Auditorium, by Summer Edition 2006 Hey, Hot Shot! Winner James Rajotte.

Every other Spring, an international group of photographers and reviewers gathers in Portland, Oregon for a week-long “celebration of photography,” called Photolucida. Their mission: an increased understanding of the world through photography. Their goal is to promote in-depth, informed, and supportive dialog between photographers, gallery owners, publishers and pundits of various sorts, and thus to promote the culture of photography.

Photolucida publishes monographs for two or more artists (who haven’t previously published monographs) selected from the top-scoring finalists of its review. Lisa Hunter shared the shortlist and the Critical Mass winners on her website this weekend, and Beth Dow, a Jen Bekman represented artist and 20×200 edition-maker, is on the shortlist for the book prize.

Five Hey, Hot Shot! winners are among this year’s top 50:

Colin Blakely
James Rajotte
Daniel Traub
Ian van Coller
Sarah Small

A Hey, Hot Shot! honorable mention makes an appearance on the list too: Alejandro Cartagena.

Sold out 20×200 edition Untitled (Astoria Park, Queens, New York), by Carlo Van de Roer

“It’s a gateway drug for art.”

Today’s Houston Chronicle writes on all things Jen Bekman — specifically 20×200, Hey, Hot Shot! and the gallery — in “On the Internet, it’s real art for $20.“

Painted Palms, California City, by Ian Baguskas, 2007 30×37.5″ C-print

Ian Baguskas was a Spring ‘06 Hot Shot, a 2007 Ultra, and his “Kamping Kabins” is available now at 20×200.

Sweet Water, Baguskas’ debut solo exhibition in New York City, is comprised of thirteen color photographs of failed oases of the American West. Please join us for the show’s opening tomorrow, Friday, March 21, from 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Sweet Water will remain on view at Jen Bekman Gallery through Saturday, April 26, 2008.

Baguskas is skilled at juxtaposing the refuse of habitats of modern aspirations with the vast land and otherwise open skies that those constructs interrupt. His images are quiet and still, non-snarky meditations on man’s remaking of nature. In Sweet Water, he captures development (and attempts at development) of the land, and also the subsequent decay of much of that development.

He says, “…This lifestyle was only temporary, ending when the aquifers were depleted and the water ran out.” He explores a dyed lake in Antelope Valley, 80,000 acres of desert known as the would-be Los Angeles of California City, Rincon Artificial Island and Pipeline in Ventura, and a tiny green driving range at the Silver Saddle River “resort.”

Ian Baguskas was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1977 and moved to New York to attend The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he received his BFA in 2000. Recently named a PDN 30, Baguskas was a nominee for the 2008 KLM Paul Huf Award. His Search for the American Landscape series was shown earlier this year in a three-person show at The Ice Box in Philadelphia, PA.

Sweet Water at Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring Street.
March 21 - April 26, 2008
Hours: Wednesday — Saturday, Noon – 6pm or by private appointment.

9-11-02 by Spring Edition ‘07 Hot Shot Nina Berman, available now at 20×200

Writing from Fotofest in Houston, Texas, where she’s currently conducting lots of portfolio reviews and “hobnobbing with the photorati,” Jen Bekman declared, this morning, that it’s going to be an all photo week on 20×200.

First up is 9-11-02, by Spring Edition ‘07 Hot Shot Nina Berman. Berman’s work brings the war home in a quietly stunning and heartbreaking way. She’s not screaming about the war, but her images are strong and certainly vocal.

Of her Purple Hearts show, last summer at Jen Bekman, Holland Cotter wrote, in the New York Times, “One of the more shocking photographs to emerge from the current Iraq war was taken last year in a rural farm town in the American Midwest. It’s a studio portrait by the New York photographer Nina Berman of a young Illinois couple on their wedding day.” That image, Marine Wedding, went on to win a World Press Photo award.

Untitled #17, from “Stories,” by Winter Edition ‘06 Hot Shot Jessica Bruah, which I wrote about in The Village Voice, back when they paid me to think about art shows in neat little 75-word blurbs.

