Mongolian Village, 2010 by Shawn Records

Like the recently featured contender Noah Addis, who we discovered years ago from his previous and winning submission to HHS!, Shawn Records first came into our purview when he was selected as a Hot Shot in the fall of 2005. You may also be familiar with his work from from We Love You So, the website of Spike Jonze and his film Where the Wild Things Are, where Shawn's son Max played the lead character and he documented the set during the filming of the movie.

Shawn's latest HHS! submission is comprised of personal photos that he took while on a two-week trip to China, and at first glimpse it appears as a pretty rosy view of the country: his colors are bright and cheerful, his images crisp and meticulously composed, and the scenes depicted are static and serene, ever-pleasant and—at times—rather romantic.

The rainbow—an immediately identifiable symbol of hope, prosperity and innocence—recurs three times as a motif in five submitted photographs, a move that seems intentionally uniting. Although what initially drew me to Records' photos is their apparent sunny disposition and their undeniable aesthetic appeal, closer inspection detects a hint of irony; I'm forced to acknowledge that these photos must be intended as a specific comment, and perhaps even criticism.

This leads us to the back-story to Records' project: the Chinese Government in fact sponsored his trip. Records, along with five other American photographers (who were at all times escorted by government officials), traveled to predetermined locations, which included wetlands, oil fields, a coal mine, and oil and coal museums. Their assignment was to take photographs that would be used to promote tourism in China. The photographs submitted to HHS! are ones he took in an attempt to document this (I imagine incredibly bizarre) experience. The question that most concerns me from seeing his work: how on earth does one tackle the challenge of presenting a coal mine as appealing to potential visitors to China?

Oil Museum, Daqing, 2010 by Shawn Records

Records provides a canny explanation of his submitted works in his artist's statement, and one that confirms my initial, (visual) suspicions regarding the complex, and certainly to some extent critical intentions of these photographs:

There's a Chinese saying, zuijing guantian, "like looking at the sky from the bottom of a well." These photographs were made from the bottom of that well. Ultimately, this work is wrapped up in the complexity of global economics and its web of politics, propaganda, environmental whitewashing, and good-old romanticism. But in the end, my limited knowledge and opportunity show just a sliver of this sky. I'm not sure what I can say, conclusively, other than people all over the world really, really want to be happy; and advertising, whether it's created by Western corporations or Eastern governments, uses that. We want to believe that everything's going to be alright. We want to believe that there's something special at the end of that rainbow.

Record's experience of China calls to my mind a book that I read more than a decade ago: Red China Blues, by Chinese-Canadian journalist Jan Wong. The book is a very honest, and often self-deprecating account of her experience moving to Beijing in 1972 (having grown up in Montreal, and not speaking the language) to study at Beijing University, and then going on to actively participate in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Although the political circumstances, and involvement of Records and Wong with the Chinese government are certainly vastly different, I draw a link between the experience of two outsiders attempting to navigate, and becoming intimately acquainted with ideas and goals of an unfamiliar and reputedly very complex administration.

Ultimately, Records' submission represents a thoroughly intriguing meditation on the nature of advertising, on cultural pride, on propaganda, and on how we choose to view and represent the world that surrounds us. More of his work (although not from this series) can be seen on his website.

You might be celebrating (or mourning) the end of summer this weekend—but either way, here's something you can cheer about: it's 20x200's third birthday! We're not ones to celebrate alone so we're offering an uncommon deal to all of you out there:

Consider this a stock up sale! You'll be saving lots by picking up scores of 8"x10" and 11"x14" prints. (Usually shipping starts at $8.50.) You can put as many prints in these two sizes as you'd like and it's still just $3. One detail to keep in mind: the $3 shipping and handling fee is applied per size, so if you're mixing things up with both 8"x10" and 11"x14" prints, the absolute most you'll pay is $6—still a steal.

Be sure to peruse all the fabulous photography available on the site. Here's a taste of Hot Shots editions that bid adieu to summer and ring in the fall to whet your palate:

Midway, Neshoba County Fair, Philadelphia, Mississippi by Mike Sinclair

Golf Driving Range by James Deavin

Rincon Artificial Island and Pipeline, Ventura, California by Ian Baguskas

Norristown, Pennsylvania by Justin James Reed

Driveway, Ashland, Oregon by Jeffrey Krolick

* Rate is applied per size. Special rate can only be applied to orders within the U.S. and does not apply to international orders.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.'—Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

For five years, James Luckett lived in Tokyo: trying alternately to adjust to the city, to adjust his own expectations of himself, and, ultimately, to create for himself something of the experience of living so outside and somewhat alienated from that self. In the beginning, he thought he'd become a chef, and taught himself how to create elaborate Japanese meals. Then he came to the realization that he'd hit a wall unless he made a major investment in mastering the language, and that at his core, while being a more than competent cook, that he was no prodigy. So in his last year in Tokyo, he returned to what he knew, teaching himself something again this time, but something he had already known but discarded: the act of seeing photographically.

#27, from the series Suginami, by James Luckett

#05, from the series Suginami, by James Luckett

Everyday then, for an hour or a few hours a day, he'd take long walks with his camera and his dog throughout Tokyo's wards, or, ku, which is just another way to say that he wandered through the vast interconnected maze of backyards, alleys and sidewalks that make up the city's neighborhoods. From his artist's statement:

Houses and apartments there are sited tightly together; narrow streets and even narrower paths wind in around themselves in a maze of walls, fences, gates and plants that carefully delimit private space from public. In, around and through the margins of this place I walked hours every day. Suginami is an exploration of the ways this landscape layers into the edges of a frame, the transformation of light inside the dark box of the camera, and the space of discovery between the viewfinder and the eye.

