home project 2 by Summer HS winner Dan Boardman

Dan Boardman
Currently residing in Rochester, NY

website: http://www.danboardmanphoto.com/

Work Statement
My interest in photography stems from luck. When I first started shooting, a friend recommended me to slower.net. Which was incredibly inspiring and important in getting me to shoot everyday, and chronicle all the nooks and crannies of my day-to-day life. Around the same time another friend came back from New York City with Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, which he found at random on the side of the road, and gave to me. Stephen Shore opened up a world contrary to that of Eliot Shepard, and even though I didn’t fully understand Shore’s work then, it did, to say the least, mark the beginning of my love for formal photography.

I think these two artists created in me a love for place. I love to think about the history of a place, or my personal history with a place. I look for small pieces that comprise a whole, and really love sequencing and editing and how it can change the tone of a project.

I’m currently a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, so despite my best efforts, my training has been very formal.

Lately I’ve been inspired by Martin Parr’s boring postcard collection, and all things Russian. I’ve been inspired by ponies off and on.

Bio
I was born in Ontario, California and moved to a small town in Central New York when I was in third grade. My pop’s job moved him from UCLA to Syracuse University. I spent most of my youth like Tom Sawyer, (swimming, eating pancakes, faking my own death).

In High school as a door prize at my after prom party I won a digital point and shoot. The camera had no screen and a mere 2-Mega Pixels. It held fifteen shots. I’m glad my Mom made me go to prom, I’m also glad I was nerdy enough to spend the rest of prom night with adult chaperones and teachers in the converted casino cafeteria.
What was great about that camera was that I had no expectations at all.

After high school I went to The University at Buffalo and studied English and Art History, all the while shooting pictures more than anything else. After my freshman Summer a friend convinced me that going to school for photo made more sense than trying to figure everything out on my own. So I took his advice and transferred to RIT in the Summer of 2005.

I am 22 years old now and in the fall I will be starting my senior year.

The Brad by Summer HS winner Rachael Dunville

Rachael Dunville
Currently residing in New York, NY

website: www.rachaeldunville.com

Work Statement
There is a distinct and profound pleasure in making portraits. I approach the transaction of making a photograph of and with another person as an intuitive, magical exchange; a subtle seduction between willing participants.

With striking impunity, the people I photograph can look straight into the camera, and therefore, straight into me. What is unveiled in this hushed interface is a distilled state of emotional undress; the honest curiosity to explore the conditions of looking into someone becomes something sacred and intense. We blush.

Using only available light, the resulting images reveal a complex, curious, and often disarming view of our encounter—fostered by the rapt attention between photographer and subject. Whether neighbor or stranger, my subjects are not arranged or posed. I have found that if I open space for them to be, their be-ing-ness is more inspiring than anything I could have possibly arranged.

Inspiration flirts with me about as often as I breathe, but at the deepest point from which I grow stems the influence of Peter Hujar, Mike Disfarmer and Joni Mitchell—all of whom keep me striving to convey a rich and complex human essence expressed through the grace of the photographic medium.

Bio
I was born and raised in the sacred and little known Ozark Mountains of Southwest Missouri. A town called Springfield. A street called Cedarbrook.

Generally speaking, I got into photography in childhood as an unabashed and obsessive memory collector. My mother supported a roll-a-day maximum through grade school and I scored a job at a 1-hour shop to fund my trigger finger until I moved away for college. There, at last, I learned what that fickle needle was in my viewfinder. Through photo books, my only access to a non-technical photo education, I tried to deepen my grasp of what I saw and how I wished to weave into the course. I started a freelance photography business and took many classes from many colleges, finally receiving my BFA from Southwest Missouri State University. I promptly moved to New York City where I earned my MFA in Photography at School of Visual Arts.

Since graduation, I have traveled widely and have generated even more momentum for the passionate pursuit of my image making and communication thereof. I currently live in NYC where I continue to expand upon my projects, goals and fine-art career.

Untitled 03 by Summer ‘07 contender Willamain Somma

The lovely Marina had promised one last contender post for this round, but since she is a busy and active woman, has not had a chance to post her final feature. So if I may, I will post on her behalf.

Yesterday, my cab driver dropped me off four blocks away from the Port Authority Bus Terminal with all of my fat pieces of luggage in the rain, and this photograph, which comes from Willamain Somma, calls to mind my feeling of absolute incredulousness of him driving away.