Hi. I’m Jen Snow. I’ll be blogging here at Hey, Hot Shot! I used to write about art and shoot gallery openings for some newspapers and magazines. My photos and writing have also appeared in/on places such as The New York Times, Artforum’s “Scene and Herd,” McSweeney’s, Rolling Stone, and Gawker’s “Team Party Crash.” I have a couple of jobs and a few websites and I’m excited to join Jen Bekman just as Hey, Hot Shot! is preparing some great big changes and a fancy new redesign. More on those soon. Please be in touch with comments and tips.

Please join me in congratulating the 2007 Hey, Hot Shot! Ultras:

Nina Berman
Karolina Karlic
Brad Moore
Birthe Piontek

Browse the links below and you’ll get an idea of how hard it is to choose just four people from the forty talented photographers who have exhibited in this year’s editions of Hey, Hot Shot!:

Fall 2007
Jennifer Boomer * Scott Eiden * Todd Forsgren * Shauna Frischkorn * Georg Parthen * Birthe Piontek * Marie Sauvaitre * Ross Sawyers * Ian van Coller * Carlo Van de Roer

Summer 2007
Dan Boardman * Afshin Dehkordi * Rachael Dunville * Jonathan Gitelson * Shuli Hallak * Beth Herzhaft * Gregory Krum * Kalpesh Lathigra * Ari Salomon * Willamain Somma

Spring 2007
Clint Baclawski * Nina Berman * Michael Julius * Karolina Karlic * Mark Marchesi * Casey Orr * Justin James Reed * Pavel Romaniko * Kelly Shimoda * Daniel Traub

Winter 2007
Holly Andres * Colin Blakely * Jeffrey Krolick * Juho Kuva * Molly Landreth * Brad Moore * Kirby Pilcher * Ben Roberts * Mickey Smith * Ka-Man Tse

Nina, Karolina, Brad and Birthe are now represented by Jen Bekman Gallery and will all participate in the upcoming exhibition Ne Plus Ultra, the Hey, Hot Shot! Annual, which opens on Friday February 8th, 2008.

2007 was a great year for Hey, Hot Shot! We had an amazing array of international talent exhibiting at the gallery, and getting involved in all kinds of other gallery related programs: art fairs, jen@joe and 20×200 among them.

2008 is shaping up to be extra super great. We’re making big changes to the competition as it enters it’s fourth year: there’s a site redesign in the works, there will be some significant (and awesome!) changes to the competition’s format and we’re cooking up an amazing array of opportunities for Hot Shots past, present and future.

We’ll start accepting entries for the Spring edition in a few short weeks, and will be sharing all the juicy details with you then.

For now, be on the lookout for 20×200 editions from the Ultras, and from many of the other talented Hey, Hot Shot! alumni.

Ne Plus Ultra, the Hey, Hot Shot! Annual, opens @ Jen Bekman Gallery on Friday February 8th and will remain on view through Saturday March 15th, 2008.

Image Credit: Ahern Rentals, Westminster, California (2006) by Brad Moore

From the series Sub Rosa by Birthe Piontek

At last! This Fall’s Hot Shots have arrived. Someone just got back from Paris Photo mere hours ago and was appropriately exhausted - hence the delay of a few hours before posting the winners. Sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches. Or should I say roll wiz ze panshez. We learned that in Paris.

Without further adieu ado:

Jennifer Boomer
Scott Eiden
Todd Forsgren
Shauna Frischkorn
Georg Parthen
Birthe Piontek
Marie Sauvaitre
Ross Sawyers
Ian van Coller
Carlo Van de Roer

Congratulations! Pencil in the opening for the Fall HHS Showcase on Wednesday, December 12th from 6-8. The showcase will be up until Sunday the 16th - you have four days to check it out!