I think of two things about these photos when I look at and consider the images that make up Suginami: the first is of Luckett as the quintessential flâneur, someone who, in Charles Baudelaire's words, is, "a gentleman stroller of city streets," someone who, though a detached observer, plays a key role in understanding and portraying the city, a kind of "botanist of the sidewalk." The second is rather related to the first, but maybe a bit more spiritually leaning: still the sidewalk walker or stroller, but more in line with one that participates in walking meditations (which in Buddhist literature, one is instructed to, "Notice the beauty of your surroundings, both externally and internally. Smile with every cell in your body"), which is what I believe these walks eventually became.

#11, from the series Suginami, by James Luckett

The images on view in Suginami are at odds with my imagined vision of a bustling, crowded and intense city. It's as if on these walks the city has become a ghost, a place of emptying-out. The light seems bright, midday in character, and the neighborhood homes and apartments are silent, except for the occasional cat. The intimate yet detached view speaks of someone that is familiar with where they are and what they are looking at, but true to both concepts of flâneur and walking meditations, they are somewhat lonely as well—liminal and solitary. I bet when Luckett happened upon that feline shown above, both were equally startled. Deluze and Guattari describe the act of the flâneur's walks (and specifically in reference to the walks that Virigina Woolfe's Mrs. Dalloway took) as a "haecceity," defined simply as a "thisness", the essence or particularity of a thing itself. They finish off with an observation I find entirely appropriate to Suginami, saying, "...A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome."

The images in Luckett's portfolio for this HHS! entry period are part of a larger and carefully edited sequence that James created for Suginami to exist in book form. You can view the entire series here. When taken as a whole, there's a sense of not only a quiet walking through, but a working through, going on as well. I'm uncertain whether he knew it or not at the time, but this would be the last year of James' life in Tokyo. So lastly, the photographs serve in a personal function: they are a farewell to the dissimilar familiar that had made up that epoch of Luckett's experiences there, and they are simultaneously a prodigal return to self, as these images mark his return and commitment to the practice of photography, which has since been ongoing.

Luckett is currently having an exhibition of Suginami at Ann Miller Gallery at Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio. The photographs will be on view from August 23—September 24th, an artist's lecture and reception will be Wednesday, September 8th at 5 p.m. More images and an accumulation of Luckett's writings and interests can be found on his website. The book Suginami can be viewed and purchased here, through Blurb's bookstore.

It's official: Hey, Hot Shot! now has a bookstore!

Earlier this month, we announced a partnership with forward-thinking Blurb Books, when they offered to sweeten the HHS! 2010 prize pot with $1,000 book credits for every Hot Shot selected during this competition period. Each Hot Shot will have the start-up funds to begin work on a book of their choosing, and one of the new Hot Shots will be selected from among the five chosen by Ms. Jen Bekman to work personally with a professional photo book editor Darius Himes, and TBD designer, and get a first-rate education in creating a first-rate work of book art.

Benicia/Martinez, CA by Daniel Cheek

In the interim of the past couple of weeks, we've been hard work creating a way to get the word out about some great books that are already out there from Hot Shots past and present. Whenever you're in the mood for some new visual material, or just curious to see what some of our favorite photographers are up to, take a virtual walk through our bookstore and see what strikes your fancy:

Untitled, from the book One More Night by Ben Roberts

Putting a book together can be a daunting task for many photographers, as it calls upon many skills that are not immediately apparent to someone gamely, for the first time, thinking, "Hey, maybe I"ll make a book." Being a strong self-editor (or knowing someone that you trust has this skill to advise you), having a good eye for design and page layout, having the capacity to cogently express what your book project is and be compelling with your images as well as, perhaps, the written word—these are but a smattering of the tools necessary to transform a body of work from the gallery wall to a beautiful object in readers' hands.

Facing pages from the book Seeing Things by Leah Benetti

And what's so great about a book, anyway? Why not just stick to the tried and true gallery show? Artist books are the new—old—way to disseminate your vision widely and provide access to work that others may not have due to geographical distance, cost and inclination of getting to a particular venue, or a infinite number of other reasons that make it difficult to see something in a given time frame in a given city. What's more, the act of sitting with a book is a completely different experience than that of viewing work at a gallery, and its benefits as an intimate, one-on-one between the photographer and reader should not be underestimated. One can return to a book after a first viewing, contemplate it in an undisturbed reverie and repeatedly digest it without much onus on the book collector or reader except the inclination to pick it back up. And not least of all, it's a very good exercise to put yourself through the task of translating a body of work into a different medium.

Our virtual bookstore is just a start of where we are taking this publishing train, and there are already more than 30 titles from our gallery of Hot Shots. We're looking forward to adding more in the coming months, and seeing what our artists are working on putting out next.

We're aware that a number of contenders from this entry period also have Blurb books out there in the ether...are you one of them? Provide a link to your title here in the comments. We'd love to see and share what you're doing!

