Henry Kingston wins National Gold Medal for photography

Freshman Henry Kingston won a national gold metal for their work Duplicity, recognized by the prestigious Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. 

After winning a gold key in the regional competition, Kingston was eligible to win a national medal, where they won gold.

Along with other national gold medalists, Kingston will be able to travel to New York this June with photography teacher Jamie Berry. 

“Henry has a bunch of opportunities that are unique to the Scholastic Gold key recipients for the national awards,” said Berry. “I have access to a couple of different developments and there will be a recognition ceremony at Carnegie Hall,” said Berry.

Besides photography, Kingston has other artistic interests as well.

“I’ve done a lot of different mediums of art in the past, and I like new and interesting ones. I’ve done pixel art, which is really fun,” said Kingston. “But photography is the one that really stuck.”

Kingston describes what they enjoy about photography, especially compared to other forms of art.

“There is no practice involved,” they said. “You don’t have to train muscle memory or anything. You can just take the picture of the thing, which is nice.”

Kingston’s photography career first began when they came to Riverside. They first became interested after finding out that Riverside offered a photography class as an elective.

The award-winning photograph that Kingston captured was inspired by a class assignment. 

“We were doing pinhole photography, and it has a really long exposure time,” Kingston said. “I realized that I could do two versions of myself if I just moved halfway through the exposure, and I thought that was really cool.” 

Berry said that she knew Kingston’s work was going to be successful. 

“The way Henry combined his photographs, it was just a very unique perspective, unique way of looking at the world and that particular assignment,” she said. “And he exceeded all expectations of that assignment.”