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.

With tomorrow’s Hey, Hot Shot! entry deadline on the horizon, it seems apropos to have a grand summary of just a few of the entrants - think of this is as the big loud long burst of fireworks at the end of the display.

Swainson’s Thrush, 2007, by Todd Forsgren

I love this bird, from a series called Bird Banding Project by Todd Forsgren. The bird is tangled, delicate, pitiful, with that one big eye. I thought at first that he was stuffed, dead, and displayed in this net the way captured butterflies are tacked to a board, until I read this:

Ornithologists now use mist nets instead of shotguns for data that cannot be obtained with the help of binoculars, microphones, or telephoto lenses. 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, unharmed.

That being said, I can almost feel that little guy trembling as if I were holding him in my fist. Mr. Forsgren explains in his work statement that these images showcase a “fragile and embarrassing moment” for the birds - and I think this hits very close to that mark.

into the cave, by Tim Gerdes

In this snapshot of wholly different fauna there is palpable power and motion in the primate vaulting himself into a cave, like it’s a still from a clip of the whole action (for the sake of continuity, one could say that this is the escape after the capture depicted in the previous image - why not). It could be Godzilla, with the head and shoulders already having disintegrated into the ominous shadow of that hole. But, I think I’ll let Mr. Gerdes speak for himself:

I’ve been long enamored with the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles—among countless others. The cinematography of Gordon Willis—particularly on “The Godfather” and “Manhattan”—was my first realization in the artistic importance of lens-work.

I’ve worked to channel this inspiration at “Traumnovelle,” to present images with a cinematic flavor, and that tell a story—or rather where each images tells the single frame of a much larger story.

Church, 2007, by Bryan Keefer

Leaving the animal world and entering the world of the hyper-human, Bryan Keefer portrays the interior of this church with an overwhelming sense of lack of presence, that there should be someone at the lectern and people in the space, but it is conspicuously empty. With the brilliant, raw light streaming in from the window and the chandelier above unlit, it seems even more like people haven’t breathed in this room for years. There is a feeling of rustic modernity about the structure as well, but the feeling of abandonment is undeniable.

Self Series #8, by Gabriela Herman

Here, human is entirely present in the image, although in a collaged and somewhat awkward way. What is interesting about this photo by Gabriella Herman is that the body doesn’t look like it actually exists in that place even though it fills it so totally. The shadow on the floor is the only quality of the body that moors it to its surroundings. The legs and bizarre bend of the upper body, which seems to angle deeper into the floor than is logistically possible, make it look like a twisted marionette that has been lowered in. Even though the body is still it exists in a strange state of flux, with the torso moving against the hips and the legs going in their own way altogether; indeed Ms. Herman herself says it has always been her habit to “incorporate a lot of movement in [her] images.”

Facsimile I (Alaska), by JD Gaul

For a change of pace: this photographer presents a series of “facsimiles,” images which act as exact reproductions of places and things. What I like best about this photo is the little piece of flotsam in the lower center on the ground; amidst such a broad expanse of gravel and wet that little detail somehow anchors the larger structure in the back and gives it a ring of authenticity. The photographer’s other photos seem to each have a similar small detail that pulls the larger image into the space of reality and beefs up the statement that they are in fact facsimiles of something preexisting.

Wadi Rum JORDAN, by Marie Sauvaitre

This image is another broad landscape with some minute but all-important detail, detail that takes a second or third look to differentiate: the ant-size trail of figures cutting across the photo from the left. It’s a detail that makes a big difference when understanding the photo, from a series about which Ms. Sauvaitre says,

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…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.

I think this image communicates this tension as well as transience and vulnerability loud and clear. It exists not only in the trail of nomads, but also in the ambiguity of the sky, the blanket of nutmeg-y ground rolling out, and the sheer size and isolation of the various rock formations.

Wave, by Slava Deryuga

The first thing that jumps out of this photograph is it’s similarity to The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a familiar Japonese woodblock print made in about 1830. The detail and sharpness of the foam on the crests of the water and the depth and range of blue is massively appealing in a way similar to the crashing wave of the aforementioned print. The photographer explains that her “goal is to make every picture true to nature,” and I think there is great adherence to that rule in this photo in the crushing density of the wave and the rushing froth on the surface.

Restaurant, by Remi Thornton

From big ol’ waves to sleeping buildings: Remi Thornton explains that pictures taken at night are the most exciting to him,

I seek out objects that are taking a break for the night. A water fountain in a park, a construction vehicle, a pedestrian bridge - these things have totally different personalities when there is no one there to use them. What I’m capturing is not complex and only partly conceptual–I make an effort to keep things pure, simple and eerily beautiful.

This photo seems very Edward Hopper Nighthawks to me, minus the people. There is something of the all American to Thronton’s pictures, albeit with a dash of the eerie and otherworldly contributed by the absence of people. In keeping with the idea of the restaurant “taking a break,” I love that the light on the front sign seems almost like a little nightlight.