On Friday, Jen (@jenbee) asked the Twitter-verse, "What's your favorite photography related quote? Who said it? Points for something pithy!" And, the responses came rolling in. Here's a compilation of what we heard:

"And all these no's force me to the yes." - Richard Avedon. (@litherland)

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." - Robert Capa (@kavehg)

"To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event." - Henri Cartier-Bresson (@AnthonyRhoades)

"Any photographer who says he's not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar." - Helmut Newton (@laughingwoman)

"Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies." - Diane Arbus (@cgmoyer, @kowalskiphotos)

"I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. " - John Steinbeck (@katetropa)

"Photography ... is the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece." - Chuck Close (@josephholmes)

"A camera is a tool for learning to see without a camera." - Dorothea Lange (@josephholmes)

"One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing. It doesn't turn off and turn on. It's on all the time." - Annie Leibovitz (@josephholmes)

"I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse." - Diane Arbus (@josephholmes)

"Too many photos make a statement, not enough ask a question." - Joseph Holmes (@josephholmes)

"Photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops." - David Hockney (@austinkleon)

"Photography begins with an "f" sound that stands for fiction, fake or forgery. And that is the original sin of photography. Only the most untainted purists (and the pedantic New York Times) seem to be unaware of this." - Jorge Calado (@katetropa)

"Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference." Robert Frank (@sethbutler)

"There's nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed." Garry Winogrand (@jessangelo, @laughingwoman,@bryanf)

"To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. .... The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. .... The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture." - Joan Didion (@bobulate)

"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind." - Dorothea Lange (@moyamcallister)

"Photographs stop time and bring people together." - A Mexican Street Magician (@juanrFotos)

"When your mouth drops open, click the shutter." -Harold Feinstein (@PanoptGallery)

"All photography to some extent is a violating act as you are seeing someone as they could never see themselves." - Susan Sontag (@Weegee)

"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept." Ansel Adams (@BespokePhoto)

"Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference." - Robert Frank (@momenta,@AhrensEditions,@indifferences)

"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." - Robert Frank (@sandyiowacity)

"Photography is not an accident --it's a concept." - Ansel Adams (@J_Isarankura)

"Photography.. is the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece." - Chuck Close (@AnthonyRhoades)

"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers." - Mahatma Gandhi (@dantebusquets)

"Teachers don't work in the summer, and photographers don't shoot in in the middle of the day." - John Loengard (Steven Quinn on Facebook)

"Shoot first, ask questions later." - Victor Burgin (Kylie Macey on Facebook)

"I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight - and I'll fight to the finish - single handed & without money if need be. It is not photographs - it is not photographers - I am fighting for. And my own photographs I never sign. I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight. This sounds mad. But so is Camera Work mad. All that's born of spirit seems mad in these [days] of materialism run riot." - Alfred Stieglitz to J. Dudley Johnston, 15 October 1923 (Tim Baskerville on Facebook)

‎" . .with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film" - Jack Kerouac in the intro to Robert Frank's The Americans (Vance Lessard on Facebook)

Thanks to all who sent us their favorite lines. We hope this inspires you to take a second look at your own photographs and send us five before Hey, Hot Shot! 2010 comes to a close tomorrow night, 8/31 at 8:00 p.m. (EDT). If you have a favorite quote that you haven't sent in yet, we'd still love to hear it. Leave a comment or send it to @jenbee + @heyhotshot on Twitter.

A drawing exercise that I've remembered for years consisted of choosing a palette of two colors that you would normally always avoid in the pastels box, and then making a composition of that day's still life. A large part of foundational visual studies is learning effectively to distrust what you think you hate, as well as what you think you love. I found that in being forced into the problem of using colors that I disliked, I made different kinds of decisions than I normally would, and that I was less attached to the outcome. And then surprised that I enjoyed the final result more than many other daily exercises when I was not color-restricted.

While Montreal-based Nik Mirus might not hate the color pink, he's certainly made an interesting decision in allowing the color to become a sort of character or entity in his recent series Subconscious Pink. Taking inspiration from surreal influences and impressions, his images revel in vaguely unsettling, meta-archetypal associations: an elevator pad that appears to be dripping (or weeping?) pink puddles in its edges; a layer of grassy earth peeled back to reveal a too-merry pink descent into something else; a dark room filled with a desk where a pink portfolio binder is prominently and assiduously placed.

Underneath, from the series Subconscious Pink by Nik Mirus

Untitled, from the series Subconscious Pink by Nik Mirus

In his artist's statement, Mirus explains that:

Very rarely do I find myself with a camera, hunting, searching and capturing the events and things around me. Rather, I prefer to use the camera as a tool with which to build a moment, create a narrative or evoke a feeling...The results of such an approach are photographs that often share an atmosphere with cinema and blur the line between fiction and reality. In the series, Subconscious Pink, ambiguous pink elements within the frame are used as means to represent the internal forces that drive and motivate our behavior. Our fears, desires and ambitions are an integral part of who we are. Lurking with in us, just beneath the surface, they're always present. This series has been a way for me to try and understand some of these ideas, who I am and what motivates me.

A trend has been developing for the past several years in editorial and fashion photography of creating images that seem like the viewer has just walked in on a moment in someone else's life, and/or is getting a privileged, fly-on-the-wall experience into something that they should not otherwise be privy to: an attractive couple in the midst of an argument on a couch might serve as an advertisement for designer jeans; a quick, one-frame still of a woman leaving her abode distraught and in a hurry might be the mental fodder for a haughty and distraught new fragrance on the market. Narratives with only a middle, where you are left to fill in the beginning and end are a compelling way to give viewers a moment, or to sell them something. Similar strands of this thinking has been in the artistic arsenal of fine art photographers for decades (think Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson). Where Subconscious Pink succeeds the most is in the middle moments where Mirus concocts a scenario of a place both of our imagining and one we think we've seen before: in a dream, a Salvador Dalí painting, or a David Lynch film. Very rarely is there someone in the frame, and if there is, there is still room enough to insert ourselves into the space of the narrative.

Untitled, from the series Subconscious Pink by Nik Mirus

This body of work is a relatively new one for Mirus. Begun last fall, he introduced it on his blog by saying:

When ever I try to explain these pictures/ideas to inquisitive minds I always find myself sounding kind of vague, hazy and stoned. "Yeah man...I'm really into like...hot pink...these pictures with pink elements...odd, out of place pink. You know..."

It's really allowed me to veer off into a variety of different directions and do things that I don't normally do.