Somma’s series is about isolation, and her submission of photos was taken while at the UCross Foundation for the Arts in Clearmont, Wyoming this past March.

There I was in the middle of nowhere with not much aside from cattle, horses, deer and endless rolling hills. I was desperate to make some interesting pictures during my artist residency but was feeling terribly stuck in my creative process. Aside from a few other artists who were busy working on their paintings and scripts and dances there was just the endless rolling hills and highways. And then there was me. So for the first time since I picked up a camera in high school, I started photographing myself.

In describing this particular body of work, I appreciate Somma’s unapologetic stance on the use of herself as a subject in her photographs.

In the past I have always photographed other people knowing that every portrait was ultimately a reflection of myself. These pictures no longer disguise that fact. They are about me in the landscape, me in the world, and me in my creative process. They are about being stuck, trying to escape, existential angst, the whole narcissistic nine yards. I hope others like them but they please me and I’ve found that ultimately, that’s enough.

Somma is from from the North Shore of Massachusetts and is a graduate of the Bard-ICP MFA Photography Program. She now lives in New York City where she works and teaches. Her past projects include a documentary project on crack addicts in the Lower East Side.

The winners for the Summer Edition of Hey, Hot Shot! will be announced on the website tomorrow at noon. Thank you to everyone who took the time to enter. Good luck!

That’s right, folks. Your time has finally come. The entry deadline has now passed and the submissions folder for the Summer edition of Hey, Hot Shot! is officially closed. This season’s competition is pretty hot and I’m very excited to see who the panel selects!

Stay tuned to the blog for the winners will be announced here next Tuesday, August 21st. Plus, I’ll continue posting Hot Shot-related announcements.

Expect to see one more contender post from me today, as well :).

Empty Bedroom by Summer ‘07 contender Sarah Szwajkos

Today’s contender, Maine-based Sarah Szwajkos, takes perfect painterly photos. The above photo of a crisp, clean bedroom reminds me of Edward Hopper and his New England-type paintings. It also makes me think of the concept of the bedroom and it’s critical spatial elements.

Personally, I’ve always been something of a pack rat. I must have learned this from my mother, who has never thrown out a pair of shoes (seriously, there are hundreds of shoe boxes stored throughout the house). Nor could she ever even get rid of a cardboard jewelry box–she saved them all and has found something to store in each one of them.

My current bedroom, and entire apartment for that matter, outwardly exhibits this unfortunate quality of mine. I have old magazines everywhere, postcards from all over the world stashed in my apartment’s most intimate nooks and crannies, and coins–lots of them. Recently, however, I have been of the mindset that a cluttered apartment lends itself easily to a cluttered mind. I don’t know much about that feng shui shit, but I’m pretty sure that if I give over to the magic of minimalism, it might help simplify my life to some degree.

I bring this up now while faced with Szwajkos’s aptly titled Empty Bedroom, which is sparsely decorated to the say the least, as well as a somewhat perfect model of decorative asceticism. Szwajkos is hyper aware of my aforementioned neurosis. She understands that people allot tremendous value to their personal belongings and use these belongings to define themselves. She explains that with her camera she “sp[ies] on other people’s spaces” and “learn[s] about them by what they choose to surround themselves with.”

What we bring into our lives, and how we arrange our space — whether with thought or without care — reveal some of our basic creative urges. People construct shrines with their possessions, and day after day they pray at the altar of their own constructed order. By taking my camera in hand, by looking down onto its ground glass, I find revealed to me the secret order surrounding us — order that we impose to fit our individual lives. In this act, we create order out of chaos.

Right now, however, the state of my apartment leans more towards the realm of chaos than that of order. I can only imagine what it would be like for the proprietor of the empty bedroom to spend a night in my room. They would probably have an aneurysm. Not because my room is messy–it’s not, trust me. It’s neurotically organized, actually. It’s just that I have so much stuff. I always have. And I have always liked to display all of that stuff creatively around my bedroom.

It’s time for a change though. Looking at Szwajkos’s beautiful photo, I see peace and quiet. I can feel the calmness. It’s like Zen and the Art of Archery embodied. I wonder whose bedroom this is and what kind of person they are. I also wonder what its like to sleep at night in a room where the neutral carpeting matches the spotless walls as well as the color coordination in the floral comforter. Am I this kind of person or do I need all the posters on my walls and my books stacked all the way up to my ceiling? How can I re-decorate my personal space so that it’s still some kind of a shrine, but a shrine that will enable a healthier, clearer perspective on life? Maybe I should just get a plant. A big one.

