Hey, Hot Shot! Entries for Contenders

Terence Koh, 2008 by Carlo Van de Roer

The first biweekly feature of the new decade over at online art resource culturehall was curated by Ruben Natal-San Miguel of ARTmostfierce. Ruben selected four photographers in response to an invitation by culturehall's Tema Stauffer (one of three artists in Jen Bekman Gallery's inaugural exhibition in 2003, and who has also produced two great editions for 20x200) to select work that "communicated strong messages and reflected the direction of the medium in the new year." The resulting line-up, 2010: A New Year With Photographs, features work from Fall 2007 Hot Shot and 20x200 edition-maker Carlo Van de Roer's Portrait Machine project. From the culturehall announcement:

Carlo Van de Roer brings new meaning to contemporary portraiture with The Portrait Machine Project. Using AURA technology, Carlo creates portraits mostly of well-known artists and prominent figures in the art business. The color palette varies with the personality of the individual in front of the camera.

Adultery, 2009 by Alex Leme

Also included is 2009 Second Edition Honorable Mention Alex Leme:

Alex Leme searches and explores the content of billboards and signs while driving aimlessly through the south of the United States in an area known as The Bible Belt....The subtext of his images demonstrate how far some fundamentalist religious institutions are willing to go to recruit new members and to warn their followers of the lure of the adult entertainment industry which threatens their faith.

These, as well as pieces by Gina Levay and Matthew Pillsbury, are right up front at culturehall until January 12—check it out!

A photograph tells a story. But contender Deron Bauman goes a step further, by taking something overheard on the shoot and making it the title caption. The results are inviting, strange, and sometimes comical. By tightly binding words and images together, the narrative aspect of the picture is reinforced. While not as extreme as a jeering episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, this approach suggests some in-built viewer commentary as well.

Words supplement the image to create a second reading, an alternative documentation for the same story, activating the invisible. We become interested in what he isn't showing us, a world beyond the edges of the photograph. Deron points, shoots, and laughs at the limits of photography, while at the same time expanding its boundaries a little further into our imagination.

My mom said I could be anything I wanted. Except a cheerleader. I wonder if Rebecca Greenfield's mom told her the same. These photos document the tryouts for NFL cheerleading teams and showcase Rebecca's obsession with artifice and beauty.

At fifteen, when I first began to photograph, I made pictures of friends emulating what I saw in the glossy magazines that I studied and devoured. Later, I became less concerned with fashion but ever more interested in gender and its construct. As a result, I have been repeatedly drawn to photographing all stripes of young women as they begin to define themselves and who they are in the world.

Rebecca's obsession with the social constructs of feminity have lead her to this arena of overt sexual exploitation. Though her photos peer behind-the-scenes into a bizarre world of constructed femininity, they remain impressively unbiased. The innocent moments of worried facial expressions, captured in-between the poised glitter and sex, give life to what was solely a mindless body. Rebecca's camera obliterates the fantasy.

There's also something unexpectedly appropriate about the American flag hanging in the background of this photo. Together the cheerleader and the flag have connected as icons. In this identifiable role, these women are no longer human, but objects to be celebrated and upheld as a common dream by our society. Looking at these photos, I can't help wondering if all girls aspire to dance provocatively on the sidelines. However, this series is ultimately not about cheerleading at all, but questioning today's culture of American femininity. It connotes the imagery and stories behind photographer Lauren Greenfield's series Girl Culture, which investigates and interprets self-esteem in American women today in order to break down the media's illusion. Rebecca leaves it to the viewer to determine what part of this American dream is real and what is a construct of imaginary and traditionally justified stereotypes.

Pong Field, 2006, by Jessica Eaton

The camera is a complex and somewhat mysterious tool that translates experience into two-dimensional imagery. For many photographers, it is simply the means to an end: photographs. For others, such as contender Jessica Eaton, the camera's unique properties and possibilities define her entire practice. Her works, which are each created in-camera onto a single piece of film, deal largely with the deconstruction of and experimentation with the medium of photography itself.

Jessica writes,

I plan my projects extensively but as experiments, a neverending series of tests. Each time I shoot the results influence the next step. I often like to leave a lot of space for accidents to happen and am most satisfied with the work when it takes on a life of it's own. I want to make photographs that surprise myself, that teach me something, that seem a little like I didn't even make them despite the effort. I want to make photographs that compel one to keep looking.

In an age where it's possible to snap thousands of digital photographs at a time with little to no cost, Jessica's intent to build up layers of slow experimentation is both heartening and visually arresting. Her dedication to the process is such that instead of filling out a bio she included extended notes on the recipe for each of her images.

Pinholes 12, 2009, by Jessica Eaton

She writes,

Pinholes 12 again uses in-camera masking, in this case the masks are made by hand, pin pricking sheets of paper into screens. Pinholes 12 is one of the first photographs where an image is visible, the previous attempts show only very abstract spots of colour in a sea of black. As I continue to shoot these works and make changes to the masks and exposures the indexical referent, the 'something' that I am photographing, resolves. Viewed as a series (they are meant to be large prints as they visually change with physical proximity) and with regard to the process of making these photographs they posture or dramatize colour photography itself. On the one hand the early colour efforts such as the Autochrome Lumière or likewise modern grain, on the other the mediums constant quest for an ever clearer or acurate image, applicable to both photography proper and digital sensors.

If the name Jessica Eaton sounds familiar to you, it may be because she is one of the thirty-six artists whose work currently graces the walls of the Mixtape exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery. Or, perhaps you're a proud owner of her 20x200 edition Filter Samples.

You can check out more of Jessica's work at her website, or stop by the gallery to check it out in person.

Direct Object #03 by Jon Sheridan

Since we've postponed the announcement of the 2009 Second Edition Hot Shots to December 18th, that gives us ample opportunity to continue blogging about the impressive contenders that have entered this round. Keep checking back here, on Flickr and on Facebook to see their work over the next few weeks.

Today we take a look at contender Jon Sheridan. Jon makes a syntactic analogy with photography in his series Direct Objects: "In language, the verb acts upon the direct object. Here, the interventions of my photography act upon the direct objects in the picture," he says. Using a "forensic" approach, Jon seeks out quotidian items found at construction sites, loading docks and smoke-break corners. These Direct Objects are lit and grounded to emphasize that favorite quality of cultural theorists, their "thingness." Here, this impermanent coffee cup emerges as a uniquely sculptural object among the hard, angular wall and electricity boxes.

We wrote about Jon's series How to Fix a Campground here on the blog during the last round of competition, and you can also see more at his website.

Fragmented Cities, Santa Catarina, 2007, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, by Alejandro Cartagena

A few days ago we posted about a project called American Palimpsests by contender Stacy Mehrfar, which documents the desolation of suburban and exurban America. South of the border, contender Alejandro Cartagena has been photographing the causes and effects of Mexico's own residential sprawl which, despite all odds, is booming in this down international economy.

As a result of government initiatives granting loans toward buying homes, more than 300,000 new houses have popped up in the areas surrounding Mexico's metropolitan Monterrey area. "Amazingly," writes Alejandro, "even in the financial and mortgage crisis being lived in most of the world, the commission just announced in June that they will position another 500,000 loans for housing in 2009."

Like many development projects, the repetitious rows of houses forsake both their natural surroundings and cultural context. Most of the houses are a kind of boxy, mass-produced approximation of mission-style architecture, a sad nod to an endangered cultural history and an eerie parallel to the pseudo-colonial McMansions that have overtaken American developments. For me, it is painful to watch these spiritless developments envelop the landscape. Alejandro, however, "does not overtly condemn these development projects." Instead he seeks to "openly engage a critically dense examination of the complicated balance existing between economically driven States and the yearning of a society for a fairer World in which to live."

The photographs evoke many conflicting thoughts and feelings about our quest throughout history to create residential utopias. Though Alejandro has tried to present an objective view of this changing landscape, the images seem to shout: be careful of what you wish for.

The entirety of Suburbia Mexicana; Fragmented Cities can be seen at Alejandro's website.

Driving At Night by Kevin Van Aelst

A quick glance at Kevin Van Aelst's photos will probably not do you much good. His subtle images bring inanimate objects to life in a far more sophisticated manner than their commercial applications would suggest. Kevin creates simple tableaux that reveal his witty disposition toward everyday things in space.

Like the surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim and her furry teacup, Kevin uses his objects to hint toward their fantastic possibilities. As Kevin puts it:

The images aim to examine the distance between the 'big picture' and the 'little things' in life—the banalities of our daily lives, and the sublime notions of identity and existence.

While some say Kevin plays with visual accuracy and our perception of truth, perhaps he is actually revealing the intrinsic natures of this minutiae. In this photographic reconsideration, these objects are simultaneously themselves as well as another object that exists within. This is why crumpled laundry can form a heart, and gummy worms can organize themselves as a genome. He makes it clear for viewers to recognize the endless possibilities of everything around us. In a way, Kevin's work points toward the dizzy philosophy of I Heart Huckabees and its existential mantra that if you look close enough you can't tell where my nose ends and space begins.

Untitled, 2009 by Thomas Jackson

Contender Thomas Jackson writes that he "got into photography late," having picked up a camera just a few years ago after working as a writer and magazine editor for over ten years. It wasn't until he had gone through phases of 35mm street photography and "Richard Misrach-style" landscapes that he came to create his own unique body of work. The photographs, which could easily be mistaken for stills from an upcoming Pixar film, blend "pyrotechnically enhanced, sci-fi inspired sculptures with everyday environments."

Approaching the enigmatic glow of an abandoned bonfire is Tom's clunky robot character who appears throughout the entire series, sometimes in surreal settings such as the forest below, and other times doing laundry or driving a wheelbarrow. The series alternates between scenes of ethereal fantasy and the day-to-day grind of domesticity until the line between the two has blurred.

Untitled, 2009 by Thomas Jackson

To me, the images have a strong sense of narrative, which undoubtedly comes from Tom's background as a writer, but also evoke surreal and eerie tones through their carefully constructed lighting. The series presents an unusually imaginative response to our desire to escape the most tedious aspects of our lives.

You can see the complete series over at Tom's portfolio.

Magnolia, Texas. April 2006 #1 by Stacy A. Mehrfar

In Stacy Arezou Mehrfar's seriesAmerican Palimpsests, the suburban project born in the postwar boom of the 1950s carries over to the twenty-first century. Photographing in twenty-eight states over the course of five years, Stacy surveyed the ambiguous terrain between wilderness and residence in contemporary society. As she recounted in an interview with Amy Stein on Amy's blog, these journeys began when American residential development was expanding at an enormous pace. Yet for all of this construction in the service of habitation, she found isolation:

Days would go by where I would hardly see a soul. Many of the suburbs were eerily silent. Cold, even when it was hot outside. Empty, even before the foreclosure crisis had begun. Traveling for days in these communities was awfully dismal and lonely.

These uncanny qualities are demonstrated in Magnolia, Texas. A newly paved patch of development bears the traces of construction vehicles, but little else. An environment in a state of suspension, the visible forest around this cul-de-sac will someday disappear, creating another neighborhood in a dead end.

Stacy also recently received an Honorable Mention in the Fine Art category in Blurb's Photography.Book.Now competition, whose lead judge is photobook evangelist and Hey, Hot Shot! panelist Darius Himes. The book she created, American Palimpsests | This Was What There Was, incorporates a second body of work created on her journeys. As mentioned earlier, for the next few weeks, Flak Photo is showcasing twenty-five top books from this year's PBN, including Stacy's.