I'll be interested to see where his subconscious takes a picture next.

The entire series Subconscious Pink, as well as several other bodies of work, can be seen on Nik Mirus' website. Mirus also maintains a blog.

I first learned of the work of Noah Addis after the HHS! panel selected him as a Hot Shot in the Winter of 2006. He had submitted a series of abstract images dealing with issues of mass-consumption and technology, photographing the hazy clouds of light and amorphous energy that surround our modern day tools and the places so many of us go perpetually consume: shopping malls, factories and airports.

Untitled #1 (from Future Cities: Lima), 2010 by Noah Addis

In the time since then, Noah's traveled the world as a photojournalist and documentary photographer. His work has taken him to Africa and Iraq, into homes during times of tragedy, and on the news trail of scandals and terrorist attacks. His current project, Future Cities, which is informed by his documentary background, is a series of quiet portraits and macro and micro views of squatters in major cities around the world. They are studious ruminations on how people survive in these transformative spaces, and how cities have failed to adapt to their own rate of growth.

Of the project, he writes:

By photographing contemporary city dwellers as well as the built environment in which they live, I hope to gain a greater understanding of the issues facing these cities as they continue to evolve and grow....My current project, Future Cities, focuses on squatter communities and informal settlements within the world's major cities. According to United Nations estimates there are more than a billion squatters living today--one out of every six people on earth. This number is expected to double to two billion by 2030. And by the middle of the century there will be three billion squatters.

Untitled #2 (from Future Cities: Lima), 2010 by Noah Addis

Untitled #5 (from Future Cities: Lima), 2010 by Noah Addis

Addis photographs the multitudes who often go unseen by visitors or tourists, their shacks and homes built of the materials often discarded by others, far from the city center.The homes, and the makeshift spaces used for recreation, cooking, dining and sleeping are deeply entrenched into the existing environment. In Lima, this is the backdrop of arid mountains; in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the favelas Addis documents exist more evidently within city bounds. Plywood homes are squeezed between the giant rocks of a mountain, and propped up by piles of tires and rocks, each moved there one by one.

On his website, Noah writes more extensively about Future Cities, noting there are more than 400 urban areas in the world with over a million inhabitants—and many of them have failed to acknowledge the need for, and implement, the infrastructure to support their growing populations. Industrial jobs have moved out of cities and the influx of migrants who arrive in these places every day are faced with few options, than to sleep where they can with the little they have. As a result, migrants who initially headed to cities in search for brighter futures, end up in crowded, crime-ridden and impoverished communities, making just enough in low-wage just to survive. Their futures are uncertain and the homes that were once a transitional solution necessarily evolve into places of greater permanence.

You can see more images from Future Cities on Noah's website.

If I ever want to know what Chilean sea bass tastes like, I'll have to do it on the sly, without my significant other's knowledge and dine with someone that doesn't know about the Monterrey Seafood Watch guides. The part of me that's curious to experience all things, though, will generally lose out to the part that doesn't want to add to the world's woes. And who wants to be the person that ate the last Chilean sea bass?

Turbot (Psetta Maxima), from the series One Fish Two Fish by Mark Dimov

In his project One Fish Two Fish, contender Mark Dimov hopes to create a conversation about the fish that we see at the supermarket and on our restaurants' specials list. From his artist's statement:

Created in response to the April 2007 National Geographic special report, "Saving The Sea's Bounty" regarding the global fish crisis, these images of commonly consumed fish are individually photographed in silhouette. The resulting photographs punctuate the colors and textures of the animal's contours while disguising 90% of its central details. I believe this obscurity sparks curiosity and I hope to evoke a sense of beauty for these creatures in addition to open up a dialogue about sustainable fishing practices.

Shot with back-lighting, the contoured forms of these creatures are often shown with mouths agape or with splendidly illuminated displaying gills. This provokes me into a state of idealized projection concerning the nobility, grace of the creatures, and also solicits a general empathy with what is potentially my dinner's right to exist and not become, for example, an IUCN red-list species of Great Concern.

The son of a painter, Dimov's treatment of his subjects for this project creates strong associations for me of another artist that traffics in silhouetted forms and negative space, the painter Donald Sultan:

Apples and eggs 2000 by Donald Sultan

Black Flowers September 26 by Donald Sultan

Golden Tilefish (Lopholatilus Chamaeleonticeps), from the series One Fish Two Fish by Mark Dimov

In focusing upon form instead of centralized detail, and in creating compositions that force the minimalist treatment of those forms into our consideration, both Sultan and Dimov create something that is both beautiful to regard and effectively raises their most artistic concerns and problems to the front of our consciousness. How does negative space and silhouettes transform our understanding of subject and context? How much of context is content? What kind of content is there when you remove or obfuscate the context? How does this treatment effect how we look at, consider and/or care about what we are being shown?

There are over 50 species of sea creatures depicted in One Fish Two Fish, which can be viewed in its entirety on his website.

Untitled from City Beautiful

Earlier this month, 2009 Hot Shot + Ultra Mike Sinclair, one of the newest artists added to the gallery's roster, came to visit New York from his hometown of Kansas City. He stopped by JBP HQ and the gallery, and a few of us were fortunate to have the chance to talk to him about his practice and see prints of images he's made over the last several decades. At the gallery, he chatted with Associate Director Jeffrey Teuton about his experience becoming a Hot Shot, releasing editions on 20x200 and how these experiences made an impact on his career.

Fourth of July #2, Independence, Missouri by Mike Sinclair

Mike: I think, like a lot of photographers, I entered HHS! not thinking that I might succeed, but more motivated by the chance to get my work in front of the several judges whose opinions I respected.

Jeffrey: How did you choose what to send in?

