If you go to a Lincoln art gallery in February, you’re almost certainly going to see photographs.

While every gallery in the city isn’t part of Lincoln PhotoFest, 20 galleries and museums will be exhibiting photography next month in an unprecedented group of cooperative exhibitions.

“I don’t think anybody’s done something like this in town — one medium in all the galleries,” said Roger Bruhn, one of the primary organizers of Lincoln PhotoFest. “It’s not just local and regional talent. There’s national and even a little international. For a first-time effort, it’s going to be all I expected it to be.”

Bruhn is one of many Lincoln photographers who will have works in one of the shows. Several Omaha photographers will as well. But there are also photographers from New York, Colorado, Oregon and even China who will have work on view at a Lincoln gallery in February.

Lincoln PhotoFest grew out of an exhibition at the Sheldon Museum of Art that has been in the works since 2007.

“Photography is probably my passion,” said interim Sheldon curator Sharon Kennedy. “I knew we had a slot for a large show and I knew I wanted it to be contemporary photography, the latest works that wouldn’t otherwise be seen here.”

So she asked Bruhn to co-curate the show, and the two traveled to New York in December 2007 to look at photo shows and check out the work of some photographers.

By the end of the trip, they’d chosen three photographers — Arno Minkkinen, Hans Eijkelboom and Edward Burtynsky — and found a loose environmental theme to link them, calling the show “Evolving Eden: Three Photographic Perspectives.”

Then Kennedy and Bruhn began to talk about how to get more community involvement with the exhibition, which was to open in February 2009.

“We first started thinking it would be great if Modern Arts Midwest would do a show to ping off ‘Evolving Eden.’ I said, ‘Shoot, let’s get as many galleries as we can,’” Bruhn said. “I just started going around talking to people who have galleries. We ended up with 20 galleries plus Sheldon.”

The basic structure for Lincoln PhotoFest grew out of Houston PhotoFest and a similar event in France that Bruhn attended.

“Those are wonderful deals, to see all the work in all those galleries,” he said. “Those are the models I had in mind. Those are much more complicated; they have portfolio evaluations and bring in some big-name people. I knew from the get-go this was going to be more scaled down. But it’s a start.”

Lincoln PhotoFest is creating the buzz that Kennedy and Bruhn hoped for when they set about organizing it.

“I’m thrilled with the idea of PhotoFest and the number of galleries that are participating,” said Larry Gawel, a Lincoln photographer who teaches at Metropolitan Community College in Elkhorn. “We tried to do this in Omaha when we had a big photo conference there. There were no galleries there, and nobody that was there wanted to show photography. This is fantastic.”

Gawel and his wife, University of Nebraska-Lincoln art professor Dana Fritz, have a PhotoFest show at the Lux Center for the Arts called “Converging/Diverging” and they curate the WorkSpace Gallery, which is showing the photography of Carol Golemboski.

Three of Fritz’s students are having a show at the Rotunda Gallery in the Nebraska Union and another has curated an exhibition of work by professional photographers that will be on view in the Eisentrager/Howard Gallery. Plus Gawel helped other galleries find photographers for their exhibitions.

In addition to the exhibitions, Sheldon is hosting a symposium on contemporary photography that will feature Minkkinen, Keith Davis, curator of photography at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Sheryl Conkelton, director of exhibitions and public programs at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art.

“We thought, ‘If we’re going to go to this much trouble and effort, why not bring in people to talk about the latest contemporary work?’” Kennedy said, adding that Davis will bring a historical viewpoint to the discussion, Conkelton will talk about the cutting edge in photography in new media and Minkkinen will provide an artist’s perspective.

“I think there’s always a great value when a museum that is generally showing paintings and sculpture for a public who is used to seeing canvas and marble and clay that you could see photographs on the wall,” Minkkinen said from his Boston studio.

“Some people think all you have to do is push the button and get the picture and it’s all done. When they see the work that will be there, they’ll see it’s far more complicated.”

Given the fact that there are thousands of photographers turning out work around the globe, it’s impossible for any PhotoFest to present a comprehensive view of contemporary photography.

“It’s an awfully big subject,” Bruhn said. “I go to New York two or three times a year and look at every photo gallery and see something new and different every time I go. There’s no way this little PhotoFest is going to show everything there is. But it’s going to be more than scratching the surface.”

Kennedy agreed that the first Lincoln PhotoFest appears to be heading toward meeting its goals.

“It’s going to be worth somebody’s while outside of Lincoln to come and see this,” she said. “That’s what we wanted. If it turns out to be what we think it can be, maybe it will become an annual event.”

Lincoln PhotoFest is important for another reason that has less to do with medium than the communitywide nature of the event, Gawel said.

“Building the community is paramount for art to exist,” he said. “That’s why art doesn’t exist in a lot of small towns. With a lot of cultural things, Lincoln is second fiddle to Omaha. But with art, Lincoln is far ahead of Omaha. There’s a strong art community here — just look at the First Fridays. This (PhotoFest) is just going to add to that.”

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.