Slab City, USA by Marie Sauvaitre

Marie Sauvaitre
Currently residing in New York, NY

Website
www.mariesauvaitre.com

Work Statement

Reflecting on globalization, mobility and the new roles of borders, ERRANCES - French term for something between exile and wandering - explores and pays homage to nomads’ home through color landscape photographs.

For months I traveled across cultures and continents, living amongst nomads, while creating a poetic visual evidence of their “homes�. Starting in Jordan’s Bedouin tents, to Slab City’s trailer parks in California, through the gypsy outposts of Beauduc, France, I then explored New York and completed my photographic journey in Israel’s Negev desert.

From my own experience of exile, I am drawn to these tensions between the pulls of nomadism and the search for the feeling of home. When looking at nomadic dwellings, I am touched by their vulnerability, their transience and the enigmatic play between interiority and exteriority that they engage with the landscape in which they integrate.

My belief in the social responsibility and moral agency of the artist made me choose these places carefully: they cover various regions (the US, Europe, the Middle East) and religions (Muslim, Christian, Jewish). By juxtaposing these economically and religiously contrasting cultures in my images, the arch-narrative of the project goes against a dichotomization of the world. My goal is to challenge the viewer’s curiosity for nomadism, and in a bigger scheme, “Otherness�.

In today’s hybrid post-modern world, one must welcome difference, tolerance and the cohabitation of antagonisms.

Bio

Marie Sauvaitre is a French photographer, now residing in NYC.
After graduating with an MBA from the University of Houston in 1994, she obtained her MFA Photography from the NY School of Visual Arts in 2005.
Her fine art work has been shown since by various galleries in:
- New York: in 2007 in Chelsea at the Robert Steele and Mixed Greens galleries, in 2006 at the Storefront for Arts and Architecture and in 2005 at the Exit Art Biennial.
- Buffalo: Chautauqua Center for Visual Arts and
- California: Richard L. Nelson Gallery, Davis.
Her editorial work is published in magazines internationally (Photoeye Magazine or Time Out New York - USA, Masa Acher - Israel, Korean Photography - Korea, Il Corriere della Sera - Italy) as well as in books such as: Title TK (Anarchive Publications France), New York Downtown Style (Garden City, Taiwan) and Witty Design Objects (Garden City, Taiwan).
Over the past two years, she expended her teaching experience to being a Guest Lecturer in Undergraduate Photography, as well as an Adjunct Professor for Graduate Photography, at the NY School of Visual Arts.

From the series Sub Rosa by Birthe Piontek

Birthe Piontek
Currently residing in Vancouver, British Columbia

Website
www.birthepiontek.com

Work Statement

Similar to numerous other photographers my first take on photography was rather journalistic. Inspired by artists like Jeff Wall, Stephen Shore, Anna Gaskell and the work of David Lynch my pictures became increasingly staged over the last years.

In order to tell my stories, I frequently use a combination of portraits and stills, which currently constitute the lion’s share of my work.

Two subjects have always been of great interest to me: innocence and adolescence – both of which playing major roles in my latest project Sub Rosa.

The intimate moments captured in Sub Rosa oppose the innocent vulnerabiliy of youth to otherwise rather somber settings. We are confronted with introductions and conclusions of stories from a world we once were privy to – all the while hinting at secrets and revealing none.

Bio

I was born and raised in Germany and studied Communication Design and Photography at the University of Essen where I received my M.A. in 2004.

During my time at University, I started working as a freelance photographer for various clients and magazines. To get the experience of living and working in another country I moved to Vancouver, BC in 2005.

Since then my work has been exhibited internationally, and featured in publications and magazines including ‘The New York Times Magazine’, ‘The Globe and Mail’, ‘Stern’ and ‘Die Zeit’. My work has been recognized a number of times, most recently by being honored with the Santa Fe Juror’s Choice Award in 2007.

Village by Georg Parthen

Georg Parthen
Currently residing in Dusseldorf, Germany

Website
http://www.georgparthen.de

Work Statement

My “Lanscape” series is an ongoing project about reality and its photographic representation. I digitally construct photographs of landscapes that are implausible but appear authentic at the same time. It is up to the viewer whether to believes them or not. I want the images to arise doubts whether the shown reality really does exist or not. This works best when viewing the images in real-life size. Also the images represent my personal interpretation of beautiful landscapes.

I studied documentary photography in Essen with Jörg Sasse and just got my diploma a few weeks ago. All my former works are rather strict documentary works about contemporary phenomena as for example carports and mulitplex cinemas. In my new series i try to transcend the idea of documentation further. What is a documentation of a place that does not exist?

Bio

I grew up in Wiesbaden, Middle Germany, then did my social service in the middle of nowhere in the Harz mountains near the former German-German border and then moved to Essen to study photography. I did that for the last 7 years and got the best education I could ever imagine.
The thing that always interested me most in photography was the fact that you tell something or create a feeling without actually saying it.