Mike: When I finally made the decision to submit to HHS!, it was difficult then deciding what to send in, because I've been at it a while and have quite a lot of work. I had just finished spending about a year photographing Kansas City's parks and boulevards system, and that was the work that I was very involved in. [see image above]

Gladstone Community Center, Gould Evans from Architecture: Public portfolio

Jeffrey: And how has it been over the years, transitioning from commercial photography into fine art, and walking that line? [an image from Mike's commercial portfolio is pictured above]
 
Mike: Well, in college I studied as a fine arts photographer and then - instead of teaching - I decided I'd prefer to be a commercial photographer and I've made my living as an architectural photographer for many years. I've always done personal work, but it's only been recently that I've started showing that work. I'm in a lucky situation in Kansas City where I have some great architectural firms that use me, and they're also very interested in what I do in the fine art world. If something has changed, it's that the two bodies of work have started to grow together, and that's great.

Jeffrey: How did becoming a Hot Shot impact your career?
Mike: Well, to find out that I was one of the finalists was amazing, and immediately all kinds of things started happening. You know, congratulations from people who had gone to see my work for the first time, and I got a call from Time magazine to go photograph in Detroit—The Detroit Symphony Orchestra—which was an amazing job. And things continue to happen! While I was here in New York this week, Penguin Books emailed me about using one of my photographs for a book cover. The experience continues to help get my work in front of people.

Check out more of Mike's work on his website, and follow in his footsteps by entering HHS! before August 31st, 2010!

Mike also has four editions available on 20x200: Midway, Neshoba County Fair, Philadelphia, Mississippi, Las Vegas, Nevada, November 2000, Rodeo Stars, Strong City, Kansas and Fourth of July #2, Independence, Missouri

The world of well-conceived collage (or assemblage) has long been of interest to me. The act of dismantling, disordering, cutting out, displacing and out of this creating new order holds a certain clever appeal; familiar objects or faces assume and assert new meaning when taken out of familiar context, re-informed with changed meaning when the canvas shifts under knife and glue.

Laurie Blakeslee, who was originally trained as a painter, continues in the tradition of subversion of meaning through her photo-based collage work in the body of work Styled Life. Recalling catalogs and fashion magazines of her childhood, Blakeslee alters and re-photographs these excerpted images "...with the intention of interrogating the original purpose these images present—the myth that consumer goods hold the promise of happiness, self-worth and most importantly, social status."

Charm Curl, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

All Combed Cotton, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

While the history of contemporary art records the names of famous male artists as the most well known practitioners of collage (Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell come to mind), the usually intimate small size and introspective nature of the process make it ripe for the double-entendres and Feminist critique that occur when a woman is wielding the cutters and storyboarding the montage. While Hannah Höch created famous political satires in the Dadaist tradition, and Bauhaus artist Marianne Brandt would specifically address the evils of fascism through hers, it is the work of relatively unknown Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue whose tone and output most closely aligns with what Blakeslee is working with today.

Untitled, from Toshiko Okanoue's Drop of Dreams by Nazraeli Press

As a young, unmarried woman living through the reconstruction period in postwar Japan, Okanoue began making photo collages. From Nazraeli press:

She cut out the photographs that - in her own words -"fit my dreams" and arranged them on black flocked paper. "Those scraps of my fantasies turned into strangely interesting things," she said, "things I would not have thought of. Emboldened and delighted by the results, I made one collage after another."

Much like Okanoue's investigations with the same form (and some of the same types of original period materials), Blakeslee uses glamorized and idealized representations of the feminine to call out inherent contradictions within what is projected and expected of women and their role in traditional society versus what that same woman's experience and fantasies of that life might actually be. In Charm Curl (the first image above), the perfect ringlet curls on a daughter's head mimic both the tighter, more controlled hairstyle of her mother (pictured in background) as well as the long curled tail of the colorful horse in foreground, itself a popular icon of what passes for the acceptable girlhood extracurricular. In B. Rayon Romaine (pictured below), a typical catalog shot of a post-war era housewife wearing clothes both feminine and proper is interrupted by a superimposed loud, red feather, intimating something that is both burlesque and meant to be hidden from sight.

B. Rayon Romaine, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

As a large swath of America is currently obsessed with the stylings and fast-changing cultural mores depicted in Mad Men, it seems a ripe time for Blakelee to push this visual investigation further, weaving a more complex theme and methodology in the wake of her montages.

More from the ongoing series Styled Life can be seen at Blakeslee's website, as well as other bodies of work.

Untitled (Santa Barbara) from the series California Vernacular by 2010 contender Liz Kuball

We're thrilled to announce that we've increased the HHS! Competition Grand Prize to $10,000 and are extending the deadline to Tuesday, August 31st at 8:00 p.m. (EDT).

As part of this community, you are well aware of how hard we work at creating opportunities for artists and spreading the word about the competition. The good news is—it's working! After we announced that we were teaming up with Blurb to offer each Hot Shot the chance to produce their own book a few weeks ago, a buzz of excitement percolated 'round the web, and created quite a stir.

We're happy to hear that you're excited—all the energy is bringing new photographers into our community at this eleventh hour. We want to share the love, welcome this new community around us, and give them—and you—a little more time to get your entries in, which is why we're doubling the Grand Prize to $10,000 and extending the deadline to August 31st.

Jen has always wanted the prize to be as big as it can be, and though we were happy to offer you $5,000, we're ecstatic to offer to $10,000. Over the last 5 months, we'd been wracking our brains to figure out how to bolster this amount. We considered working with other companies to increase the prize, but in the end, dug deep within JBP to offer you an amount that we think can make a real, positive change on the possibilities for an artist.