Extra special thanks to our shining panel stars: Joerg Colberg, Stephen Frailey, Darius Himes, Youngna Park, Kate Bingaman-Burt, Ian Baguskas, Christine Collins, and Joseph Holmes.
It wasn’t easy to decide between all you talented hot shots, but here’s a list of some very honorable mentions: David Balhuizen, Jason DeMarte, William Hannigan, May Heek, Mickey Kerr, Adam Krause, Mollie Murphy, Nandor Ordog, Toni Pepe, Corine Smith, Damian VanCamp and Jon Wasserman

A big merci to everyone who participated, and congrats again to the winners.

Zanele Ndlovu by Ian van Coller

Ian van Coller
Currently residing in Bozeman, Montana

Website
www.ianvancoller.com

Work Statement

This project focuses on the intersection of post-apartheid black and white identities via photographic portraiture and oral recording of black domestic workers.
There are more than 1.5 million black South Africans, primarily women, who still serve as maids and nannies in white households. Although these domestics and their employers remain separated by an enormous gulf in race, culture, education and poverty that characterizes much of South Africa today, they are often wedded by an intensely intimate, personal, and awkward interdependence. In this project, my intent is to capture some of the complexities that all South Africans face in creating and asserting post-Apartheid identities in the face of dramatic economic and cultural realities.
The women in this portrait series were photographed in the homes where they are employed. They were asked to choose their own dress and posture as a means to express their identity within that environment, and became active participants in the construction of these images.

Bio

Ian van Coller is an artist and photographer who grew up in apartheid era South Africa. After receiving a National Diploma in Photography in 1991 from Technikon Natal in Durban, van Coller moved to Arizona in the southwest of the United States. He spent nine years in Tempe where he completed his BFA degree in Photography (from Arizona State University) and worked for 5 years as a photogravure collaborative printer and partner at Segura Publishing, a small fine art printing company in Tempe (www.segura.com). In 2000 Van Coller moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where he received his MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico. He currently lives in Bozeman, Montana where he is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Montana State University. Van Coller returns to South Africa every year to work on art and photography projects. His work has been widely exhibited in the United States and South Africa where his work is included in many museum collections including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Fogg Museum, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and The South African National Gallery (IZIKO).

Untitled (One) by Ross Sawyers

Ross Sawyers
Currently residing in Seattle, Washington

Website
www.rossawyers.com

Work Statement

The spaces in my photographs are influenced by living in increasingly smaller spaces in closer proximity to others in increasingly dense neighborhoods and housing developments of a city like Seattle. I construct the situations I photograph as a way to challenge my understanding of the buildings and neighborhoods I am referencing. Building, then photographing models allows me to exaggerate and over-state what I observe in my surroundings rather than simply replicating it. The environments depicted in my photographs are close to the actual, but deliberately are not accurate copies of reality.

Recently my intentions have shifted from representing specific received ideas to the exploration of why I am so attracted to these types of environments. As the spaces I create and mediate get further away from the reality I know, I have found it increasingly important to incorporate details familiar to us as humans in living spaces in order to ground the images in a sort of reality while at the same proposing situations outside the expected.

Bio

Born in 1979, Ross Sawyers moved from Iowa to Kansas City Missouri in 1998 to study photography at the Kansas City Art Institute. He received his B.F.A. from KCAI in 2002 and an M.F.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2007. Sawyers was recently chosen by the Art in Loop Foundation in Kansas City to be the inaugural artist for the semi-annual commission ArtWall. Concurrent with the unveiling of ArtWall, he was invited back to the Kansas City Art Institute in November of 2006 as a visiting artist. In March of this year Ross was invited to present his art work at the Society for Photographic Education national conference “Look Out� in Miami Florida where he was also presented with the Crystal Apple Award. Sawyers’ work is part of the Belger Family Foundation Collection in Kansas City, the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection and the King County Portable Works Collection, both in Seattle. He was selected for the 2006 CoCA Annual His work was seen in his recent solo show at Platform Gallery in Seattle in July and looks forward to a solo exhibition at Gallery 4Culture in January.

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.