Garage Fire and Casino, Bullhead City, Arizona by Kipp Wettstein

Photographers have long tested the artistic possibilities of the vistas, challenging terrain, and inimitable light of the American West. You can see things there that are impossible to witness in other regions. Kipp Wettstein started a photographic project around the Great Basin to explore the physical and psychic landscapes of his Mormon ancestors, but after a wandering (perhaps not unlike theirs) he settled on the subject of the Colorado River. The resulting series, For Water Will Not Do, is, as Kipp writes,

a story of a declining river, a setting of harsh beauty and thirty-four million people with no reasonable alternative. This is a search for some understanding of the historical forces that led to the extraordinary effort put forth to 'tame' a landscape. It is also an effort to record an environment in transition with a large slice of American culture inescapably in tow.

Working with a handmade, large-format camera (which he explains in fascinating detail on his site), Kipp captures such improbable and enigmatic scenes as the one in Garage Fire and Casino, Bullhead City, Arizona. Even taken at a distance from the conflagration, the picture evokes a sense of confusion and urgency that I recognized from an iconic image from the great photographer of American spaces, Jeff Brouws.

Car Fire, Interstate 40, California by Jeff Brouws

In exploring these daunting territories and landscape photography traditions, Kipp reminds us of the allusive power and real perils of the desert. There is of course more from For Water Will Not Do on Kipp's website.

World Exclusive! by Peter Bugg

In June, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Peter Bugg spent a week interning with a paparazzi photography agency in Los Angeles. Peter, who had previously worked with appropriating celebrity imagery, spent two days chasing stars across the streets of LA and three days filing through the agency's archives. His series of appropriated imagery, World Exclusive!, comes out of this weeklong experience.

About his work, Peter writes,

In order to sell more photos to magazines, the [paparazzi] spice up their images by sensationalizing them with text. Without these explanations to color the reader's interpretation of the images, the pictures quickly lose their intrigue. On the other hand, without the photographs...these texts are freed from the constraints of the images and take on a life of their own. Instead of existing as simple captions for bubble-gum pictures, the phrases become colorful, quotable, inside jokes.

Approaching the intersection of photography and conceptual art, Peter captures these caption bubbles with a flatbed Epson scanner. The graphic, text-filled circles raise questions about how we interpret imagery, and the value of photographs created for consumption. While other contenders such as Joshua Scott have attempted to extract art from a commercial photography context, Peter's series isolates the prompts which help transform relatively inert images into commercial products.

Daily Dose by Peter Bugg

And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum 2 by Justin James King

Justin James King radically intervenes in the common spectacle of the tourist vista by removing the view itself. A lone figure stands on a promontory gazing out into the utter void. Commenting on the reflexive act of looking (and by extension, on the rich traditions of landscape photography), Justin says,

Perhaps all we see when we stand in front of the landscape are archetypes: preconceived notions and pre-experienced views....Our perception grows out of how we have seen the landscape represented and how it has been delivered to us historically and in popular culture.

By removing the sweeping natural view, Justin undercuts the entire premise of the conventional landscape, pulling off the tricky business of making a photograph about the invisible.

Earlier this year Justin was a recipient of the Arthur Griffin Legacy Award from the Griffin Museum, and winner in the Best Personal Work as Photographic Art Series category at the New York Photo Awards. There is more from And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum, as well as from other bodies of conceptual work on Justin's site.

Marvin by Beth Yarnelle Edwards

The portraits of Beth Yarnelle Edwards explore the relationships "between people, their living spaces, and their possessions." Many portrait artists strive to portray their subject's psychology through expression, gesture, and other hints of demeanor. In taking her subjects' environments as another level of rhetorical expression, Beth demonstrates the ways we all use our personal items to reinforce the stories we want to tell about ourselves.

Beth collaborates with her subjects in recognizing and enhancing these emblematic, if not quite fictive, aspects of their personal settings. She says,

I seek out intersections of the mythic and mundane. As I attempt to reveal some basic truth about my subjects, I'm attracted to the peculiar or surprising. This can take many forms, ranging from humor to visual quirkiness to a sense of universality, or even the uncanny.

There is much more environmental portraiture at Beth's website.

Sour Cherries, Hungary by Monika A. Merva

Monika Merva's Sour Cherries, Hungary portrays what is likely a minor scene in the day of a pedestrian crossing: a bunch of cherries have spilled on the street. Surely a prosaic accident, but then again you'll never know what this event comprised. If ever they were meant to be displayed, these colorful stone fruit would have created a dignified tabletop tableaux; here they are merely a small-scale slaughter. A trivial loss, but perhaps sour in more than one way.

A committed portrait artist, Monika is lately turning to more oblique ways of storytelling. Of this new direction, she says this work retains an "ingredient of the human element, but not as the focus." Centering her earlier work in people, Monika produced a years-long project in her family homeland, Hungary. The result was City of Children, an extensive document of a government-run housing program for runaways and at-risk teens. There they forge a semi-autonomous community with whom they share the key youth experiences that their absent and dysfunctional families would have otherwise witnessed.

Rabbit Ears, Hungary by Monika A. Merva, from City of Children

The sense of sorrow and hope bound up in City of Children is palpable; the qualities it shares with newer work like Sour Cherries, Hungary is in proposing stories "without a certain answer." The matter-of-factness common to each belies an ambiguous but perceptible turmoil.

For San Francisco residents, Monika's series City of Children will be on view at the mighty RayKo Photo Center at 428 Third Street. Monika will be on hand at the opening reception this Friday, November 6, from 6 to 8 p.m.; stop by to experience the eloquence of her uncertain stories and meet the artist.

Tara Misenheimer loves hair. She draws hair, she paints hair and she's even brainstormed about hair as a Hollywood hair consultant. This obsession stems from her greater love of 60s and 70s era advertisements, featuring enviable bobs, bouffants and braids. Standing somewhere in between found photography and the cut-and-paste age of graphic design, Tara takes pictures of overlapping retro magazines on a copy stand.

She writes,

My work seeks to make connections between familiar and fundamental properties of hairstyles and sensationalized commercial objects of the era, such as cars, diamonds, swimwear and fashionable trends.

Looking back at another recent contender posting about Aline Smithson, the past is similarly romanticized in Tara's work. Her casual compositions seem randomly conceived yet wholly familiar and comforting. Perhaps all these pastel-colored images of nostalgia from a bygone era provide a fleeting sense of bliss in this time of current economic confusion. These images she's chosen to include are colorful and fun-loving, reminding us of seemingly better days in the imagined history of ourselves. Kind of like a Paul Simon song.

Air Power Over Hampton Roads air show, Hampton Roads, Virginia #2 by Christopher Sims

Christopher Sims has documented people, mostly young men, engaged with the Virtual Army Experience, a traveling entertainment/recruiting station found at NASCAR events and air shows. According to its website, the Virtual Army Experience provides "participants with a virtual test drive of the United States Army." Its interface is that of a combat video game.

The Virtual Army experience homepage

The body of work Sims has created from these portraits is titled Hearts and Minds, and of it he says,

These portraits remind us of the computer and television screens through which most of us have lived the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the filters of distance and media that create for us our own virtual homeland experience. The army reveals itself to be a keen reader of American adolescent emotions and passions, and employs this understanding through a brilliantly designed and bloodless simulation of the thrill of the fight.

Regardless of your political beliefs, it's impossible to dismiss the degree that video game technology suits contemporary military recruitment needs. The quality of combat simulation must absorb the player to such a degree that the psychological job involved in actual training is already in motion. This phenomenon has also been documented by photographer and video artist Robbie Cooper, in his series Immersion. Using equipment not unlike, as he acknowledges, Errol Morris's one-way mirror/camera known as the Interrotron, Robbie presents the unnerving concentration people reveal when wrapped up in violent video games, and other screen-based fantasia (including porn). See a video sampler of Immersion at the New York Times.

This combination of estrangement from the physical world and intense engagement with the virtual makes the job of message producers—be it the military, advertisers, or pornographers —that much easier. Christopher's portfolio of Hearts and Minds, as well as his significant work from Guantanamo Bay and mock Iraqi and Afghan villages for military training, are available at Ann Stewart Fine Art.

Clothesline by Aline Smithson

It was difficult to find an image befittingly momentous for today, the the final day we are accepting entries for Hey, Hot Shot! in 2009. (If you are reading this on Tuesday, October 27, before 11:00 p.m. (EDT) you still have time to enter). The range of submissions this round has been eye-popping, and for those of us who care about the state of photographic practice in this ever-fluxing world, that range is also deeply encouraging. Judging by the cross-section of innovative, accomplished, and totally engaged contenders we've seen, the state of photography is very good indeed.

I was drawn back to an image by Aline Smithson—the Los Angeles-based photographer, educator and mind behind the excellent photography blog Lenscratch. At first look it seems to be a quiet picture. What's more, it's unapologetically nostalgic. As Aline says,

We live in a world full of technical distractions. I see my children gathered around their computers as though it's a summer campfire, faces aglow, as they peer into a world of friends and fantasy, participating in a new forms of entertainment that further remove them from the childhood that I experienced....it's because of this that I have been looking at bookshelves and untouched childhood pursuits with a new eye. With great sadness, I realize that these objects will someday be obsolete, at least in their current incarnations. And like a curator of antiquities, I see them now as beautiful objects to be admired and preserved, if only on film. I can only hope for rain, a heavy rain and maybe a power outage.

Aline's heartfelt admission acknowledges that progress flows in one direction and that the days of children doting on non-electronic toys may be behind us. For some of us (even we who didn't grow up playing with dolls) these paper dresses, hanging on a string as if on a clothesline, recall the intensity of feeling that simple playthings can evoke in children. These objects could once nurture sustained attention, maybe even a childhood form of obsession; they were the analog interface for overwhelming fantasy worlds. Absent of this devotion, the dresses are now simply suspended in time.

We'll continue to blog contenders until the newest Hot Shots are announced on November 30th. Thank you for being part of this round of Hey, Hot Shot! and stay tuned for much more to come!

Pride by Tait Simpson

Tait Simpson's series Hold Tight renders itself as both physical object and collection of images. Apparent and more extended interpretations of the title phrase manifest in his work—a mother in a close embrace with her child on the beach suggests a literal tight hold, while an explosion of rainbow balloons (with a visual likeness to recent Sony BRAVIA commercials) begs to be contained. Whether bound by object, bound by idea, or unbound—the tension created by enclosures that seemingly exist to limit and partition space without apparent reason frustrates the natural desire to reign free.
Rather than creating a narrative from one image to the other, one, as a viewer, engages in a game of search, looking for the artist' interpretation on the theme.

Tait writes of the series,

Hold Tight is a recent collection of images that deal with the desire to tame that which is inherently outside of our control, the contrasting freedom that this control proposes to limit and how these ideas relate to our identity.

The artist's collection of twelve 8.5"x11" images from this series is also for sale, as displayed above, packaged together in an archival box. Limited to an edition of seven, the work can be purchased on the his website where you can also see the rest of the images from the series.