Robert (Playing Smuggler’s Run: Hostile Territory) by Shauna Frischkorn

Shauna Frischkorn
Currently residing in Willow Street, Pennsylvania

Website
www.shaunafrischkorn.com

Work Statement

My work explores popular culture through everyday life.

Game Boys is an ongoing portrait series of young men engaged in a familiar pastime—they are playing video games. For the past three years, I have been photographing video game players who come to my studio, sit in the dark, and play for hours while I quietly watch and shoot. The studio setting lends a theatrical quality to this commonplace activity. Sometimes, I watch the game to see a particularly interesting sequence, but mostly I just watch the game players. I seek to explore the popular culture phenomenon of video games by examining the “gamers� who play them. Because my work is rooted in the tradition of portrait photography, I look beyond the hype surrounding video games and focus on the players themselves. Traditionally, the belief has been that a portrait could tell us a great deal about a subject: a window into a person’s inner character could be found through facial expressions. Although the expressions on my subjects may appear to be passive, the gamers in these photographs are actually performing fast-paced maneuvers and executing split-second decisions, making these portraits of intense concentration.

Bio

Shauna Frischkorn received her MFA in photography from SUNY Buffalo in 1998. She currently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and teaches photography at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. She had a two person exhibition at Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in New York in April, 2007. Publications include American Photography 20, Time Magazine, and Mother Jones Magazine.

Painted Bunting, 2007 by Todd Forsgren

Todd Forsgren
Currently Residing in Boca Raton, Florida

Website
www.toddforsgren.com

Work Statement

To create his paintings, John James Audubon shot birds and contorted their bodies into dramatic poses by wiring and pinning them onto boards. The quirky and flamboyant postures he used were not immediately popular with the scientific community, but today they are renowned.

It was Roger Tory Peterson who pioneered the idea of a field guide. His guides highlight observable marks, pointed out by carefully placed arrows, which allow for the identification of birds at a distance. Peterson painted thousands of systematic illustrations of birds in static poses which he based on photographs, bird skins, and field observations. Field guides have allowed hobbyists, artists, and scientists to identify birds with binoculars instead of a shotgun.

Ornithologists now use mist nets instead of shotguns. These nearly invisible nets are set up like fences and function as huge spider webs, catching unsuspecting birds. The researcher carefully extracts the bird from the net. Each bird is measured, aged, sexed, and banded with an individually numbered anklet. Then the bird is released.

I photographed these birds while they are caught in mist nets, moments before the ornithologist extracts them. Here, the birds inhabit a fascinating space between our framework of the bush and the hand. It is a fragile and embarrassing moment before they disappear back into the woods, and into data.

Bio

I grew up along the shores of Lake Erie, just was of Cleveland, Ohio along a major migratory bird flyway. John James Audubon’s Monograph, Birds of America, and Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America were the first pieces of artwork I loved. I spent days studying and trying to emulate Peterson and Audubon as a bird-watching teenager.

As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College in Maine, I studied biology, focusing on using molecularly biology explore ecosystem ecology. However, when I picked up a camera during my senior year, I realized that my youthful passions of birdwatching and gardening lay in photography, not biology. When I graduated in 2003, my only desire was to take pictures.

Since then, I have traveled widely with my camera. My work grew substantially in 2004-2005, when I studied at the SMFA in Boston for a year. Aside from the bird photographs in this portfolio, I have spent much of my time photographing urban and community based agriculture projects. Across the US as well as in Cuba. Next February I begin a Fulbright Fellowship to look at the new agriculture projects in Mongolia.

Sequim, WA by Scott Eiden

Scott Eiden
Currently residing in Brooklyn, NY

Website
www.scotteiden.com

Work Statement

As a history major in college, my senior thesis was a study of the history of the Utopian colonies in the 19th century in the Pacific Northwest. This involved a great deal of traveling to these locations and meeting with people who had some type of link to the colonies. But as I was traveling, I began to meet people who, in their own way, were trying to find their utopia. These people and this search stuck with me for a long time. As I began to take photography more seriously, I wanted to go back and explore this theme further. Having moved to New York, the trips to the Northwest became more personal (being able to visit family, friends, memories, etc) and the project took a more intimate turn. These are images of an admittedly idealized utopia of the Pacific Northwest - my Home. The images are a type of fiction in many ways, an idealization of a place I could no longer live in.
The title of the project comes from a book by Edward Bellamy that was credited with starting the surge of the Utopian movement, and a quote from Thoreau - “It is as hard to see one’s self as to look backwards without turning around.”
The images submitted were photographed with an 8×10 view camera.