While I continue my discussion with my inner interior decorator, here is a little bit more about today’s thought provoking contender, Sarah Szwajkos:

I grew up in a seemingly privileged & perfect family in the suburbs of Philadelphia (someday I’ll publish my book about that). I went to Catholic school, public school, private school, then a historically all-boys boarding school in Cambridge, England, then to an all-women’s college (Smith). I spent a little time in France, and a whole year in Florence, Italy. I am truly, deeply grateful for these opportunities, especially as they got me away from home and out on my own.

I hosted an exchange student from Paris after my freshman year of high school in 1990. She was four years older, and must have been bored out of her socks with me. However, we did visit NYC where she introduced me to the Body Shop, and Robert Doisneau’s photograph, “Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville”. Not only did I want someone to kiss me like that, but I thought, hey, I guess photography CAN be art!

Szwajkos began studying photography during her last year of high school and then studied at the Maine Photographic Workshops after graduating college. She has been photographing her friends’ homes since the year 2000. She is currently exhibiting her work in a group show called Up Close at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.

Go, Sarah!

Wow. As I write this, you currently have 10 hours and 11 minutes left to enter the Summer edition of Hey, Hot Shot!

Milk Lover by Summer ‘07 contender Jim Turbert

Jim Turbert, who has an entire self-published fan club dedicated to him, takes a lot of pictures of himself and then posts them on the internet. Seriously, this is what he does. He even says so himself:

I am a serial self-portraitist. My recent work is about the perceived expectations that my family and friends had for me as a lad and how they contrast with the reality of what I have become. My father used to tell me about how awesome his dad and his grandfather were because they were fancy doctors and lawyers who went to Yale. He told me that he expected me to go to Yale to continue the glorious tradition of his forefathers. There was never much discussion of the fact that he was a junior college drop-out, and that expecting me to go to such an elite institution bordered on the ridiculous. I don’t think he meant anything bad by it, but my point is that neither my father nor anyone else ever said to me, “Geez Jim, it would be really cool if you were a darkroom/technical support guy at a New England college for affluent women. Also, it would really be something if you took lots of pictures of yourself and posted them on the Internet.� This is however an accurate representation of what I do. I assure you, it is not glamorous.

These pictures usually come out very funny in that dry, ironic humor kind of way. Like, milk dribble all over this smiley-faced dude’s beard? Hilarious.

Navigating Jim’s fan club is entertaining as well, since Turbert is more than just a photographer–he is like a personality-driven entity or something. My favorite part on the site is where he compares himself to Britney Spears and mathematically proves that he is more interesting than her.

Honestly, I think Jim is awesome and so did past HHS panelists/bloggers, who honorably mentioned him once before. Jen also curated him into the PRC Annual Juried Exhibition for which she was the guest juror this past Spring.

Since Jim is too funny for rephrasing, I leave you with these words, fresh off of Turbert’s fingertips:

I’m a 31 year old guy who takes lots of pictures of himself and posts them on the Internet. I work at Wellesley College as a darkroom manager/tech support guy/equipment manager/whatever else they want me to do. I’ve been doing that for 5 years. Before finding steady employment, I went to Massachusetts College of Art where I concentrated in photography. Growing up in (very) rural Connecticut, I wasn’t exposed to many fine art photographers, but my grandmother’s large collection of family albums first piqued my interest in photography. I was given a crappy Kodak 110 something or another for my birthday one year, and I took a ton of pictures with it. I was clearly not a prodigy, but because I was apparently interested, an uncle “let me borrow� his 35mm SLR camera when I was in third grade. Though I never use it anymore, I still have that camera. Now I have several cameras, some great and some small, and I use them as I see fit.

Make sure to check out funny pictures of Jim’s fans under the “FAN” section of his site.

I’m going to bed now. But, unless you’ve already entered this season’s competition, you don’t deserve to go to sleep.

from a wheel by Summer ‘07 contender Ben Thomas

Ben Thomas is trying to take over the world and he has revealed his insidious plans by entering the Summer Edition of Hey, Hot Shot! Future Emperor of the Earth, Ben, has figured out to shrink entire cities and its people. The effect of his havoc can be seen on his carefully-documented website: www.cityshrinker.com

He seems to take great joy in chaos and relishes in power:

My aim is to give that feeling newness with each shot I take.