For those of you who have already applied: thank you! The panelists have begun to review your entries and we at JBP are perusing your images and lining up a few more weeks of contenders to feature on our blog. We've featured over 90 this year, and the range of work has been incredible: keep it coming!

If you have any questions make sure to check our Hey, Hot Shot! FAQ, which we've been updating with your questions as we go. If your question hasn't been answered, send us a Direct Message on Twitter to @heyhotshot or an email to hey@heyhotshot.com and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

Untitled, from El Salvador, by Lauren Lancaster

If you've never listened to 9 Beet Stretch by sound artist Leif Inge, which slows down Beethoven's 9th Symphony to 24 full hours, I suggest you start now. It's the perfect accompaniment to these photos by contender Lauren Lancaster, in which time  s l o w s    t o    a      c   r   a   w   l.

Time isn't standing still, but it's stretched out to infinity—where moments that Lauren describes as "fragile, surreal, and normal," become scintillating. The photographer herself is conspicuously absent—the subjects make eye-contact only with each other, and seem not to notice the presence of a camera. The resulting images are cinematic and microcosmic.

A woman's scarf is caught in mid-swirl...
Untitled, April 2010, from Kabul, Afghanistan, by Lauren Lancaster

...a fallen child is hoisted from the floor...
Untitled, from Kabul, Afghanistan, by Lauren Lancaster

...and the sound of a can opening echoes in slow motion:
Untitled, from Westfjords, by Lauren Lancaster

I'm tempted to think that in her past life, Lauren was a fly on the wall, but—truth being stranger than fiction—she was actually a shipwreck archaeologist. Lauren started out studying History and Archaeology, then pursued a master's degree in Shipwreck Archaeology at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Texas, and even worked on excavations in Kenya, Turkey, the United States and Bulgaria.

Then she switched gears, and in 2005 graduated from the ICP's program in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism. Since then she's been traveling around the word taking photos in places like Iceland, Russia, Africa, Afghanistan and El Salvador.

"I am fascinated with the way a story develops when you build it backwards, piece by piece," writes Lauren. I'm looking forward to watching these wordless stories develop as new images are created.

Lauren is currently based in Dubai, where she is working on completing the series she entered to Hey, Hot Shot! You can see more work on her website.

The concept of liminality is a seductive and slippery one in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy. Known largely as a term describing a psychological state, its origins were actually from the field of anthropology, and are related to rite-of-passage rituals of a three-part structure consisting of: 1) separation; 2) a liminal or in-between period; and 3) reassimilation. The OED describes liminality specifically as, "Of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process," and as the author of the site liminality.org writes, liminality is a state of being "betwixt and between." Not necessarily outside the social or a given mode or environment but not from within it either, liminal is the state of existing in between states/modes-of-being/environments. It is to be in but not of; it is literally the in-between space.

UK-based photographer Nick Rochowski visually investigates what he takes to be the liminal places through a study of constructed landscapes and boundary areas in dark forests and woodlands, both literal and imagined.

Untitled, from the series Liminal Points: The Woods by Nick Rochowski

Untitled, from the series Liminal Points: The Woods by Nick Rochowski

Nick's photos in this series are all situated at a time that is not-quite night and not-quite day, the air and light themselves taking on that betwixt-and-between time and coloring. Pardoxically, where an image may seem to have been taken at the darkest of hours, a slice of light—is it moonlight? is it supernatural?—will it illuminate a path of blue wildflowers against the inky stumps and trunks of trees? In several images from this body of work, an arc of undulating currents weaves its way into the middle ground, conjuring up associations of spirits, the unknown or of raw energy itself hovering in the ether. Rochowski's imaginings of what and where these boundary spaces are reflect back on his definition of these liminal spaces, as well as on the viewer's own childhood conceits of such places.

Untitled, from the series Liminal Points: The Woods by Nick Rochowski

Taking his inspiration from cinematography and traditional landscape photography, Rochowski writes that his aim with this series is to address:

...the relationship between thoughts, the senses and the environment [that] are manifested in vivid isolated scenes. Each location has a story ingrained that has been passed down through historical fact, village myth and family tales. Although these are the personal experiences of nature, solitude and youth resonates in all people.

I find Nick's images to be psychologically rich spaces that I am invited to enter alone, as if happening upon these clearings and vistas without quarter or concern. These are not necessarily the places where bad things will happen, but they might be the sort where anything on a weirdness scale of 1-10 just might.

You can see all of the images in this series, as well as other related bodies of work, on Nick's website.

Three Horse Race 2001 - 2006 by Ernie Button.

Hot Shot Ernie Button's portfolio Back & Forth was recently featured in the portfolio issue of F-Stop Magazine. In this series he photographed coin-operated grocery store rides, many of them deteriorated and neglected. Five years later, he returned to the locations of many of the rides and was captivated by what he found, as he writes in his artist statement:

The revisited site was photographed at a different time of day or year or a slightly different position from the original photograph to signify not only the passing of time but also how things are never quite the same. The findings of this project seemed to mirror life: sometimes changes are dramatic, sometimes they are barely noticeable, but change happens. And continues to happen. Change can be so subtle that if you don't pay attention, you won't know what's different.

Rocket (or) Ferris Wheel 2003 - 2007 by Ernie Button.

You may be familiar with Ernie's charming Cerealism series that garnered him the title of Hot Shot in the Summer 2006 competition. This body of work will be in an upcoming show at Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson, New York. The show will be on view August 26 - September 19, so be sure to check it out if you're in the area! Below are two images from the portfolio to whet your appetite.

John Chervinsky & Ernie Button
Davis Orton Gallery
On view: August 26 - September 19, 2010
Opening reception: Friday, August 28th, 6-8 p.m.

cat, no hat by Ernie Button.

french toast canyon by Ernie Button.