Rhonda and Chantelle by Graham E. Miller

The series, Suburban Splendour, by contender Graham Miller seeks to capture moments of "quiet desperation." It's a phrase that's tossed around so often in art and literature that it has become hackneyed; only rarely is it executed as well as this. What is so visceral about the work is how real the moments are. The carefully considered lighting and sense of space in the images enforces a kind of isolation that is present throughout the work. Instead of fretting over the conceptual or technical details, the viewer is pulled straight into the narrative of each frame. Who are these "characters," as Miller calls them, and what is it about them that we identify with?

Miller writes:

These characters are troubled, but not irretrievably lost; they carry a dignified endurance and a sense of bruised optimism. These people are survivors. They have a desire, as we all do, to be transported from darkness into light.

To some extent, it's a theme to which we can all relate, and a timeless one too. Miller cites many influences from art and literature such as the films of Paul Thomas Anderson and Ray Lawrence, paintings by Edward Hopper, and the writings of Raymond Carver. Thus it comes as no surprise that the photographs possess the depth of a great story and the cinematic beauty of a film still.

Below is an excerpt of the poem Tomorrow by Raymond Carver, with which the series has been paired.

I remember my mother, God love her,
saying, Don't wish for tomorrow.
You're wishing your life away.
Nevertheless, I wish
for tomorrow. In all its finery.
I want sleep to come and go, smoothly.
Like passing out of the door of one car
into another. And then to wake up!
Find tomorrow in my bedroom.

The resulting images embody the contradictions of our day-to-day lives; they are personal yet universal, composed yet true to life, and simple yet magnetic. The entire Suburban Splendour series, among other work, can be seen at Graham's portfolio.

Backroom by Nicole Hatanaka

Morbidly fascinating taxidermy is central to the work of contender Nicole Hatakana. Nicole's Taxinomia series, shot with a 4x5 field camera, documents the back rooms and archives of natural history museums and nature labs.

Nicole writes,

Underscoring this project is an interest in how specimens become worthy of preservation and study. What gets preserved and what gets thrown away? Which objects are put on a pedestal and which in a drawer? What determines value? More broadly, my practice is an attempt to deconstruct such binaries as ordinary and extraordinary, order and disorder, official and non-official, valuable and insignificant, in order to reframe the ways in which meaning may be constructed and interpreted for both the individual and the collective.

At its core, the Taxinomia series is about history; how what we choose to archive versus what we present in museums shapes the way that we interpret our past. About a week ago there was a fascinating article in New Scientist about a tiny necklace camera that was originally invented to help Alzheimer's patients jog their memory but may soon be sold to consumers as a "lifelogging device." The article suggests that as soon as next year anyone could wear this camera to automatically archive whatever is in front of them every 30 seconds.

However, unlike digital photographs, taxidermied animals take up lots of physical space and require expert preservation. In an age where we have the capacity to record and archive infinite amounts of digital information, the images from Taxinomia are a thought-provoking historiographical documentation of how we grapple with the challenge of preserving the tangible aspects of our history.

Contender Kyle T. Pierce's illustrations of maps drawn over photographs give geographic contextualization to his portraits of place. Both an illustrator and photographer, Kyle's pen and pencil are as strongly guided by the lines and shapes of the objects in the images as they are by his imagination and memory. His series' work together—sometimes with contiguous illustrations meant to connect images—to tell both fantastic and narrative stories of personal adventures. At times, the illustrations take on more abstract concepts, connecting ordinary objects like this car interior to an anatomy of Things that were lost (what I have found).

He writes,

There is an immediacy to drawing by hand that makes the end product feel more "alive." I use primarily pencil, ink, and oil pastel, and draw from life, photographs, and memory. In recent years, my illustrations have incorporated photography, allowing me to merge the real and surreal in an authentic way. The (3) submitted photographs are from 'Montpelier' and were shot during the 4th of July parade in 2006. In 2008/2009, the series was overlaid with fragments of a hand-drawn map of Vermont copied from the 1930 edition of the 'Commercial Atlas of the World'.

Kyle's drawings are often guided by the typographic, with slogans like "Stop searching forever, happiness is just next to you" written in playful cursive over photographs of his children splashing in a pool. The words and photographs both take on new meaning as one views the work—concentrating on the text and image as discrete and unified entities. They recall the optimism and wonder in simple joys conveyed in 20x200 edition-maker Shaun Sundholm's Untitled (Let's Get Lost), where he states, "Let's find some beautiful place to get lost."

Kyle's work also summons photographer and illustrator Jane Tam's series to the fun house, which also integrates both mediums. Her line drawings depict men and woman entangled in everyday activities like strumming the guitar or sitting at the office, though often—unlike Kyle's—laced with flirtatious innuendo.

Many more of Kyle's joyful illustrations, photographs, and illustrated photographs are available on his website. Where photographic memory does not do an experience justice, Kyle is on-hand to add aesthetic accent.

Tracks by Katie Koti

Landscapes seduce us. Even the most city-bred of people will succumb to the collective unconscious of beauty we see in nature. Painters and photographers have enticed us for centuries with such imagery, and will surely continue to do so. In contender Katie Koti's series Asunder, the Rhode Island artist visibly connects the landscape to the nature of the human body, furthering the idea of man's connection to the surrounding environment. Bent and nude, her figures—faces sometimes obscured and sometimes fully-bared—are entangled in the structures of their surroundings. The landscape and body become interchangeable, yet discrete entities.

Despite this seemingly natural reciprocation between nature and the body, the series' title, Asunder, suggests a separation more apparent than meets the eye. The nudity of the body is stark, and automatically draws our minds towards ideas on sexuality.

Katie writes,

Our society has attempted to rigidly define gender and sexuality into a binary divide. There is often a sense of disconnect that one can experience as a result of not fitting into these boxes. I hope to challenge these dichotomous roles as well as expose the struggle an individual can go through inside of their skin.

In previous work on gender study, Katie has highlighted this divide through scientifically arranged portraiture. Tightly cropped bodies systematically "undress identity" and remove the restrictive terminology we commonly associate with sexuality. In Asunder, Katie's figures are fixed amongst fields, bales of hay, decaying machinery, and other natural landscapes, their skin and bodies exposed in an external struggle with the place, they should theoretically feel most at ease.

Be sure to check out Katie's website to see additional work from this series as well as the The 50 States Project, where she is a participating artist. Hot ShotsShawn Records, Justin James Reed and 20x200 edition-maker Brian Ulrich are also contributors to the project, capturing portraits, the landscape, and industry across the United States.

Lois at Trindle and Lake, 2008 by Andrew H. Kessler

Contender Andrew Kessler's large format photographs of crossing guards are both formal portraits, and heart-meltingly sentimental. Upon seeing them I found myself recalling days from my own childhood, shuffling along icy sidewalks towards school with the aid of crossing guards to help guide me on my way.

About his work Andrew writes,

[This series] explores the personality, commitment, and dedication of the crossing guards in three towns. Each more interesting than the next, always on time to their post, some with more than 30 years at their posts, serious about this sometimes dangerous (drivers texting, doing their makeup, etc) work of getting children and adults safely across the street and to their destination. Sharing these images with adults evokes memories and immediately the stories start to flow of when they were young about their local crossing guard and the impact they had on their lives.

Bundled up in neon vests and coats, Andrew captures these nostalgic community staples, on foliage-laden sidewalks, in crosswalks, and on street corners. However, Andrew's series is not comprised of casual images of the passerby; they are elegantly executed with the detail and clarity afforded by very-present 4x5 camera. The crossing guards' sense of responsibility and focus is evident, and in the landscapes behind them, one can practically smell the aroma of the changing seasons.

Put on your scarf, mittens and backpack and head over to Andrew's portfolio to check out all of the portraits form his series, Crossing Guards.

p.s. We will continue to feature contenders here on the blog, Flickr and Facebook until we announce the 2009 Second Edition Hot Shots on November 30th. But, your last chance to enter is TOMORROW, October 23rd at 8:00 p.m. (EDT). Apply now!

Bench by Leah Holscher

Austalian-born contender Leah Holscher documents "colour, pattern and lines" in the pursuit of capturing the "beauty of ordinary things." Photographing familiar, even boring, objects and settings can elicit subtle qualities in them that otherwise go largely unnoticed. For me, the photographer who did this most vividly is William Eggleston, whose huge influence endures today. (A quick glance at previous Hot Shot winners supports this contention.)

Leah has traveled throughout Europe, Asia, Central America, the United States, and North Africa in search of "intimate scenes of quiet, unconventional beauty" that reveal "how we affect our surroundings, the natural arrangement of objects, what is kept, what is discarded, and what we leave behind."

See more of Leah's work on her website.

Amazon Relic and Brooklyn Summertime by Joshua G Warren

San Francisco-based contender Joshua Warren photographs "portraits" of fire hydrants in-situ, creating a colorful taxonomy of this sidewalk staple. About his series, Joshua writes:

They are these funny, stubby, phallic warriors, yet they speak to our greatest fears. They are the last line of defense against losing all one's worldly possessions. They are conduits to a vast unseen subterranean aquatic network. They are the dashers of hopes of rock-star parking. They are like Facebook for dogs.

With an idea as charmingly simple as this, there is definitely strength in numbers; Josh has already captured forty-two fire hydrants in his series. The obsessive aspiration for completeness of such playful work reminds me of one of my favorite artists, Daniel Eatock, who photographs abandoned car batteries.

Car Batteries by Daniel Eatock

Joshua's statement about his fire hydrants works beautifully in the case of Eatock's work as well:

Despite their being mass produced, each one is unique... Because of their ubiquity, however, they are the kind of thing that you almost don't see at all... until you start really looking. At any rate, I find them really beautiful, hilarious and compelling.

Perhaps taking cue from Bernd & Hilla Becher's catalogical portraits of large-scale industrial structures, Josh brings his camera to the more equanimous street-level capturing an object familiar to all of us. His work is a light-hearted and unpretentious reminder to reconsider the way we see everyday objects without somber or pedagogical overtones. Head over to Josh's portfolio and take a look at all the rusty, silly, patriotic, and colorful fire hydrants that you've probably missed.

Antler Speaker by Adam Caillier

At first glance the ambiguous thing at the center of Adam Caillier's Antler Speaker could be a sculpture, perhaps a shambling Joseph Beuys installation. Closer scrutiny reveals the kind of haphazard assemblage you make when moving apartments—if "you" are a college student and most of your gear is still at your parents' house (except the antler, you have to take the antler).

Or perhaps it is somewhere in between: a pile of arbitrary, decontextualized stuff that takes on a totemic power in bizarre combination. Adam seems to suggest as much when he says his work aims to "describe the traces of the everyday, the contained energy of the objects that make it, and my nascent awareness." An MFA candidate at Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD), Adam intimates that his consciousness as a photographer may not be much better informed about the nature of this energy than we viewers. His family history ("My father is a mortician/construction worker, my mother is a teacher, and my sister does hairdos in New Hampshire.") seems to ground him in things as facts, however prosaic or absurd.

Our awareness is left to contend with "what is there," visible but not totally knowable. The rest of his oeuvre explores these same ineffable qualities.

Lovely You In The Lovely Field by Erin L. Shafkind

A vacant stare in an abandoned wilderness with a funny hat. These are the simple elements that make up the amusingly beautiful photography of Erin L. Shafkind. Her subjects gaze directly, and indifferently, into the camera, unaware of the discomfort they create for the viewer. Comparably, this contrived ineptitude has become a staple in the world of independent film-making (along with quirky personalities, melancholia, and bangs). The fact that Erin captures these images with an analog film camera augments their connection to the forced awkwardness found throughout the scripts of indie films.