My method is to take what was once large and shrink it down to model size. To take the familiar and get you thinking even if for a second “wait a minute, is that…”.

Luckily for us, we are safe in North America as only Australia and the people of Melbourne will have to feel his vengeance for the time being.

Our future overlord was born in 1981 in Adelaide, Australia. While there, President of the Universe, Ben, developed his creative itch playing jazz trumpet then moving onto filming the local bands he grew up admiring. He Who is Large and Powerful graduated from the International Design Effects and Animation School (Adelaide) before picking up a still camera and a new city, Melbourne.

Although we should be very afraid of Ben, there seems to be a shining fragment of his humanity which we might be able to persuade to stop shrinking us and instead, love us.

You see amazing things every day. It could be out the window of the train on your way to work, it could be in your back yard, even better it could be somewhere completely foreign, something you didn’t know existed.

Good luck, Ben. Please don’t shrink me. For everyone else who is not an aspiring ruler of the planet, you still have time to enter the competition.

Untitled (swim 1) by Summer ‘07 contender Carlo Van de Roer

I used to have this theory that all people with brilliant names are destined to be winners in the game of life, if winning means international acclaim and success: Quentin Tarantino, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ennio Morricone–these are just a few examples. Today’s contender, Carlo Van de Roer is on the verge of being one of those people, but if his name doesn’t blow you away, then his photos sure will.

This photo reminds me of 10th grade geometry class with my super tall and similarly well-named teacher, Mr. Munsterteiger. Everything about this photo comes across as precise and calculated, from the strategically framed lines to the placement of the bathing bodies amidst the wide blue water. There is also a Legoland feel to the photo, as if it were a miniature model as opposed to a real event.

On Van de Roer’s website, I found more photos that I liked from his series of pools, like this pretty one and this one, which reminded me of the architectural photography of Julius Schulman. He also has another series on his site entitled “Swim”, in which the above photo belongs. Out of those, I adore this one and this one, which makes it look like those people are swimming through clouds.

Of his photographic fascination with swimming and pools, Van de Roer says:

I am interested in the landscape as a recreational and social space. Swimming pools and the sea dominate much of my work, as I attempt to examine and reconnect with the environments that surrounded me growing up on the North Island of New Zealand. This series focuses on outdoor swimming pools and public baths — sites where the normally parallel spheres of social interaction and solitary communion with nature intersect. Viewed from above, patterns and groupings of people emerge, revealing their interactions both with each other and with their surroundings.

Carlo Van de Roer was born in 1975 in Wellington on the North Island of New Zealand. There he attained a B.F.A. in photography from Victoria University. He left New Zealand in 1999 and has since traveled the world extensively, taking photographs in Central America, Asia, Europe, and finally in the U.S., where he currently resides in New York.

Aside from his water-based work, he also has another series on his site called “Blinded by the Light”, which looks as if it was set in the Natural History Museum and starts off with an awesome electric blue photo of running wolves.

That’s it for today, folks! Be sure to say your prayers and enter the competition before you go to bed tonight!

Monkey Time by Summer ‘07 contender Taryn Kapronica

This photo reminds me of my younger sister.

Not that she is prone to severing monkey heads, but she does photograph her collection of stuffed animals from time to time, especially her dog. Her desktop wallpaper is of him reading a page in her biology textbook, a section with diagrams on how the eye operates.

Taryn Kapronica also has a playful sense of humor and sees the comedy in the everyday. Her description of the environment she grew up in, a suburb west of Cleveland, Ohio, however, sounds like a place apt for engaging a child with more than your basic everyday wonderment:

[The] landscape comprised of Lake Erie’s decrepit waterfront, insular bedroom communities littered with McMansions, crime-ridden industrial towns, sprawling farmlands on the verge of extinction, and the intensely political and social environment at nearby Oberlin College.

Kapronica studied Playwriting and earned a B.A. from Fordham University at Lincoln Center. She started taking photographs as a means of escaping perpetual writer’s block. Soon the exercise became an obsession, and eventually, a calling. Kapronica says she wishes to educate people to find the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary:

My images tend to revolve around beginnings and ends. As the world speeds along, and the everyday passes by just a little quicker than the day before it, I seek to document those fleeting instances. I do not intend to stall time, but to capture keepsakes that communicate finding the still moment within the transition itself.