Delaware Bay by Jeff Gates, from the latest Pictory Showcase

JBP's own Youngna Park guest-curated the latest Pictory Showcase: In Deep, presenting a variety of takes on the theme "bodies of water." The photographs are complemented by a cool, ebbing and flowing design by Sleepover SF, and a few words by Editor Laura Brunow Miner. Dive in and escape the summer heat, without even leaving your desk!

Want to be part of the next Pictory showcase, Summer Jobless? Submit here.

Liz Kuball just might be the long-distance runner throughout the history of our Hey, Hot Shot! competition. We first saw her work in the Summer 2007 HHS! entry period, wherein she claimed an honorable mention; she then cast her lot with us again in the Fall 2007 entry period, then once again during the 2009 First Edition competition period (where she merited another Honorable Mention). In the interim between her HHS! entries, she's remained extraordinarily productive, appearing in Fraction magazine, as well my recent favorite zine, Get Off My Lawn; she's been in two group shows at Jen Bekman Gallery, released two editions on 20x200 (just goes to show you that good things come to those who are contenders!). Here in the last week of this year's only HHS! competition period, we were delighted to see Liz's entry come through our upload tool. Her images are from her ongoing series California Vernacular.

Untitled (Hollywood Hills), from the series California Vernacular by Liz Kuball

Untitled (Santa Barbara), from the series California Vernacular by Liz Kuball

Kuball's work from this series is a great example of my favorite kind of extended portraiture: that of place and space. Sometimes this portrait might have people in it, but more often it's an ongoing narrative told on different days, perhaps with different voices. But what's consistent is the open-ended wonder and allowance to let place speak for and by itself.

California Vernacular shows you how California itself is astonished by light and color; how the incongruous and whimsical can become personal totems and how danger can lurch out at you from unexpected corners (the first photo shown above is a truly great animal photo in a pantheon of great animal images; Daido Moriyama's Stray Dog comes to mind as a point of comparison with Kuball's pit bull). I also am drawn to the veracity of what it is that Kuball is photographing here: the vernacular, the everyday, the ephemeral. Some might look at this body of work and say that what we have on view is street photography, but I would disagree with that. To my eye, Liz's work has more in common with someone like Zoe Strauss's I-95 project than the likes of a classic street photographer like Garry Winogrand. Both Kuball and Strauss have channeled place to such a degree that the panoply of human experience is brought to bear, even when (or perhaps more precisely especially when) no human face is filling the frame.

Untitled (Hollywood), from the series California Vernacular by Liz Kuball

We often cite excerpts from an artist's statement in these contender posts, but what struck me in Liz's entry was what she had to say about her education and formative experiences:

As a photographer, I'm what is considered "self-taught," but I hate that term because it minimizes (and even negates) the profound impact that other photographers and writers have had on me...it was when I quit taking classes and started reading blogs that my education as a photographer really gained momentum. I formed friendships with photographers around the world, and through many long e-mail conversations, I learned about myself, what I care about, and what I want to photograph. I read and looked at books by people I admired and people I couldn't stand, and I learned equally from both. I entered contests (including this one) before I was ready, and learned from my subsequent rejections. I took pictures--lots of pictures--and tried to understand why some of them worked and so many more of them didn't. I wrote my own blog and, through writing, figured out what I thought. And so it continues.

Liz is someone that reads, interacts and engages with the world widely, who challenges herself both by what she's drawn to and inspired by as well as by what is counter to her nature or difficult, and she puts herself out there in the best of all possible ways. She understands that the process of learning and emerging is never ending, and that cultivating a love for both is the secret to success.

We're thrilled to announce that our friends at Blurb have jumped in at this eleventh hour to offer each of this year's Hot Shots a $1,000 Book Prize to go toward the creation of their own photography publication! In addition, Jen Bekman will select one of the five Hot Shots for the opportunity to work with a professional photo book editor and designer to create a printed masterpiece.

Blurb's tools already make it easy for photographers to design and sell their own books—from 20 up to 440 pages—and with this generous book credit each of the Hot Shots will be able to create books and print copies to keep, share, or give as gifts.

If you peruse Blurb, you'll find nearly forty titles created by Hot Shots over the past few years. We've got a bunch of these books on our shelves at JBP HQ, by the likes of Alison Grippo, Kurt Tong and Mike Sinclair (among others) and—to the credit of the photographers and Blurb—I'm always surprised to find that they were self-published. There's something truly wonderful about holding a bound and printed book of photographs in your hands.

Two pages from Farewell in Labrador by Kurt Tong on Blurb

By teaming up with Blurb we hope to empower even more photographers to self-publish books of their work. As an office full of photographers and bibliophiles, we look forward to seeing the books to come from this year's Hot Shots.

We'll have more details (and a Hot Shot bookshop) for you to peruse soon, but in the meantime, take a look at Blurb, then get your five best photos in before our final deadline for entries of the year: Sunday, August 22nd at 8:00 p.m. (EDT)

"I love black and white, have no interest in manipulation and I already have all the stuff," writes contender Robert Forlini. Call it old fashioned, but Robert goes out with two solid cameras and photographs the people around him.

Lemonade Stand, Rhinebeck, NY, 2009, from Stand Alone, by Robert Forlini

Of his series Stand Alone, Robert writes:

As a photographer working alone I am always aware of people in isolation. I choose my tools for their simplicity and directness: black and white film, Leica camera, and few lenses. The location can be anywhere and everywhere. In the midst of a massive crowd or waiting for a city bus I see most people separate from the world around them. I have discovered this seclusion in the tourist on a bleak Hollywood Boulevard, the teenager mixing lemonade on a late summer night at the fair or a family moving through an historic sight together but detached by headsets. I am sensitive to an inner sadness that encapsulates their spirit. It's not difficult to track and document that pervasive loneliness but this question keeps haunting me: Why are humans who exist in an over populated and technologically connected world destined to stand alone?