Erin, who works as a teacher in Seattle and is a self-proclaimed big fan of puffy clouds, champions the anti-aesthetic. In a separate black and white series, she focuses on the randomness of objects, people included, in their surrounding community. Everything is quiet, simple and charming. Women play the accordion among cows, furniture is strewn about a field, and men hula-hoop in suits. It's all a display, simultaneously symbolic and meaningless.

Erin hopes all her photos engage our notions of narrative around a framework of fashion photography. Her models coyly tease our perception of reality—Are they real? Are they human? Are they beautiful? But unlike fashion photography, her images exude a plainness. And the titles, like Bath Tub Beauty and Your Horns Take My Breath Away vaguely reference trashy romance novels, giving away her whimsically silly nature and letting viewers in on the joke. It's just her friends in strange headgear.

Untitled, 2009 by Janelle E. Jones

The midnight black crows that create domestic catastrophe in contender Janelle Jones' images seem to have no regard for keeping a clean house. They rip apart the contents of the pantry, shred roll after roll of toilet paper, pull apart feathered pillows, and in their anthropomorphic state, embody a house as though misbehaving children.

Jones creates her cacophonies with intention, with the birds devilishly still lingering at the scenes of their crime. Unlike other photographers who either explore the invitation of the wild beast into the unadulterated home as in Amy Stein's Domesticated or glorify the animal-as-human as in Jill Greenberg's large-scale posed Monkey Portraits, Jones portrays the birds as the obviously guilty, but shameless invaders who seem completely unaware they are treading unusual territory.

She writes of her work,

Humor, in its various forms and degrees, also plays an important role in my thought and creative processes. My work often suggests an air of irony and absurdity, and pushes the viewer to question first the truthfulness and then the apparent meaning of the image. By pushing situations to the point of absurdity, I am able to reduce overwhelming ideas to physical situations that are visible and understandable.

The crow, known to be both an intelligent and ominous avian, is the star of the Aesop's fable, The Crow and the Pitcher wherein the bird finds a pitcher full of water, but cannot drink it because its beak is too short. Rather than giving up, the crow drops pebbles into the pitcher one by one, until the water level is high enough for it to drink the water. Whether Jones views her carefully articulated gaggle of mess-making crows as intelligent, plotting creatures, or as a foreboding presence, she captures them with her tongue-in-cheek.

See more from this series and others on Janelle's website.

Untitled, 2009 by Rebecca S. Horne

I had the chance to meet Rebecca Horne at a portfolio review event a few years ago and was immediately taken with her work, wherein pitchers of water mysteriously empty themselves, a cup of coffee reflects a heavenly vault and paper bags express their previously unseen tragicomic selves. Her visual vocabulary is of the humble and domestic, but her rigorous compositions create a powerful allusive quality. The everyday materials and objects which comprise the subjects of her work are "evocative of raw, organic relationships," as she says, and lately she has begun to include herself in the photos (however obliquely, as above). Painstakingly assembled, the world she crafts is of a slightly surreal domesticity that feels entirely fresh.

Rebecca is also the Photo Editor of Discover Magazine, and has the enviable task of making the latest astrophysical visualizations somehow assort with product shots of clunky-looking scientific gadgets. She uses her blog to muse on her own work (read about her process with the above photograph here), other photographers she admires, and the challenges of forging a distinctive visual style for a consumer science magazine (including this recent favorite, "Why Is Black Hole Art So Shiny?"). Rebecca is a true thinker and photographer whose work lies in the space where personal symbolism and quantum physics intersect.

You can see Rebecca's portfolio here.

Untitled, From the series "The Cybernetic Tourist" by Elizabeth Obert

Contender Liz Obert's series, The Cybernetic Tourist, is a wonderful exercise in meta-photography: pictures of tourists taking pictures. Liz writes,

We use devices such as cell phones and cameras to connect to the world, but by doing so we become disconnected and removed from our immediate surroundings. I find this behavior particularly ironic in settings where people go to escape their usual hectic lives, but are unable to fully disengage. . . .This body of work is about observing and documenting people interacting in these spaces who are more concerned with the framing of the moment rather than the experience itself.

Her series is so interesting to me because, as a photographer myself, I often have trouble reconciling my desire to be on both sides of the camera at the same time. Back in August there was a great article by New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman titled At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus. Kimmelman writes,

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

Kimmelman and Obert both suggest that in our frenzy to see as many attractions as possible, we're losing out on the subtleties of the experience. All this talk, it turns out, is quite timely because tomorrow, October 17th, is Slow Art day at the Smithsonian Museum. According to the Smithsonian, the average person pauses "less than 8 seconds to take in a work of art." (5 seconds of which might be spent snapping a picture.) Tomorrow, the museum will celebrate art the slow way by encouraging visitors to reflect at length upon a few pieces of art and then participate in a group discussion at lunchtime!

Whether or not you can make it to the Smithsonian tomorrow, I urge you to stop by Liz's website, the Jen Bekman Gallery, or another favorite gallery or museum to take in some art, slowly.

I'd like to conclude with a quote from Ms. Bekman herself, a strong advocate of all things slow:

If we really take the time to savor what we consume, we're more inclined to be discerning about what exactly the input is. Conversely, if the makers of what we consume know that we're paying attention, they're more likely to give us the good stuff. Oh yes, my theory is riddled with flaws, I realize as I type this, but allow me some idealism, won't you please? Work with me people!

Common Composite: Clocks by Ted Ollier

There's something compelling about composite photography, like that created by contender Ted Ollier. Tens, hundreds, or even thousands of overlaid images allow us to see trends and patterns that are invisible to the naked eye, or, as in the photograph above, an object in multiple states of existence.

Ted writes,

In a sea of undifferentiated grey, nothing sparks an interest. Add a speck, a dot, a mark--and something emerges from the gloom. Something draws the attention and the eye. Something engages the mind. The world is, and we are designed to analyze it in ways that baffle the most advanced digital computational systems we can devise. Blur it, average it, dice it, compress it, and the mind still gleans some sort of information from the inputs it is provided.

Ted's work reminded me of some of my favorite composite images from across the web, which can have the effect of diluting the individual object, while simultaneously evoking a a sense of awe in the surreal quality that the multiples creates. Jason Salavon takes Playboy centerfolds and layers them to show "the evolution of this form of portraiture" through the decades.

Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized), 2002 by Jason Salavon

Penelope Umbrico's 20x200 edition, 87 Suns From Fllickr - 29 Visible, culls nearly a hundred sunset photographs found on Flickr into a single, celestial image:

87 Suns From Flickr - 29 Visible by Penelope Umbrico

Ho-Yeol Ryu visualizes the trajectories of an entire day's worth of flights at the airport resulting in this image below:

Busy Airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu

Most recently, a new project by Joshua T. Nimoy made the rounds, declaring that the average color of more the 26,000 pieces of art in the collection of the MoMA produced this shade of brownish gray:

In addition to his composite photography, Ted, a self-proclaimed "armchair philosopher" has many other conceptual projects on his website in a diverse range of media like printmaking, sculpture, installation and sound. Browsing through, I began to wonder what a composite of all his experiments, or a composite of all the composites, would tell us about the works as a whole.

Contender Jeff Seltzer caught my eye with his new series because it conveys my exact feelings on this blustery fall day. It's slightly eerie, melancholy and desolate, though the presence of chairs and empty bike racks, in some of the images, leave a sense of nostalgia and longing for the warmer months and good times we just left behind.

Jeff intends the series to reveal socialized structured space and how it imposes societal norms upon its inhabitants—an idea that has become of interest to me as a recent immigrant to New York City, exploring the nooks and crannies of its underbelly. There are grand buildings and streets intended to be viewed, to have us take something away and leave us with the feeling of awe. We create our own spaces of comfort to feel familiar and confident, but much of this is based on the aesthetics that have already been laid out before us. In photographing an educational building, Jeff is revealing the constructed experiences that channeled most of us through our childhood and created our perception of the use of space.

Jeff describes his series:

The series of images taken at Los Angeles Valley College (L.A.V.C) is a study of contradictions between the perceived benefits of formal and structured educational environments, and the reality of order as a potential repressive tool. The images, which in each case represent a pre-set state of conditions determined by the institution, seek to show an inherent rejection of these state affairs by the photographer, by portraying either their distinct abandonment, state of repair, or isolation.

His work reminds me of the work of performance artist Alex Villar that was part of The Interventionists at Mass MoCa in 2004. The series, titled Other Spaces, documented Villar intervening and reclaiming spaces in New York City that normally go unnoticed. This included the tiny crevice between two buildings, an empty concrete alley behind a gate that normally went un-tread, and the space underneath a stoop. All of his actions, as well as Jeff's, inspire viewers to look at what is not in front of us, to step off the beaten path and take in the forgotten and unused.

Jeff Seltzer is based in Los Angeles and was educated at San Diego State University, receiving a BA and an MA in Rhetorical Theory.

Refinery Triptych (panel 1) by Massimo Cristaldi.

The work of Massimo Cristaldi is concerned with the ineffable qualities of the visible world. Here, nature and industry make an unlikely pair, yet they make a conceptual reciprocation. The flock of starlings in this photograph are drawn to the refinery's thermal flows; en masse they create a kind of super-organism that almost emulates the scale of the artificial complex. And, they create an amazing visual tension as well.

Having written about his body of work Simulacra elsewhere, I continue to be drawn to the ideas behind his photographs, which in his words represent "possible and strange harmonies." He adds, "I dedicate a particular interest to boundary lands in unstable balance between progress and leftover traces of a time gone."

Based in Catania and Rome, Massimo has received awards from the Prix de Photographie de Paris and International Photography Awards this year alone. Much more can be seen at his website, which The New York Times recently called out as a must-see portfolio site.

Beale Street by Thomas Griscom

Tom Griscom has been collaborating with the San Francisco State University Labor Archives and Research Center to document important sites of labor revolt and unionization in the Bay Area. Beale Street depicts an area bridging the Financial District and Multimedia Gulch whose traces of labor struggle are today largely eradicated. Though many brick warehouse spaces remain, it is hard to imagine this neighborhood of corporate centers and oyster bars was once the site of the violent climax to the months-long West Coast Longshoremen's Strike 75 years ago, popularly known as "Bloody Thursday."

But this stirring historical reflection is only one motivation behind this body of work. Tom says,

By no means is this project a political statement as much as it is about me trying to understand the allure of the West Coast for so many people, myself included. It has always had the promise of a better life, both the quality of and financially. Choosing these structures has been a look at what remains, what has been reappropriated, and what is gone completely. What started as a small collaborative project for [the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' triennial] Bay Area Now last summer, then turned into a 50 page thesis and show, and now I am expanding it further to parallel the downturn California is facing

With this in mind, these panoramic portraits are especially poignant in that the format is ostensibly suited for the romantic sweep of California's vistas, only to document a restless and sometimes bitter history.

More of Tom's labor sites and other portfolios can be found on his website.