Leslie’s Keys, by Erika Ritzel

This is another picture of things without people that still show the everpresent footprint of the people who have been, but from an entirely different angle than the previous image. Ms. Ritzel explains her work better than I do:

I focus the camera on domestic interiors; these are the spaces I believe have the most emotional resonance. When people leave, objects remain which hold the meaning of their owner. These environments may be void of human life, but a residue of presence remains, which retains the meaning of their inhabitants and embodies the history of the space. The people might leave the location, but they are never really absent. When photographing, I respond to places that are familiar to my own experience of domestic space, whether directly or indirectly.

Nobody Belives You!, by Massimo Cristaldi

Voilà, from conspicuous lack of people to plenty of people. What is so mesmerizing and pleasing about this photo is the way it seems to transport the viewer to a different time and place. Mr. Cristaldi says of his work, “Taking images is for me a way to transform into physical things my inner visions and memories.” Looking at this image takes you by the hand and guides you into Mr. Cristaldi’s memory and shows you this humorous, sweet, visually engaging scene.

That brings us to the end of the Hey, Hot Shot! Grand Finale Tour. For all you procrastinators, peruse the posts, get your work together and throw in your lot before it’s too late - the extended deadline ends at 11AM tomorrow. Best of luck to all competitors!

my patient at home, Toronto, by My Le Nguyen

The work of My Le Nguyen has stayed with me since i first saw it, and it still retains that initial punch in the gut. She says that her background in and practice as a registered nurse informs her photography, and vice verse. This may explain the sense i get of emotional impact coupled with practical clinicality (if that is a word).
This particular photograph excites me for it’s simplicity, that every element is in it’s place for a reason…the patient, who we cannot help but relate to, seeming to mutely slide off the page…the pillows creating waves for him to drown in as well as extending into the viewer’s space…the “lifeline” connecting him/us to the kneeling saint, whose ornate frame mirrors the patient’s head…and that light switch! Okay, sorry, i’ll stop the dissection. In the much less analytical words of My Le:

I am drawn to subject matters that are immediately surrounding me, physically and emotionally, such as my family, Vietnam, and the patients I care for when I go to work. I’m attracted to ordinary everyday things, and how the ordinary can speaks loudly about itself and about our relationship with life. I like creating tension, mystery, and exploring isolation, hope, and the oddities in life….
I now feel that nursing drives my knowledge in photography; and photography drives my knowledge in nursing. These two, in turn give me knowledge of life and and how to live it, which I think works out pretty well.

Indeed. Thanks My Le!

Okay, now, i’m not going to tell you again! Enter it!

51st and Warrington by HHS! contender Jeffrey Stockbridge

It’s 4:39 in the morning and I just returned home from work. All I want to do is sink into my warm covers. But first, I want to briefly share a photograph with you.

Jeffrey Stockbridge is a 24-year-old photographer based in Philadelphia. He writes:

As a photographer I am compelled to make photographs that reveal what is ordinarily hidden. I am attracted to the elusive and mysterious nature of areas that are outcast from the rest of society. This desire has brought me to many economically depressed neighborhoods in Philadelphia. The houses I photograph have aged. They have been deserted and left to decompose, yet there remains a lingering memory of a past life. With furnishings still intact and personal belongings scattered about, it is as if the inhabitants simply disappeared. The ready-made scenarios I discover inside the houses I photograph are tranquil, yet unsettling.

See more of his work on his fabulous website. Best of luck, Jeffrey.

One more day to enter, y’all. ‘Nighty ‘night.

Binoculars, by Erik Dalzen

Of the many things in art for which I am a sucker, a big one is Hiding. This is particularly the case in photographs that are essentially straightforward, such as the work of Erik Dalzen. Using different fabrics draped over ostensibly mundane objects (if we are correct in assuming the titles name the hidden thing), he creates spaces that are at once dramatic, romantic, staged, and absurd. The fabric is also used as backdrop for the covered object, making it, in a way, both figure and ground, even as it conceals the “true” subject.

My life and my work have been influenced by countless contradictory factors. In school I was taught one history; my own research revealed another. I was raised in a conservative community but reared with strikingly liberal siblings. I heard certain sentiments in church and others in punk music and literature. I enjoyed poverty’s company in Brazil and now have run-ins with true affluence in New York. I have coped with death from addiction while finding an addiction of my own in art. Through it all I have developed a critical and quizzical mind. Art ideas surge up as personal reconciliations of such disparate experiences.

In my work what is shown is one thing, and what is suggested is another. I meld half-truths, misinformation, and partial evidence to speak to an audience as familiar with incongruities as myself. I photograph with a palette of the banal, commonplace, and everyday. I borrow from numerous “-isms� to shape works that are accessible on varying levels, where a casual glance provides one pleasure and a careful study offers further still.

The included selections are from a body of work titled, “Some Things.” I am exploring the act of titling, the role of artist and viewer, perceptual effects of advertising, estimations of consumer goods, and the blurring of subject in respect to setting.

Keep it up Erik! And for the rest of you procrastinators, no more excuses. The deadline has been extended for YOU!