One of John Scheibe’s ballet photos that led to his award. (Photo courtesy of John Scheibe via Northern Michigan University)

MARQUETTE — John Scheibe, a 2015 Northern Michigan University theater graduate, was honored as the 2024 Photographer of the Year at the Exposure One Awards, the premier competition for black-and-white imagery.

Scheibe was honored for a series of ballet rehearsal photos he took during this past summer’s North Coast Dance Festival in Marquette.

“The awards are about honoring the historical value of black-and-white photography, which I think stands out and is extra special in a world with so much color,” he said. “Top-tier photographers enter competitions like this, so to have my work seen and recognized in this way was a bit of a shock, but very exciting. Marquette can seem remote and isolated; it’s not New York or Chicago, where a lot of photographers are based. But it was fun to represent the (Upper Peninsula) and receive this award.”

“John Scheibe’s work and the other winning images in this contest rose to the top for their artistry, emotion and mastery of the medium,” stated the description on the awards website. “This annual competition attracted remarkable submissions from artists worldwide, each bringing a unique perspective to monochromatic photography. Winners were chosen based on their artistic innovation, technical expertise, and the emotional resonance they conveyed by using black, white and every shade in between.”

Scheibe became a creative collaborator with NMU Theatre & Dance in early 2023 to fill a vacancy, then was contracted to serve as the official photographer for the North Coast Dance Festival for this year and beyond.

“The first summer, I was experimenting; this year, I explored a fun relationship between photography and dancing, finding a way to collaborate in a more impactful way,” he said. “For the ballet images, I used two cameras. I was running around with one camera in hand to take traditional photos while a second camera on a tripod was running long exposures the whole time. It was the images from that second camera that I submitted to the awards competition.”

This is not Scheibe’s first impressive achievement for his creative work revolving around dance. As founder of The Yonder Studio in Marquette, he won Screendance Short of the Year at the 2023 Independent Shorts Awards International Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The award was presented for “Perhaps We Wrong Them,” a choreographed dance film that visually explores powerful themes relating to childhood trauma and its lingering effects on a survivor’s everyday adult life. Scheibe conceived and produced the piece, which stars Karina Johnson, NMU director of dance and assistant professor.

“It’s been an honor to be working on behalf of my alma mater and alongside the program I graduated from, which has been exploding. There’s a stacked faculty of incredible people pushing the program upward and forward. The degrees now available in theater and dance are more up to par with the opportunities available to professionals in the real world.

“There were six or eight students in my graduating class in 2015. Now there are many incoming freshmen every year. It keeps growing, and the number of students who show up to support their classmates is incredible.”