Taryn currently lives and works in New York City.

Enter anytime at your convenience before Tuesday, August 14, 2007 @ 11am Eastern Time.

Witches Pond by Summer ‘07 contender Andrew Rhea

For a film class, I once did a scene from Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law where I took on the part of Laurette (originally played by Ellen Barkin). In the scene, I was kicking the character of Zach (played by the radical Tom Waits) out of my house by aimlessly tossing about his belongings. To successfully capture my rampage on camera in a small, window-less acting studio, my teacher decided after a few takes that we would proceed filming the scene as a close-up, meaning I couldn’t move wildly out of frame and somehow had to contain my angry impulses within relative stillness. At some point in the heat of passion, I slammed my open palm down on a black wooden box (which, in acting school, translates into a ubiquitous and multi-functional piece of furniture) and did something like pop a blood vessel in the center of my palm. Needless to say, it hurt–after all, I was acting hard, but more importantly, it was bad ass.

This memory, which encompasses a number of bad ass associations, runs parallel in my mind with the above photo by Virginia-based photographer Andrew Rhea, and not in the sense that the nudie girl has a bad ass, but in the sense that she looks so bad ass sprawled naked on that bare mattress. Maybe my film class memory arose because there is a seedy-motel-room-thing going on here, which reminds me of throwing my scene partner’s records out of our imaginary Louisiana abode. Or maybe because there is an overwhelming Jarmusch-ian (?) quality to this photo that includes loss, sexuality, and an inexplicable coolness.

I’m somewhere on the page with Rhea about the moodiness of his photos. He says, “I want to take pictures that have the same feeling that Tom Waits’ songs do.” Let’s only hope he isn’t being literal and referring to songs like “I’m Your Late Night Evening Prostitute” or 1992’s “All Stripped Down”. If there’s any Waits song that this picture reminds me of, it’s “Poncho’s Lament”:

Well the stairs sound so lonely without you
And I ain’t made my bed in a week
Coffee stains on the paper I’m writing
And I’m too choked up inside to speak

Of this Waits-like quality, Rhea explains:

I just love the way he captures a dark and strange America, where you can hop trains and hang out with seedy carnival folks in empty bars. Just on a personal level, I feel like a lot of the mythical aspects of America are gone; there’s no moving out west, there’s no fighting heroic wars, and there’s no big city metropolis, with all its culture and glamour for kids in small towns to dream about.

Having not yet read Rhea’s bio, it was these words of heightened romantic idealism that made me realize he had to be young–at least one of the youngest entrants to this season’s competition, and its great to see photos imbued with this youthful quality to them. His images are alive and passionate. They are emotive, too, but they are not overwhelmingly sad or nostalgic, at least not primarily so. It’s exciting to feel the still-beating heart in someone’s work.

Of where he currently stands in the field of photography, Rhea says:

Now we live our lives on computers and through text messages, and I want to take pictures that make me feel like there’s still mystery and adventure to be found in America. I don’t know if I’ve done that yet–captured my views on my country, but I hope to some day. Right now I’m just trying to document my world, and remember the parts of it that are exciting and strange to me, the parts that romanticize being young and confused and in love.

The quality I enjoy in Rhea’s photos is the same quality I adore in Jarmusch’s films and in Godard’s early films–this sense of play and romanticized storytelling. And it’s even nicer to find it in an unpretentious embodiment. I also want to add that my boyfriend totally said I should post this photo, but that’s just because boys like nudie girls. And his name is Andrew, too.

I’m guessing that this Andrew, a 20-year-old college student from 25 miles outside of Richmond Virginia, also liked nudie girls since he submitted the above photo. In his biography, he states that he grew up in a small town called Chester. “[It] was once a weekend destination for wealthy Richmond-ers,” explains Rhea, “[that] over time because like any other suburb. That’s why I like living there, [because] it’s the kind of place where you are forced to be imaginative and creative, instead of having fun handed to you on a silver platter.” Knowing that his idea of fun would make us here at the jb curious, he extended an offer to visit him in Chester, where he would take us to the rope swing and to get milkshakes at the Chester Village Grill, and honestly, I don’t have it in me to resist a Virginian milkshake.

I have to go to work now. Unfortunately, we don’t serve milkshakes there. But, you can get one for me somewhere in your hometown. And then, you can spend your free time entering the competition.

P.S. I had to include this awesome and totally relevant picture somewhere.