Perhaps the most famously photographed set of twins in the art world are Cathleen Mulcahy and Colleen Yorke, also known as The Wade sisters or the Diane Arbus twins. Arbus photographed the sisters in matching dark green dresses, after discovering them—and their startling eyes—at a local party for twins and triplets in 1967.

The photograph of the Wade sisters was discovered among many photographs of "freaks" and "outsiders" in Arbus' collection after she committed suicide in 1971. They suggest that Arbus compartmentalized twins among the bizarre and tragic forms of humanity that existed in her vision of the world—a world that was both a point of fixation and an entity that engulfed her psyche.

Contender Andrew A. Henderson has also sought out twins in his project, Seeing Double, but only twins in the village of Kodinji in the southern state of Kerala in India. The village is comprised of 2,000 families, but contains 250 sets of twins, a phenomena that has occurred without apparent explanation. Henderson notes, "while most twinning occurs in the West because of the widespread use of fertility drugs, doctors cannot attribute a reason to why it occurs in Kodinji, especially given that India has one of the lowest twinning rates in the world."

Henderson's work is a catalog of double-dom, and the pairs of his brothers, sisters and sister-brother combinations stand side-by-side shot head-on, unsmiling, in an ambiguously located forest. Some pairs are dressed alike, some not, some sets identical and others fraternal and disparate enough in appearance that their twin-ship is only knowable through Henderson's documentation. Henderson neither celebrates nor condemns the individual sets of twins—and rather, only suggests that their existence is a difference to anthropologically acknowledge. His stage-lit forest backdrop avoids making commentary about the rest of the village of Kodinji—whether it is poor or industrial, conservative or liberal, or if the twins are welcome or outcast in their own community.

Henderson has also photographed other hierarchical and classifying elements of Indian society including a series about individuals who suffer leprosy titled The Untouchables and another, Dreaming for Fiza about the struggle of transsexuals. Images from both series are available on his website.

Lola Series 2 by Joshua Schwalbach-Scott

This image from the Lola series by contender, Joshua Schwalbach-Scott, is the type of stylized photographic eye-candy that might be more at home on a billboard or your TV screen than on the walls of a gallery. Upon seeing the images I became instantly nostalgic for the viral Sony Bravia ads featuring bouncy balls and paint cannons.

Outside the context of logos, headlines, and lifestyle-branding, the Lola series (actually outtakes from a commercial perfume shoot) evoke an abstract kind of whimsy. These images, Joshua writes, are:

. . . artistic interpretations out of items in our overly commercialized society, which is an overall theme throughout my work.

To me, this recontextualization of commercial photography is akin to the appropriation work of Richard Prince, whose infamous rephotographs of the unbranded elements of magazine ads created a bold new category of fine art.

Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, by Richard Prince

Lola Series 1 by Joshua Schwalbach-Scott

However, Joshua's work isn't limited to literal explosions of color. Other portfolios up on his site such as Snapshots and Hong Kong show his engagement with street and travel photography. The diverse subject matter allows us to see several sides of a single artist whose experimentation and crossover between personal and commercial work makes him an exciting photographer to watch.

129 6th Ave W, Dickinson, ND, 2009 by David Ebeltoft

Even in this digital age, the physical qualities of the work are still critical considerations for photographers. What kind of film (for those who still use it, and there are many), the type of print, the quality of print stock, and not least, the matte and frame are all material choices which affect how the photograph is displayed and perceived.

It helps to see the work in person, of course; I saw the importance of these qualities at the 2007 solo exhibition of Helen Van Meene's work at Yancey Richardson Gallery. Van Meene used framing to her advantage by encasing her beatific portraits of children in thin, dark walnut frames to give the images a votive-like quality. The portraits were not only beautiful and eerie, but the slight frames reflected the delicate character of these children.

Contender David Ebeltoft brings this approach to light in his new body of work, Residential. He writes about the project,

My current series, Residential, was built on the idea of how a home's external appearance and formal composition can be extensions of the individual, their family, and community. The framework of each dwelling became a symbol, a scene from an ordinary existence that helped shape my idea of how a home, both aesthetically and conceptually, should look. The split-toned, gelatin silver prints are 'housed' in a white-stained 1/2in Baltic-birch matte and ebony-stained 2x4 walnut frame.

David Ebeltoft completed his BFA in Photography and Museum Studies at the College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2002. David received the Grand Prize at the 2008 National Small Works Exhibition at the Arkell Museum and was most recently awarded the 2009 AATTA Arts Fellowship at Dickinson State University.

Photographs with magical light always capture my heart. This obsession with luminous qualities began with the intensive lighting in the work of Philip Lorca DiCorcia, was solidified by the 2006 exhibition Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and extends to the unearthly glows found in the photographs of 2009 Hot Shot Mike Sinclair. The misty haze found in Contender Sarina N. Finkelstein's work just reinforces my swooning. Golden sunshine is just, well, sunny, and instantly implies the endless summer of the West Coast. It is surprising, then, to see this light fall on sobering and increasingly all-too-familiar subject matter (as we've also observed in the entries from other Hey, Hot Shot! Contenders this year): the effects of the recession.

Sarina documents the surprising resurgence of gold miners in the mountains of Northern California and their struggles. Says Sarina of the project,

This body of work focuses on five California gold prospecting communities. The miners here--victims of recent layoffs, veterans, ex-convicts, and freelancers in between gigs--are dependent on the income from their claims to feed their families. Selling an ounce of gold at $1000/oz provides them with hope for survival. The New '49ers arrive in Winnebagos and pickups, having sold their homes and farms for subsistence. They create the same semi-permanent Hoovervilles along the edge of the river canyon as their predecessors.

This image strikes me because it documents a pregnant moment: a young man casually strolling down a riverside, a family in the far distance. At first glance it seems idyllic. However, the context casts the image in a darker light; this is a place of hardship, where people take on unknown odds in unlikely ways to survive in the worst economic climate in generations. But it is also full of promise; accidental but tight-knit communities emerge as they face the same hardships and an uncertain future together.

Sarina Finkelstein received her BFA in Photography and Art History from Washington University in Saint Louis, and then completed her MFA in Photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has been a guest speaker for the Professional Women Photographers (PWP) and a featured photographer in PWP Magazine, as well as a speaker and award recipient at the 2004 Society for Photographic Education National Conference.

Untitled (Aren't They Beautiful?) by Kara Suhey

"Aren't they beautiful?" asks contender Kara Suhey in a series of photographs that documents her own candy red fingernails. The work, in both appearance and thought, resembles the spontaneity of images made on a camera phone and questions her intent to create photography-as-art. The series appears to be a recreational afterthought, but Kara's naivety is sweetly feminine with a touch of nonchalant narcissism. She knows what she's doing.

The precise stupidity of the statement [Aren't They Beautiful?] leads one to ask whether or not I might be serious. It's this hazy area of childlike wonderment in which these photographs dwell. In the gravity and simplicity of the present moment, my own red and shining fingernails are radiantly beautiful.

This kind of self-aware work acknowledges the action of artists to create and show, while mocking the formality of this action itself. Everything is delivered with a sly wink. Though the photos clearly examine the concept of beauty, they cheekily poke fun at feminist ideologies as well; direct embodiment of our generation's post-feminist wit and irreverence.

But truly, it's all about having fun while making and sharing art. Kara and her longtime friend, Mina Karimi, have also been collaborating on a series of performance projects under the idea that Everything Will Be Okay. Part public art and part motivational speaker, their goal is to surprise everyday people by bringing a bit of unexpected joy to their lives. This includes organizing a NYC reenactment of the unforgettable parade scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and a two-month Dance Everyday tour.

This project idea came to us as a tangible extension of our longtime ideal that you should follow your bliss and do what you truly feel like doing. This means taking an active role in your own enjoyment and cultivating a creative mind, playful spirit, and performing the work you genuinely would like to do.

Kara's projects are quite inspiring for all struggling artists out there, reminding you that the power of one person (or two!) can greatly influence the collective experience.

x2EXP60 by Damian VanCamp

Edward Weston once quipped that "consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk." Hot Shot Contender Damian VanCamp's work seems to take this advice to heart in his series Watching The World. VanCamp sidesteps compositional convention by exposing his roll once, leaving it for a while (in the process forgetting what he had first shot), and re-exposing the film. The resultant images are generated by creative chance, revealing distorted overlays of textures and unexpected intersections of light and shadow.

According to VanCamp Watching The World is best understood next to Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai's poem, "The Resurrection of the Dead," part of which reads:

We will not take anything with us.
Even plundering kings, they all left something here.
Lovers and conquerors, happy and sad,
they all left something here, a sign, a house,
like a man who seeks to return to a beloved place
and purposely forgets a book, a basket, a pair of glasses,
so that he will have an excuse to come back to the beloved place.
In the same way we leave things here.
In the same way the dead leave us.

See more of VanCamp's work on his website.

LESS 7 by Sergei Sviatchenko

Browsing through this year's second edition of Hot Shot contenders, the bright colors and faceted shapes of Sergei Sviatchenko's photo collage submissions brought my scroll to a stop. A 60-year old architect from the Ukraine, Sergei uses collage to invite the public within his artistic process, asking for reflection on our modern vision of life and culture. His most recent series, LESS, explores portraits and architecture, recombining photos into singular objects that float against a flat space of emotive neon. He writes,

It might sound absurd or surreal, but the recontextualisation [sic] of familiar everyday objects, with the use of photo collage are turned into scarp contoured, sculptural expressions, point out the media imagery all around us and delivers the imagery in new, dynamic forms.

Following a large history of photomontage artists from the Constructivists to the Dadaists, Sergei takes the medium one step further by also photographing his collages parading through real space. These pieces are interacting with fingers, toes and various environmental elements, adding a voyeuristic and process-heavy dimension to the work.

Sergei's surreal world of jumbled miscellany is more readily experienced in his large-scale, pervading installation work, which include drawing, painting and video (an expansion on his belief that all art is inherently a collage).

In 2002, Sergei opened a collaborative non-profit exhibition space, Senko Studio in Viborg, Denmark. The space showcases emerging new media artists and experimental projects, while his accompanying venture, Senko Frame Project, has expanded to include contemporary video art.

His most recent show, Mutatis Mutandis, in collaboration with photographer Jan von Holleben, combined human and animal structures superimposed over scenic landscapes at the Farmani Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.

Toys R'Us Customer Pickup by Darrius Thompson

Darrius Thompson's Toys R' Us Customer Pickup is spare in subject and composition but long on possibility. On one level is the frank presentation of a bland, if not unsightly, scene. A steel door is barely demarcated from the surrounding surface, the side or back of a major retail store. The asphalt comes right up to the edge of the building save for a small patch of concrete. The few other details are pedestrian; the stain on the door is perhaps the most compelling detail of the overall picture.

This attention to the banal and ugly has a proud pedigree in modern photography. Lewis Baltz turned his camera on the unexpressive surfaces of corporate buildings in his landmark The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, published in 1974. This would soon be succeeded by the New Topographics exhibition and catalog (of which Steidl has also published a volume dedicated to the show and its legacy). This attention to the ready-made environment at hand transformed photographic practice in allowing the quotidian and distasteful as legitimate subjects for depiction and consumption. Darrius is clearly embracing this tradition in its entirety.

Darrius has more work up on his site as well as a blog and resource site, urbansand, both worth checking out (including interviews with 20x200 edition-maker Michael Lundgren and contender Bryan Formhals).

