A select amount of photography students at Cosumnes River College had their work displayed at the Crocker Art Museum and one of these students received an honorable mention from the museum for his work. 

The student who received an honorable mention was Timothy Dimal, a 24-year-old photography major, who is heavily influenced by the photography department at CRC as well as his peers in this program. 

“The photo program at CRC is wonderful, all the teachers that I’ve worked with are really passionate and care a lot for their students,” said Dimal. “All of my colleagues are really close, they’re my friends, we always support each other especially during this time so I think the whole photography program is a really good environment for me, it’s one of the best experiences of my life.” 

Dimal’s work that is displayed at the Crocker Art Museum and received this honorable mention award is a photograph that he titled “Leaky” that originally came from an in-class assignment. 

“The prompt was to do something with either a fast shutter speed or a slow one so it was either capturing a moment or making something really blurry,” said Dimal. “I was walking around the house trying to figure out what to do then I looked at my bathroom sink and I thought that maybe I could do something fun with the water.” 

After many attempts, this photograph came out the way he wanted with a water droplet coming out of the sink which was later edited to be a black and white photograph, said Dimal. 

Dimal was encouraged by his photography professor, Patty Felkner, who advised him to enter some of his pieces. 

“At the end of the last semester, my teacher had mentioned that the Crocker Arts was going to have a student exhibition and suggested I should enter one of my pieces and I entered that one (“Leaky”) and I ended up getting selected, now being apart of their exhibit and getting an honorable mention which is nice,” said Dimal. 

April 2020 was scheduled as photo month and the photography department had been planning for this event for over a year with many activities in the city and in the Los Rios Community College District, said Felkner. 

“Viewpoint Gallery was a major player and they set up the Crocker show. It was a juried process. CRC had the most students represented in Los Rios,” said Felkner. 

Felkner said she is proud of the students who took the time to enter the exhibition and the uniqueness of each piece that was submitted that included their own styles and subject matter. 

Photography professor Kathryn Mayo shares this same proud feeling of her student’s work as Felkner does, as she also had students whose work was recognized by the museum. 

“I’m always proud, our students are incredibly talented and we try to encourage them to submit to things like this as this is a wonderful opportunity so I can’t help but be proud when I see the hard work that our students have done and for it to be appreciated by entities outside of our own college,” said Mayo. 

Mayo said that it was heartbreaking for the photography department to see these students not be able to be recognized by the museum in person due to these unprecedented times but are working on having these students be recognized at CRC. 

“What we are trying to do is to host the Crocker exhibit at the college in the CRC art gallery for all of the students that were selected to have an opportunity at a later date when it’s safe to have that work exhibited and to recognize them,” said Mayo.