Andrew Jackson's Tomb, Nashville, TN, 2009 from Stand Alone by Robert Forlini

Robert's images (and there are many, with at least thirty years of work on his website) remind me of what drew me into photography in the first place. I first held a real camera when I was about 12. Shortly after, I came across of book of Diane Arbus photographs for the first time and was taken by her narrative portraits. Though Robert's work has less of a narrative arc, each image seems to contain a story. Some series, like Stand Alone (which the two images above are from) are somber and introspective. Others, like Classic Images are more light-hearted.

Expired dog, New York City, 1983 from Classic Images, by Robert Forlini

When my father was an officer in the Army, he used to carefully watch the movements of crows in order to determine if there were spies or hidden troops in the area he was surveying. Still, to this day, he can tell if it is going to rain based on the actions and patterns of these birds. Once I told him that crows really scared me; their jet black color, their intense, marble eyes and their loud, bleating call. He told me to rethink my relationship with the animal since they once saved his life from an attack. Though humans cannot generally tell individual crows apart, crows have been shown to have the ability to visually recognize individual humans, and to transmit information about "bad" humans by squawking.

Crow & Hand, 2006 by Andre Ruesch

Using a clever play on words, photographer Andre Ruesch calls his series of images containing his feathered friends, A Murder of Crows. A murder here means the group of crows (dubbed this eerily because a group of crows is known to kill a dying family member).

Crows can be seen in almost every country in the world and are an ancient species. In fact, they have seen more incarnations and epochs of history than humans. Crows have lived among, and will consume the flesh of just about any animal. Aesop writes about the keen wit and observations skills of the crow in his fable, The Crow and the Pitcher. In the story, a crow attempts to drink water from a vase but realizes the vase neck is too slim and the water too low for its beak. Realizing the solution, and using ingenuity and determination, the crow drops pebbles, one by one, into the vessel until the water rises to the top of the pitcher. Intelligent crows to this day exhibit the same behavior. In classic Greek mythology, the crow is the observer of cheaters and teller of secrets. In Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is often associated with crows because of an old story of the foretelling of his birth. In the Bible, during the flood, before Noah released a dove from the ark in order to find land, he first released a crow.

Crows & Cat, 2007 by Andre Ruesch

According to an article published by the BBC News, crows top the avian IQ scale. Dr. Louis Lefebvre says, "People tend not to like crows, because they have this fiendish look to them and they're black and they like dead prey" But, there are many inventive and observant tactics once can learn from the crow! We all know taking the road "as the crow flies" is always the shortest and most direct way to success.

Ruesch explains:

In these photographs, crows lead viewers as co-conspirators and protagonists, where in their guidance they are both faithful and not.....Crows or ravens have lived in close proximity to people on five continents for thousands of years and intersect cultures in stories and myth around the world. They have been among our constant companions and as such remind us of who we are. They are highly intelligent and undoubtedly will continue to play on our consciousness as mysterious and beautiful agitators.

Crows & Spider, 2007 by Andre Ruesch

So as often as we find these feathered friends eerie, ominous or bothersome, they have lived amongst us humans and amongst our things for years and years, quietly crafting their own stories within a shared environment.

Quoth the raven, or crow, nevermore.

Migratory Mexican field worker's home on the edge of a frozen pea field. Imperial Valley, California., 2009 by Julia Curtin

The old adage goes: "A picture is worth a thousand words.," but in the instance of contender Julia Curtin, it's the many pictures that are combined with very telling titles to form rich stories about history and prompt questions about the legacy photos can leave. In her series Resettlement, Curtin creates models of vernacular structures used as temporary housing by migratory victims of The Great Depression. Her houses are constructed out of sampled components of the photographs from Farm Security Administration photographers, including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, whose images of displaced farm families, immigrants, sharecroppers and migrant workers have defined the visual legacy of the 30s.

Tulare County, California. Cheap auto camp housing for citrus workers, 1930s by Dorothea Lange

The structures are barely shacks, some with windows and doors and some without any defining features of house-ness other than the shape of a pitched roof. The paper models are photographed like still, inanimate objects, removed from the fields and roadsides where they would have once existed. Yet, they are rife with life, history—woven of a storied fabric.

One home, shown in side profile with a ragged side that is clamored together from various newspaper postings is titled, Migratory Mexican field worker's home on the edge of a frozen pea field. Imperial Valley, California. Through this abbreviated narrative, Curtin embodies the empty, tiny, constructed home with both ownership and place, suggesting that however diminutive, the storied lives of the people who occupied these homes were were instrumental to our history and ought to not to be forgotten.

House without windows, home of sharecropper cut-over farmers of Mississippi Bottoms, Missouri., 2009 by Julia Curtin

Several years ago I made a trip (as a photographer) to a sugar plantation called Batey Caraballo in the Dominican Republic. There, I came across the homes of Haitian and Dominican sugar cane cutters and their families, who labored in the fields for many months of the year. When I arrived it happened to be their time off, and they would sit outside their shacks, made of tin, scrap metal, and the cobbled-together packaging of various food products, whiling away the hot summer days in the dirt-filled "lawns" that separated each structure. These were homes they took comfort in, but also homes they seemed to assume were temporal—places to stay en route to a better life.

Batey Caraballo, 2006 by Youngna Park

The homes in Resettlement are fragile and temporary, existing to be photographed, a medium that enables them a legacy of their own. Curtin, through her own labored means of building a structure that exists longer due to documentation than because of its physical and structural integrity, pays homage to these homes that once were as well as the WPA photographers who first captured them.