Untitled by Matt Dallos

Contender Matt Dallos returns to us in this round of competition with work from his series, I Want The Red One. The images, taken at a carnival-like scene full of burly men examining muddy fields full of tractors, pays homage to one of America's most trusted pieces of machinery. The tractors here are the reason for celebration; they are being examined, fixed, rode upon and raced, with swaths of onlookers concentrating on the vehicles. On the neighboring fairgrounds families en masse gather to watch fireworks, sparklers, and nighttime tractor riders creating an aura reminiscent of some of 2009 First Edition Hot Shot Mike Sinclair's large-scale portraits of fairgrounds, rodeos, and carnivals.
These large-scale celebrations bring about the opportunity to observe both individuals, and individuals as a dynamic group, who are often focused on a specific spectacle—in this case, it is the tractors.

This work is a departure from Dallos' previously submitted series of triptychs, which examined intersections of man and nature on the South Island of New Zealand, but both are entrenched in the connection of humans to the land. Of his work, Matt writes,

I constantly immerse myself in topics such as our relationship with the land, the idea of human scale, agri-business, the dichotomy of wild and civilized. But in my life I am unable to separate these abstract ideas from the reality of topography, geology, ecology. In the end I am bound to the rock, to the pavement, to the trees, to the land.

See more from I Want The Red One and other series on Matt's website.

p.s. You can see more photos from our first-ever Hey, Hot Shot! Confab + Print Trade on flickr!

Untitled (Sleep) by Jaime Permuth

Jaime Permuth ventures into challenging territories of contemporary art practice with his series, The Completely Visible World. Permuth casts a nude couple into a grimy service core, magnifying their apparent vulnerability with the kind of lighting and metallic effects seen in high-end print ad campaigns and German car brochures. Upon scrutiny, they are behind a window, wherein light-studded trees are seen in reflection.

Of this body of work, the Guatemala-born, New York-based Permuth says:

In our twenty-first century, an endlessly sharp and unforgiving spotlight is cast on the body, which once captured is then processed and altered by digital technologies to please the greatest number of consumers. Humanity is redefined as the vast array of spectators which decides how all should look and move through space.

Seen through portals and windows throughout The Completely Visible World, this modern Adam and Eve are subject first to the photographer's staging and manipulation, then our gaze, and ultimately, a commercial context. It's unclear whether even having each other in this harsh environment will suffice, which is an allegory we all might want to ponder.

bright black sky by Julia Galdo

Hot Shot contender Julia Galdo has submitted a series of self-portraits that offer fragmentary narratives full of tension and curiosity. Julia writes, "What I learned while making [this] work is how to project emotions, problems, anxieties through the interaction of an environment. . . . It's my hope that they connect with the person in that frame in a sympathetic way."

Photographers who explore desire and female identity now constitute a distinct category of the modern canon, inclusive of Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman and Anna Gaskell. Galdo's work shares these qualities, yet possesses its own sense of isolation and everyday surrealism.

See more of Julia's photographs on her website.

Waiting room, Alishan, Taiwan. 2008 by Magda Biernat

New York-based photographer Magda Biernat returns to us again in this year's second edition of competition with compelling work from her travels abroad. After entering 2009's first round of competition, she was selected (by Jen herself!) as a winner of Photo-Op, the 14th Annual Photographic Competition run by Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW).

Born in Poland, Magda attended the Wielkopolska School of Photography before making her way to New York via Seattle. Then, after stints working at Magnum Photos and Metropolis Magazine, she embarked on a year of travels in 2007 to see where and how people live in seventeen different countries around the world. The image above was made during this time abroad, and is part of the series Inhabited. While many of Magda's earlier projects look at the outsides of living spaces and buildings, lining up the geometries of architecture and nature in cities both near and far, Inhabited makes a departure into closed and more personal spaces, inviting us behind the walls of buildings previously captured.

She writes of Inhabited,

I look into the quiet spaces where people sleep, wait, and work. The interiors of the rooms I've shot serve the same purpose no matter where they are found. Stripped of obvious cultural references and detached from their surroundings, they gain a kind of disorienting universality. The rooms are unoccupied but on closer inspection, items like a crumpled pillow or a half full bottle of water imply the human presence. By carefully composing each frame and eliminating the people who otherwise would help distinguish the place geographically, I wanted the spaces to become anonymous.

Though the habitats are void of people, their objects—bed posts, chairs, windows, and table legs—create the framework for Biernat's intimate insight into their lives while maintaining an overarching cultural ambiguity. One is only able to discern her possible location by tiny hints like Chinese script written on a calendar, and is left to guess who is living in these spaces, and where in the world Biernat is capturing their homes. The tone of the images is hushed and patient, and one imagines Biernat to be shooting in silence, surrounded only by the natural light that finds its way into each of these spaces.

See more of Magda's work from this series (and others) on her website and take a look at more of our contenders on flickr and facebook.

Leon, 2009 by Michael C. Mccraw

Our latest contender, Michael C. Mccraw hails from the city of Birmingham, Alabama. His work focuses on the South as a place that is both his home and a place he longs to find the feeling he supposes that home is supposed to elicit. He writes of his work,

My work is about the comforts of home, and the constant search for it. What it means to be Southern, and the disconnect I feel with the region I've spent all my life. Our connection with the rivers and hills that run deep through our past. The ever-changing landscape and people. Slowly being choked by growth and kudzu.

Many photographers before Mccraw have focused on capturing the essence of the South, exceptional among them William Eggleston, Emmet Gowin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Paul Kwilecki. Each works in a unique tradition ranging from Kwilecki's documentation of the rural poor that seems an evolution of the photographers hired during the days of the Farm Security Administration to Meatyard's placid portraits of children and families in backyards, often dressed in costume or wearing masks. Eggleston's Memphis-born eye is often associated with the word "democracy," reflecting on his equanimous approach to both the portrait, the landscape, and the mundane; his recent retrospective at The Whitney was named Democratic Camera in acknowledgment of this approach. Emmet Gowin is best known for his large-format black and white rural landscapes, family and dramatic vignetting.

One is led to ask whether there is common thread through the work of all of these above, and if there is, is that thread quintessentially Southern? Must one be Southern born and bred in order to capture the South, or is the South more an idea than an aesthetic that can be captured at all?

Gene Thornton, in a review of the 1981 exhibit I Shall Save One Land Unvisited featuring 11 Southern photographers at the International Center of Photography, asks similar questions about characterizing the South:

What do people think about when they think about the South today? Magnolias and moonlight? Rednecks, sharecroppers and the Ku Klux Klan? The Old South of romance and legend as memorialized in ''Gone with the Wind'' and the novels of William Faulkner? The New South of Henry Grady and the Atlanta Constitution as anatomized in the novels of Walker Percy?

He goes on to write that new photography from the South is indistinguishable from new photography from elsewhere, but that doesn't mean it's not Southern. That the South has become a hotbed for photographers is the bigger reason for celebration than suggesting a unified essence emerges from it.

Mccraw recently began a blog which features more of his work; on it is currently a sole post of "travels with amy" featuring a selection of images, presumably taken in the South. Mccraw's work represents a glimpse of photography being made by young southerners today and suggests that the desire to continue the tradition of capturing a region is ever-strong.

Girl on Wilshire by Bryan Formhals

Bryan Formhals has enough creative activity going that he merits an extended post. As a curator (or, visual editor? more on that below) his online exhibition endeavor La Pura Vida Gallery, which presents innovative monthly group exhibitions, just turned two years old. Pooled from Flickr and presented with a simple PREV/NEXT navigation, these shows have an unmediated intimacy that exemplifies what an online gallery should be.

But of course Bryan is himself a photographer and worthy Hey, Hot Shot! contender whose Girl On Wilshire is from a body of work created on peregrinations around his former base of Los Angeles, where the "pure, golden, electric sunshine" seduced him into photography. It also embodies the creative ambiguities inherent in his photographs; here a woman-shaped outline hovers among a conflation of picture planes and reflections at indeterminate distances. It is an image of fugitive images.

Bryan took some time out to answer a few questions about La Pura Vida and how his photography coincides with the practice of editing and curating images.

What seemed missing from the way that photography was presented online that you wanted to address when you started LPV Gallery two years ago?
I'm not sure I was addressing the wider spectrum of photography online, it was more related to how photography was presented and organized on Flickr that I wanted to address. I was an admin for HCSP (Hardcore Street Photography), which was my first taste of editing photos. After doing that for about a year I become a bit bored with editing a single type of genre. My interest in photography was expanding and I simply wanted to investigate a wider variety of work. The way photos are presented in pools on Flickr is basically a constant stream. It's hard to sequence and really present a selection of photos in an interesting way. So really, I wanted to take some of the great work we were finding on Flickr and present it in a more manageable and interesting way, which meant taking it off Flickr.

When you started out how did photographers find you to submit their work?
Like I mentioned, LPV spun off from HCSP which is one of the most prominent documentary/fine art groups on Flickr. Most of the photographers that initially found LPV came from there and through basic networking and promotion on Flickr. These days though, the blog, Twitter, and Tumblr also bring in new submissions.

What I think is unique about LPV and the network of groups we have established on Flickr is that we're essentially crowd sourcing the editing. There's the perception that finding work on Flickr is challenging and it can be, but if you network and follow certain people and groups, the good work gets filtered up to you. I have the 'favorites' of a few dependable people on my RSS and keep tabs on a few pools, so that's how I find the work. And really, that's how much of it bubbles up to LPV. It's actually very interesting how it kind of organically happens.

As a photographer, when did the path of curating engage your curiosity, and how?
I was in L.A. because I wanted to be a screenwriter and about 4 years ago I got burned out and just lost the motivation to write, but I still had creative impulses that needed to be satisfied. So I started bringing a camera with me on my walks around LA. As is the case with many people, I became addicted and started to study the history of photography. But at the same time I was networking with other aspiring amateurs on Flickr and eventually fell in with the street photography crowd.

As I continued to study photography, I quickly learned that lesson that everyone interested photography learns, which is that you need to look at lots and lots of photography. And right now, there's really no better place to find a high volume of new photography than Flickr. Editing and curating forces you to make choices. I enjoy that. I like deconstructing a photograph and figuring out why I like it (sometimes I have no idea why!). The process of fine tuning one's sensibility is one of the joys of consuming and appreciating art. The simple act of discovering new photography is thrilling to me. And for my own work as a photographer, it's absolutely necessary because I want to improve and expand my photographic vocabulary. It's a never-ending process I imagine.

Untitled by Lina Scheynius

At first the shows were "edited," but now they are "curated." Is this just a difference of phrasing or is there a philosophical difference?
Back at the beginning I did most of the edits and I can't call myself a curator with a straight face, so I always put "edited by." But when I started bringing on different editors each month, they would say "curated" by and I would just leave it. For me, what we're doing on LPV is editing. I know online curation is a bit of a buzz term but I'm not sure it's appropriate. I think people are probably throwing it around because it adds a bit of gravitas to what we're all doing. But essentially, I think we're editors.

Your show titles and themes have an allusive, poetic quality to them. What defines an LPV Gallery show?
The titles and themes were an accidental quirk. We really didn't even have themes until April 2008. I was doing an edit and when I saw this photograph the phrase 'beautiful consciousness' just popped into my head. From there, I went with it and we started using quotes, songs, and book passages as the themes. This probably isn't unique to LPV, but I think it's part of what defines an LPV show. We take our inspiration from more poetic or philosophical ideas rather than anything too literal. An LPV show is kind of a mash-up of vernacular, documentary and fine art photography. I don't really like looking at photography through the prism of genres though. It gets too rigid for me.

