(Rockland, ME) On Saturday, July 2, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, will open the second annual Arnold Newman Prize Winner Exhibition: Jason Larkin: Past Perfect. The exhibition will run through November 27, 2011. The primary media sponsor for the exhibition is Maine Home + Design.

Judged as a separate category in the Photo District News Photo Annual competition, the Arnold Newman Prize recognizes an individual for his or her innovative approach to photographic portraiture, and awards the individual $15,000 and an exhibition of the work at the Farnsworth. This year's judges for the Newman Prize included TIME Magazine deputy photo editor Paul Moakley, Susan White, Photo Director at Vanity Fair magazine and Farnsworth Chief Curator Michael K. Komanecky.

The exhibition will focus on Larkin's winning image series, titled Past Perfect, which examines how the museums of Egypt use different styles of curating to present exhibits depicting the past to contemporary audiences. "The museum," he states, "an institution to preserve and interpret the material evidence of the human race, has a long history, springing from an innate human desire to collect and interpret the world around us. By deciding how the past is presented and memorialized, museums not only preserve the past, they also play an important role in the construction of our ideologies, identities and the understanding and interpretation of our selves."

"Having spent my entire professional life working in and traveling to art museums across the United States and Europe, I am intrigued by the subject of Jason Larkin's Past Perfect photographs," explains Farnsworth Chief Curator, Michael K. Komanecky. "What his photographs also suggest is how museums create, consciously or unconsciously, narratives that affect their visitors and staffs alike."

Jason Larkin, born in 1979, received his BA in photography with honors from Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall, and his MA in Photojournalism at Westminster University, London.  A resident of London, he has shown and published his work extensively in his native England, and has exhibited his work in Berlin, Toronto, Cairo, Dubai and elsewhere.  His photographs have appeared in periodicals and newspapers throughout Europe and the United States, including the New York Times Magazine, Financial Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Guardian g2, and PDN Annual.  Among the books and catalogues in which his work has appeared are UK @ Home (2008), Mumbai Now and Then (2007), and London Tales, published by the London Arts Council (2007). In 2010, Larkin was one of 35 British photographers selected by the Magenta Foundation for a Flash Forward award. Other recent accolades include a 2010 Open Here photography grant from the Hereford Photography Festival in the U.K.