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Inaugural LAH Photography Contest

Stylized photo from Salzburg

The inaugural LAH Photography Awards recognize excellence and artistry in photography and support the accomplishments of our LAH students.

Eligibility: Current Liberal Arts Honors Students

Specifications: Submit an original photograph taken during the past academic year (1 September 2025 – 1 September 2026)

Award Brief: “Small World”

While travel photography often seeks the grand and the distant, our “Small World” brief challenges you to shrink the map. We are not looking for the sprawling of horizons or famous landmarks that define a destination; instead, we invite you to document the intimate, often overlooked moments that prove the world is much smaller than it appears.

What We Are Looking For: We want to see the “spirit of adventure” captured through a narrower lens. Your submission should explore common threads that bind us across borders, cultures, and environments. Whether you are shooting in a bustling city or a remote village, your work should highlight:

  • The Miniature Detail: Textures, patterns, or objects that are unique to a place but universal in their beauty.
  • Shared Human Gestures: Candid moments of connection, camaraderies, or daily ritual that make a foreign land feel intimate.
  • Narrative Scale: Innovative uses of perspective that play with scale, making the vast feel intimate or the ordinary feel monumental.

Creative Freedom: Participants are encouraged to interpret this them from any angle —be it street, portraiture, or documentary. Images can be shot on any device (including a phone) and in any style. We are searching for work that triggers memory and expands our collective horizons, whether during a study abroad experience, in Austin, or your hometown.

Awards: We anticipate making three awards of $1000 each. Additionally, we will print and frame each of the award-winning photographs and display them in the LAH Suite.

Submissions: Your context submission are due by 12 pm CDT on September 1, 2026. Submit your digital file (jpeg, tiff or raw) via the UT Box link below. Please be sure to include your name and EID in the title of the file and at the top of your work.

Submission Link: HERE

Pinto Carver Essay Contest, Due January 17, 2014

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The Pinto Carver Essay Contest – 2014

 

Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement

of the educated mind; it is also the most useful.

It pervades the whole being.  The administrator

with a sense for style hates waste; the engineer

with a sense for style economizes his material;

the artisan with a sense for style prefers good

work.  Style is the ultimate morality of mind.

Alfred North Whitehead

 

The Topic:

In Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way the narrator is describing his neighbor’s difficulties with his daughter:  “But a man like M. Vinteuil must have suffered much more than most in resigning himself to one of those situations which are wrongly believed to be the exclusive prerogative of the bohemia life:  they occur whenever a vice which nature itself plants in a child….”  We are never told the “vice,” but the narrator goes on to observe:  “But the fact that M. Vinteuil perhaps knew about his daughter’s behavior does not imply that his worship of her would thereby be diminished.  Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor” (p. 151, translated by Lydia Davis).

Write an essay in which you agree or disagree with the narrator’s (who may call Proust) assertion about fact and belief.  Needless to say, the more well developed your thoughts, the more specific your language, the better.

Eligibility:  Current Liberal Arts Honors Freshmen and Sophomores

Specifications: 750-1000 words, titled, double-spaced, and typed, with your name in the upper-right hand corner.  No cover page.

Awards:

1st Prize: $1500

2nd Prize: $500

3rd Prize: $250

Submission Deadline:  Friday, January 17, 5:00 p.m. in the Liberal Arts Honors Office.  The judges reserve the right to withhold awards in the absence of prize worthy essays.