You also seem to follow issues around copyright, appropriation, and larger theoretical debates about representation. How do these issues inform your "big picture" (yes, pun) of the state of photography today? And does this change the kind of work you are interested in?
I'm very interested to see how photography evolves online and it bothers me when corporations and unscrupulous entrepreneurs use the chaos of the internet to take advantage of content creators. Of course, the use of content on the web can be confusing and is ever evolving, so I think we need to keep an open mind. But we also need to speak up and keep people informed when we see something we know to be wrong. I want to see photographers and artists take more control of their content and not be so shackled to the whims of publishers and the bottom line. I'm really interested in photographers and groups who can build their own kingdom so to speak.

Untitled by Reuven Lebovitch

Contender Reuven Lebovitch's submitted series stages humorous situations around the home inspired by deeper psychological complexities. A woman simultaneously knits and unravels a sweater, so it is unclear whether she moving forwards or unwinding. A cross-stitched image of a small town in the mountains is hung precariously on a wall with dozens of nails and holes of past attempts surrounding the frame. Lebovitch's images suggest that the home is an extension of the human psyche—our desires to decorate and partake in domestic activities like knitting a sweater are bathed in a Rorschach of process. Reuven suggests that how we go about these daily tasks speaks volumes about our individual quirks—and that perhaps she who is most focused on knitting the sweater may also be the last to notice that it is unraveling.

See more work by Reuven on his website and additional images by this season's contenders on facebook and flickr.

Early morning meditation on Mount Guogong by Xiao Xiao Xu

Chinese-born photographer Xiao Xiao Xu immigrated to the Netherlands at age 14 and only recently returned to the hometown she left a decade ago. Xu describes this town, Wenzhou, (also the name of the series), as a "very sentimental journey for me to rediscover my home, my childhood and my memories." Using photography—a medium she found as a way to express herself while searching for identity in the Netherlands—Xu captures a collection of portraits, interiors, and profiles of everyday objects in her native Wenzhou.

Together, the images form a humble large-scale portrait of a town that we are invited observe along with Xu as she rediscovers it herself. Two middle-aged men enjoy a cigarette break together, a young boy in school uniform stiffly holds his posture, and the crowded balconies of a skyrise residential building are murky but visible through the branches of a flowering tree. Xu suggests that her memory of her hometown is about the intimately commonplace—that to be in Wenzhou is to silently observe daily rhythms with the keen eye of someone native-born. Ten years spent away cannot remove the inevitable feeling that, for her, this is still home.

Many additional images from Wenzhou are available on Xu's website alongside several other projects. Next week I'll be looking at other young Chinese photographers whose work has caught our eye (including some of our very own Hot Shots and 20x200 artists), but we're also curious to hear of any projects coming-from or about China that have caught your eye. Please let us know!

Golden Eagle in Medroom by Annie Marie Musselman

As I reviewed the latest batch of Hey, Hot Shot! contenders, this image by Annie Marie Musselman stopped me in my tracks. It's from her series Finding Trust, about which she writes:

Looking for truth after my mother passed away in 2002 I found the Sarvey Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Located in the foothills of the beautiful Cascade mountains, it's a place where injured, wild creatures come to finish their journeys or start new ones, where I've seen love, trust and intuition that equals that of a mother and child, a home where a few humans have come together to save the lives of many precious creatures.

Annie's series made me think of other striking animal portraits in recent memory, with Jill Greenberg's (aka The Manipulator) monkeys and bears foremost in my mind. Greenberg's well-known work is fantastic, but she presents her animal subjects as spectacles.

Worried, 2005, from the series Monkey Portraits by Jill Greenberg

Like much animal photography, Greenberg's work feels voyeuristic, as if I were peering through the bars of a (very clean) zoo. What appeals to me about Finding Trust is how candid and yet subtle the images are. Perhaps it's the palpable closeness between Annie and the animals she cares for that closes this gap of perception and emotion. Instead of feeling like I am watching from afar, her photographs give me the sensation of being with the animal in that exact point in space and time.

Fawn Looking Out Window by Annie Marie Musselman

Once drawn in, I feel the intense vulnerability and urgency of the moment. As Annie writes:

There is limited time for pictures during moments of crisis, constant worry over sick and dying animals, but all the while looking for moments to shoot the beauty around me. The more I am with these creatures, the more I see their inner beauty and intelligence and the more frustrated I become by humanity's neglect of nature. I believe the wild creatures among us embody the instinct and love we have lost, and with this I realize the purpose of my work.

I am reminded of something 2009 First Edition HHS! contender Sam Falls said in an interview. Though he wasn't talking about animals specifically, these words still resonate: "The pieces I always return to and can look at over and over in a museum's permanent collection are works that make me feel and not think, where there's no pedagogy but just empathy."

Dog Culture_3 by Philipp Engelhorn

Hong Kong-based photographer Philipp Englehorn captures photographic stories that take him to some of the world's poorest regions. In Dogs of Kabul, Engelhorn enters the ring of weekly dog fights, a tradition in the Muslim regions of Afghanistan that has been celebrated for centuries.

Dog-fighting, which carries weighty legal repercussions in the United States and many other Western countries, is a community event in Kabul serving as both ritual and spectacle. Englehorn notes,

Up to 1000 people gather in the early mornings to see Molossel Dogs (Powerful local Breeds Like Koochee Dogs) fought by strict rules. There are no death and only little blood in these fights...It feels like a wrestling match of 2 ancient warriors.

The fights celebrate the animals and their owners rather than positing the dogs as beings to be sacrificed either for money or for pride. The dogs are treated as loved and prized possessions and dog trainers spend hours exercising their "warriors" in preparation for the weekly fights. In the image above, the older man dressed in white serves as the judge of the day's fights making sure no dogs are excessively wounded as they tug and tussle with one another. The crowd billows into the mountains, fixated on the animals, and one stares back at the crowd in their dark dress worn against the snowy mountainous backdrop.

In contrast, the most visible images of modern-day Afghanistan in the media convey a different side of the country—one of perpetual turmoil and instability. Pictures depict American military troops stationed in Kabul, soldiers firing mortars and missiles from army bases, Afghanis lined up for an election with questionable validity, and innocent citizens injured by bombs and violence. Englehorn's essay offers unusual insight into a weekly ritual that offers a point of pride, entertainment, and reason for communing for this otherwise turbulent society and suggests that traditions as these are ways to hold on to the stability they can.

Untitled (page no. 6) by Timothy D. White

HHS! contender Timothy D. White hails from Auckland. He's spent four years in the far northernmost reaches of New Zealand working on the project he has submitted to us, True North. White set out on the project to "explore preconceptions of an area of NZ regarded as 'hopeless' due to its poor socioeconomic nature and geographic isolation." His images, and accompanying self-published book, strive to show the true nature of the region.

As he writes, "the journey became an exploration of the area's spiritual nature as well as... the 'social landscape', including local Maori, organic farmers, and a disappearing way of life (or what has been described as a 'vision of the future' in uncertain economic times)."

I can't help but think of 2008 First Edition Hot Shot Derek Henderson's achingly beautiful Terrible Boredom of Paradise, also taken taken in New Zealand, and of course, 2009 First Edition Hot Shot Kurt Tong and his series, Farewell in Labrador. It seems that in the far corners of the world, where people are struggling to find a balance between a certain quality of life and inevitable "progress", there are, thankfully, a handful of photographers around to document what may be, or is already, lost. For as slowly as we may think time passes, it can all happen quite quickly.

Our Border by David Rochkind

Whether you're a seasoned photographer or just have a passing interest in photography, don't miss the article on page C1 of yesterday's New York Times by Randy Kennedy, Treasures From an Underground Trove. The big news is that, for the first time ever, a small portion of the subterranean National Geographic Society photo archives in Washington are being unearthed for an upcoming gallery show in Chelsea. While there will surely be controversy about the possible sale of these artifacts to private collectors, the part of the article that most interested me was this comment by Maura A. Mulvihill, vice president for the society's image collection and sales:

Photojournalism has really only recently been recognized in the fine-art world... And we are sitting on this vast, amazing collection, and started wanting to find a way to get it out into the world.

This quote in particular strikes a chord with me because just yesterday we received an entry from Mexico City-based contender David Rochkind, whose entire practice straddles the line between fine art photography and photojournalism. The photograph above is from his series Heat, about which he writes:

Heat is a project about Mexico while it is undergoing a transformation caused by a drug war that has seen inconceivable brutality and violence. The drama is played out on a daily basis and is becoming routine, even banal, to those involved. The wounds of the war bleed into every corner of the country, staining the very fabric of Mexican life with violence, death and fear. I am fascinated by the space between what Mexico has always been and what this carnage is creating. The heat of the conflict is melting two worlds together, making a singular Mexico defined as much by violence and tension as by history and culture.

Differently from many fine art photographers, on David's website each photo has a caption and each series has a story. As he writes, "I want to draw viewers in with beauty, engage them with social conscience and, finally, force an emotional investment in the picture from shared feeling and experience." To think that photojournalistic content is only just emerging from its role as strictly news blows my mind. In a way, David's combination of fine art and photojournalism parallels the "melting of two worlds" shown in his captivating images.

Flora 026 by David Axelbank

HHS! contender David Axelbank's entry instantly reminded me of a show I saw at the Guggenheim three years ago, "Spanish Paintings From El Greco to Picasso." No, his photographs do not recall El Greco or Picasso, but brought to mind lesser-known still-life painters Zurbar and Juan Sánchez Cotán. I was then, as I am now when looking at David's work, impressed by the depth of the darkness that the three artists employ in their compositions.

From his statement, David writes:

The flower forms emerge out of the dark, their distinct personalities condensed against the black background. Simple and raw in their presentation, these compositions nevertheless maintain a formality typical in floral photography, their night time setting serving to heighten their sensual beauty and the sensory experience for the viewer.

View more of David's work on his site.

Elena by Pedro Cota

Just a brief moment of introduction—my name is Alan and I've just joined the team at Hey, Hot Shot! This is extremely exciting for me because, as mentioned earlier, I had the privilege of developing numerous photography books as an editor at Chronicle Books.

Being involved with Hey, Hot Shot! is a chance for me to continue to work with the photography community in a new way, and the opportunity to see new work continues to thrill me. Jen Bekman and I met years ago at one of the photography portfolio reviews that I used to attend fairly often, and have stayed friends ever since; that we now get to work together is a treat. I'm looking forward to helping her and the whole great team here continue to keep Hey, Hot Shot! the best thing going for photographers everywhere.

All that said, I'd like to introduce contender Pedro Cota, whose mysterious Elena portrays his wife descending a pedestrian bridge in an atmospheric fog. Based in Guadalajara, Mexico, Cota arranges his subject and surrounding elements in a way that is arguably theatrical. This careful composition, combined with precisely selective lighting, reflects his training as a cinematographer in Madrid. This is a suspended moment whose ultimate narrative is elusive.

Cota has more work up at his site and some allusive questions about photography and representation (in Spanish). Keep the amazing entries coming—enter now!