Bio

I grew up in Tacoma, Washington, and attended the University of Puget Sound, where I graduated with a BA in History. I have no formal training in photography, but have been taking pictures since I received my first camera at 11 (a Yashica from my mother - I still have it). I began printing my own work in 2000 at the Photographic Center Northwest, and continue to do so in New York. I also print for other photographers (Sze Tsung Leong and Len Jenshel among others) as a freelance printer.

Foreign Vessel in Harbor, Dutch Harbor, Alaska by Jennifer Boomer

Jennifer Boomer
Currently residing in Dallas, Texas

Website
jenniferboomer.com

Work Statement

After I finished studying photography in school, I made the move that so many other aspiring photographers make and I headed straight for NYC. I lived in the city for a year, working as a freelance digital technician for various fashion photographers. I worked hard, learned the business and more importantly, learned what type of photographer I did not want to be. After my year of living in the city came to an end, I made the decision to stop assisting, to build a portfolio and to begin my photographic career on my own terms. In the back of my mind I had always kept stories that an old boyfriend had told me about his former job as an Alaskan fisherman in the Bering Sea. He painted a picture of a vast and colorful place, somewhere that I wanted to experience firsthand. I chose to move from Manhattan to The Aleutian Island Chain in Alaska since it was the furthest place west I could possibly move in Alaska and still be in the United States. I have always been attracted to extreme lifestyles and isolated places, so moving to Dutch Harbor, Alaska seemed to be a great place to live and to work at becoming a better photographer. Photography is how I explore my surroundings and what results is photographs from my fascination with what I find. The following “Greetings from Dutch Harbor� series is the result of my intimate 2-year relationship with the environment and community existing on the edge of the earth in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

Bio

I was born in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas in 1979 and went to the same school with the same group of students from preschool through high school. I discovered photography in high school and it afforded me the opportunity to stay out of trouble and saved me from otherwise boring weekends hanging out at the local mall. At 16, I saw Diane Arbus’ photograph, “Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. 1963.â€? It was Arbus’ nudist camp photos that inspired me to venture out of my comfort zone and to photograph people hanging-out at the Downtown Dallas Bus Station. I became facinated with the transitory lifestyle and was eager to photograph the people at the station and to learn their stories about where they had been and where they were going. Needless to say my mother almost had a heart attack when she found out that her teenage daughter was spending her weekend nights at a seedy bus station. Since leaving NYC in 2006, I’ve been living the gypsy lifestyle, traveling across the country while documenting people and places that I discover.

Untitled #6 (Catskill, NY, USA) 2006 by Carlo Van de Roer

Carlo Van de Roer
Currently residing in Brooklyn, NY

Website
www.carlovanderoer.com

Work Statement

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 in a small coastal community.
This series focuses on outdoor swimming pools that have been drained or abandoned.
When full, the surface of a swimming pool is a flat continuation of the pool edge, obscuring what is below the surface. When drained, the depths are revealed — allowing us to examine the empty pool postmortem.
These locations were once bustling social environments, and visiting them was a collective, public experience. Now deserted by swimmers, the experience of visiting these pools is solitary, still and private. Some have become bogs, homes or gardens — new lives that often go unobserved. Photographing them can be a voyeuristic and dark experience. I have focused on an intimate view of these locations, using tight crops which also emphasize the absent, making these photos as much about what is not there as what is there.

Bio

Carlo Van de Roer was born in 1975 in New Zealand, where he received his BFA in photography from Victoria University. Since leaving New Zealand in 1999, Van de Roer has traveled and photographed extensively in countries throughout Central America, Asia, Europe and the United States. He currently lives in New York.

What’s left by recently featured HHS! contender Aubrey Hays

Although we’ve been accepting new entries for a couple of weeks now, I’ve realized we never made an official announcements with the most important details. So…

*drumrolls, unrolling of the red carpet, general fanfare*

Ladies and Gentleman, behold! The Fall 2007 competition of Hey, Hot Shot! is now in full throttle!

Entries will be accepted here through Tuesday, November 6th. This season’s winners will be announced on the blog on Tuesday, November 20th and the HHS! Fall Showcase will take place at the jen bekman gallery from December 13th through December 16th, with an opening reception on Wednesday, December 12th from 6-8PM.

That leaves y’all one month to get crazy and creative. And, remember, its always best to get your entry in before the deadline crunch!!

So, why not enter right this minute?

A last minute heads up to anyone and everyone who happens to be in New York tonight. Ms. Bekman will be giving a special presentation at The Apple Store in Soho [@ Prince + Greene] as part of the NYC Photobloggers event. Come hear about HHS!, the gallery, 20×200, and other excitement! AND Ultra Joe Holmes is also on the bill. This is an event not to be missed.

TONIGHT - Sept 26 - 6:30PM
The Apple Store [Prince + Greene]

PS: There will be goodies involved. Be there or be [ ]