrod Ames, whose winning shot captured a showgirl lit only by a stagehand's flashlight in the wings at The Usual Place, a moment of performance that most audiences never see because it happens just off the edge of the spotlight.

Category winners covered ground from the wild to the domestic. Jose Gomez took the top spot in Black and White with an image of an escaramuza team, the all-women charro riding tradition, running through practice drills out in Pahrump. Chris Colacurci's winning Landscapes entry was an aerial drone frame of a lightning storm rolling across the Las Vegas Valley. In the Storyteller category, Julie Jay's picture of a young coyote curled up asleep among discarded trash at Wetlands Park won for the quiet, uncomfortable question it raises about how wildlife and city life now overlap.

Nine judges reviewed the field this year, a mix of working photographers, art educators, and gallery staff drawn from around the valley, alongside members of the Desert Companion editorial team. Sponsors including a local camera shop and the Nevada State Museum backed the judging and the showcase event that followed.

From Gallery Wall to Library Shelf

The winning images had their formal debut at a showcase event at the Nevada State Museum back in the spring, then were published in Desert Companion's summer issue. But the contest's second life is arguably the more interesting one for anyone who cares about how a place documents itself.

Starting July 2 and running through September 13, 2026, the full showcase is touring branches of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, including a stop at the Summerlin Library. It costs nothing to walk in, and unlike a gallery opening that lasts one evening, the library run gives the images more than two months of quiet, everyday visibility to patrons who may never have set foot in a photography gallery.

That distribution model matters for a collection like this one. A library branch sees a different, wider slice of the public than an art opening does, families picking up summer reading lists, students studying between classes, retirees browsing the new fiction shelf. Each of them gets a chance to walk past a year's worth of Nevada as seen through dozens of different lenses.

Why a Photo Contest Belongs in the History Conversation

It is easy to think of a photo contest as pure entertainment, separate from the work of archiving vanished motels and shuttered casinos that usually fills this space. But contests like Focus on Nevada are doing quiet archival work of their own. Fourteen years of category winners, submitted by fourteen years of different photographers with fourteen years of different equipment, add up to a running visual timeline of the state that professional archives often cannot capture in the same organic way.

Consider how much has already changed in the Las Vegas frame since the contest's early years: new resorts, vanished motels, a skyline that keeps rearranging itself. The photographers entering this contest each spring are, whether they think of it this way or not, building tomorrow's historical record one submission at a time.

That is exactly the kind of accidental preservation this collection tries to spotlight. Explore the collection here at Lost and Found Vegas, and keep an eye on the library district's touring exhibit through September if you want to see this year's additions to that record in person.

The Six Lenses of Focus on Nevada

Every entry has to land in one of six categories, and each one asks photographers to look at the state a little differently.

1. Black and White: Monochrome work that leans on contrast, grain, and shadow instead of color to carry the image.
2. Artistic and Abstract: Compositions that treat the camera more like a paintbrush, favoring shape, texture, and mood over straightforward documentation.
3. Plants and Animals: The state's living residents, from desert wildlife caught in unexpected city moments to native flora in bloom.
4. Landscapes: Wide views of Nevada's geography, mountain ranges, dry lakebeds, and weather rolling across open valleys.
5. Town and Country: The built and lived-in Nevada, neighborhoods, small towns, and the everyday texture of city and rural life alike.
6. Storyteller: A single frame built to suggest a larger narrative, the category that rewards a photographer's instinct for a moment that implies more than it shows.

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