After five years as SSCC Program Chairman, Coco Simon has stepped down from her position. During her tenure, she was responsible for securing guest speakers every month as well as judges for every monthly competition. As a rule, in most other camera clubs, these responsibilities are held by two people or even a small committee.

Using her broad network of contacts, Coco brought us speakers on such photographic topics as race cars, the Chesapeake, haute cuisine, underwater photography, outer space and the Hubble Telescope, landscapes of Argentina, wildlife of Alaska, Zen-style abstracts, birds of the Latin American jungles, an abandoned lace factory, treks in Nepal, the White House and its correspondents, jazz musicians, and the Washington National Cathedral. Her judges covered an equally wide range, and she always tried to match the expertise of a pro judge to the competition topic.

Each month, Coco wrote the bio of both speaker and judge for the Cable Release, often finding unusual nuggets of information about their background and photographic practice. In addition, she regularly wrote feature articles as well as announcements for the Cable Release, often refusing a byline. One of her articles, co-written with Doug, highlighted church architecture in Toronto and Montreal – for which they were awarded PSA’s national Best Travel Article (a tie) in 2012.

In addition to Coco’s role as Program Chairman, she served as an active SSCC board member and contributed significantly to numerous club innovations. For example, she initiated the move to a more “democratic” way of carrying out committee chair responsibilities. Instead of one-person handling, for example, all the field trips, we now have a co-ordinator and many different members leading field trips. Coco was also instrumental in formulating the idea for the new Honor Fund. In another instance, Coco was among those board members who voted to do away with the refreshments on competition nights, and, instead, she single-handedly initiated and carried out the arrangements for our new seasonal social hour gatherings.

From time to time, Coco also initiated and directed special projects. One was the juried abstracts exhibit at the gallery of a local church. For this event, Coco educated SSCC members on how to create abstract photographs, secured the exhibit space, identified the appropriate judge, created submission procedures, co-ordinated the hanging of the show, fashioned the wall labels and catalogue, designed the publicity flyer and managed PR, and even set up the artists’ reception. In another example, when the SSCC board decided to move away from the practice of holding an annual awards banquet at a hotel, Coco managed our first “awards celebration.” She co-ordinated all the pot-luck offerings and made sure the AC was working and the carpet was cleaned. She also took complete charge of the switch from expensive wood plaques for awards to paper certificates, finding and costing out a provider, ordering all materials, designing and producing the certificates, and providing the SSCC President with necessary lists for actual handing out of certificates and other awards. She even came up with the theme for the decorations, bought all the decorations at her own cost, and put them up around the room.

Now that she’s stepped down from the role of Program Chairman, Coco will have more time and energy to devote to her ever-expanding still life project. In fact, she already has three exhibits of still life’s scheduled for this year. While Coco will remain an SSCC member, she looks forward to being less of an executive / operations manager and more of a photographer.