Just Before the Moment of Overwhelming Awareness, 2008 by Mario David Correa

Contender Mario David Correa's series, The Window Seat, is inspired by Russian Constructivism photomontages. Although the work is not politically driven, Correa finds enchantment in collaging together a "combination of unrelated subjects, locations, times and events" on an overhead projector. Once the new composition is arranged, Correa rephotographs the image to create a new narrative landscape.

See more of Correa's work on his site.

Human Landscape by Natalie Chan

Having grown up in Taiwan, contender Natalie Chan views her new-found home in New York as an inspiring playground in which to make images. Currently a student at the School of Visual Arts, Chan describes her experience of creating images in the city as a way of simultaneously looking both inward and outward. She writes of her series Waterland,

I photograph people that catch my immediate attention--often those absorbed in their own world. In contrast, my photography of objects leads to a process of self-reflection. Many of my images are of single isolated objects; in a way they are portraits. However, they involve a different kind of perception. No one looks back at me or communicates with me, so rather than interpret someone else, I am forced to look more and more into myself.

The majority of images in this series, more of which you can view on her website, are taken by bodies of water in and around New York: the beaches of Long Island and Coney, Liberty, and Governor's Island. While swimmers, sunbathers, and sand—obvious indicators of waterside activity—are present, Chan also finds a plethora of coastal anomalies: the boy on crutches who can't go in the water, a woman dressed entirely in gold awkwardly draped across a chain-link fence, and a beach full of massive multi-colored balloons that seem to swallow up all the people running around below.

Head over to Natalie's website to see more from the Waterland series and other projects.

Speedboat & Hearse by Chris Hoare

London based Hey, Hot Shot! contender Chris Hoare left his job as a graphic designer and picked up a Wista Field camera to aid him in "capturing the enivronments in which people live and regularly come into contact with, but remain largely unnoticed".

See more of Chris's work on his site.

Independence Day #5 by Paccarik Orue

Peruvian contender, Paccarik Orue, whose name means "tomorrow" in Quechua sends us images from his series Independence Day, which focuses on American SUV culture. He looks at the irony of Americans celebrating the Fourth of July in their fuel-charged vehicles, blind to the implicit dependency on oil and resources created by the vehicles they drive. He writes,

In the 1990s, Sport Utility Vehicles (S.U.Vs) became extremely popular in the United States, due in part to low gasoline prices. These vehicles became a cultural symbol of the country's dedication to the motto "bigger is better." That was until the price of oil reached record highs in the mid-2000s...for many, the S.U.V. is a way of life and there is no other type of car that will do. This work is a portrait of Shelter Cove, a small town in northern California, taken July 4, 2009. The American way of celebrating Independence Day involves S.U.Vs, illustrating the irony that people celebrate freedom and democracy with vehicles which further our dependence on cheap, foreign oil, which mostly comes from places where there is neither freedom nor democracy.

The recently introduced Cash for Clunkers bill, which offers $3,500 - $4,500 of government rebate money to those who trade in their current cars for more fuel-efficient vehicles was so popular in its first 24 hours that it expended the entire $1 billion dollars allotted to the program. The senate voted to add another $2 billion to the program, suggesting that the trend towards bigger, faster, and gas-guzzling cars may be coming to an end. But, in order to bring the ever-present lust and cultural acceptability of the SUV to an end, their normalized omnipresence in American suburbs and role as vehicles to aspire to owning must also come to an end. Perhaps in another decade, the image of kids running a muck next to flags and having a barbecue—as depicted in Paccarik's images—will no longer feature the SUV as an symbol of identifiable Americana as well.

p.s. Haven't applied to HHS! yet? Why wait? Apply here!

X-mas tree, Mojave, California by Stephen Antonopoulos

Australian photographer Stephen Antonopoulos writes, "I try to examine bonds formed amongst people and the places they inhabit. " In the case of the photo featured above, the absence of people illustrates their relationship with the Mojave and the harshness of its climate. The scalding light and withered state of the tree and surrounding "live" plants also make clear the unforgiving nature of the desert.

The abandoned Christmas tree is a bit of an emblem of Western culture, even without the tree-stand still attached to its base, the origin of the acutely out-of-place vegetation would be clear. In this photo, a seemingly benign tradition appears to be odd and maybe even sinister—the remains of something that might be stumbled upon in a Coen brothers film.

Take the photo below, from 2009 First Edition Hot Shot Mike Sinclair, as a "before" image to Antonopoulos' "after":

Antonopoulos' image is from his series Mojave. See more of the images on his website.

I know it's early in the year to be talking about the holidays and you may be thinking it's also early in the season to consider submitting your photos to HHS! But, it's not! We'll be seeing turkeys and tinsel before we know it and even before that, this round of HHS! will come to an end.

uncl jimmi s hog crossin by Tom Swanston

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Tom Swanston hails from Chattachoochee Hills, Georgia, a place we imagine from his submission is rife with slow-moving rivers and long dirt roads. Describing himself only as a "southern man," Swanston's images offer a sepia-toned glimpse into slow bodies of water and land that perhaps dictate his days. One imagines characters like Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer floating down river on a raft, drifting between fallen trees and weeping willows while the sun beats down from the sky.

With titles like, walkin by em ol ten ants farm and uncl jimmi s hog crossin, southern inflection is implicit in Swanston's depiction of place. One gets the sense that Swanston is strolling by on a hot summer's day, stopping for a pause while he pulls out his camera and takes in the southern air.

Remember: the competition is open for entries through October 23rd, and we'll be blogging here about contenders until the Hot Shots are announced. Follow us on twitter, facebook, and flickr for updates on contenders, past and present Hot Shots, and other photography news.

Happy Friday!

Two Mantles, 2009 by Jacqueline Bates

Contender Jacqueline Bates makes work about identity. More specifically, she makes work that examines her own vulnerability as an Italian American woman. With her series of diptychs, La Vita Americana, Bates provokes a conversation about past and present conceptions of Italian feminine identity.

From her statement about her work she writes:

I am interested in the position of a woman in a family, what her roles are, how they transform from generation to generation, and how isolating they can be. I examine rites of passage and family traditions which, although far removed from their socio-spiritual origins, continue to be a central part of Italian-American cultural identity. To contrast the color suburban photographs, I present three types of black-and-white imagery: film stills from Michelangelo Antonioni's classic 1960 film L'avventura; snapshots of my parents at the time of their marriage; and my own fictional film stills.

View more of Jacqueline's work on her site.

Slaughterhouse 1, 2007 by Axel Dupeux

The bloody reds of Axel Dupeux's series about slaughterhouses are affronting and catch you off-guard. Animal parts are strewn in the drain of a sink, and blood runs thick like a river. One feels exposed to information about their food-source that perhaps was really not meant to be seen and the slaughterhouses, devoid of human presence, seem like a fresh crime scene left-behind.

Dupeux writes,

On one hand, I thought the texture of blood had an inner violence and a certain beauty at the same time. The Slaughter of the beef by Rembrandt was one of the main images I had in mind. On the other hand, I always find some ambiguity in the way infrastructures are built to deal with serial production; in this particular case, I was torn between a contradictory feeling of seeing the perfect mechanism of the slaughtering process, yet I couldn't help thinking it was also a somewhat terrifying illustration of the level of development Humankind reached.

Dupeaux's series brings to mind Erika Larsen's series about hunting, The Hunt. Here, speckles of blood in the snow and bloodied fingers and animals are also present, but there is also a sense of community and comradeship that motivates the actions of the hunters. Their connection to nature—the long walks through the woods and late nights under bright stars—also complete the hunting experience. On the contrary, Dupeux's images depict a de-humanized killing factory, where the killing the animal is purely for profit, rather than experiential in itself. It renders his exposè of food-production far more brutal and--literally--difficult to swallow.

See more of Dupeux's work on his website, including additional images from his slaughterhouse series. [Warning: some readers may find the images from this project to be disturbing]

Enlightenment by Alex Leme

We all love books over here at JBP. Really, we seriously LOVE books. Have you noticed? In case you missed it, the JB Gallery's summer show is full of novel works, perfect for Summer Reading. So, call him smart, call him strategic, but Alex Leme submitted work from his series Literary Ghosts, that would surely catch our attention over here.

In his statement, Alex writes:

I have always found libraries to be accommodating, peaceful and welcoming spaces brimming with fascinating people, mysterious aisles and compelling stories. Literary Ghosts is a photo essay that intends to depict the elusive, poetic and haunting qualities of those places. This is much more a character study than a mere portrayal of their content, and physical characteristics. I want to dig deeper and explore the ghosts, mysteries, secrets, victories and tragedies surrounding libraries.

The mood, lighting, angles and compositions that Alex utilizes in his photographs of libraries are similar to those in Eric Percher's Work, which could also be described as an investigation into "ghosts, mysteries, secrets, victories and tragedies." Percher's images focus instead on office spaces and high-stress work environments, but likewise, elevate the drama of untold stories that might otherwise be considered mundane.

Leme's photos are also related, somewhat, to that of Winter '07 Hot Shot Mickey Smith. In her series Volume, Smith photographs stacks of books in libraries, as she finds them, relying on the books themselves to relay both the stories of library-goers and librarians and the role that books and magazines play as valuable objects in our lives.

See more of Leme's libraries on his website.

In-between Double #1, 2009 by Hye-Ryoung Min

HHS! Contender Hye-Ryoung Min's photographs are dreamy, to say the least. Her series of merged images, In-between, reminds me of when I forget to advance my Yashica and end up with a double exposure that is never as perfect or poetic as what Hye-Ryoung Min offers.

Like our previous contender, Annick Rosenfield, Hye-Ryoung Min is also a graduate of SVA. In her statement about her work, Min reveals her approach:

My process begins by capturing a first image of the main character, and then finding and layering a secondary image that provides emotional texture. Beyond that, I rely on the geometries of the urban landscape to convey the essential solitude of city life. I also work with elements that contrast stillness and motion, and round shapes that imply circularity and evoke the cycle of life. Finally, the process of photographing, finding, connecting, eliminating, and blending is completed by the addition of a unifying color layer that integrates all other layers into a single narrative thread. I assemble these images to make visible what is hidden, ultimately revealing a third language which breaches the gap between world and artist. It is in fact a world of images where subjects are dreaming my own language.

See more of Hye-Ryoung Min's work on her site.

Walter, 2008 by Annick Rosenfield

HHS! contender Annick Rosenfield's steely-eyed subject Walter looks askance while reaching into his pocket. His look is timeless, his posture stiff and formal, and his face bathed in a cool, natural sunlight that could be nearly any time of day.

A 2009 graduate of SVA's MFA program, Rosenfield's work has been published in Photo District News and The New York Times Magazine along with numerous New York City galleries. Of her work, she writes,

These images are from a series I made of minimalist portraits. I wanted to see how little information I could give the viewer and still make an interesting photograph. With this series I was particularly interested in the use of gesture, facial expression, and negative space.

You can see additional work and portraits by Rosenfield on her website.

And remember: we'll be blogging about contenders from this round of competition here on the blog right up until the Hot Shots are announced. The contenders' photos are also featured on flickr, and on the Hey, Hot Shot! facebook page. If you're on facebook, we hope you'll become one of our fans! Apply today!

Untitled, 2007 by Carrie Chalmers

Ithaca-based photographer Carrie Chalmers' series In November is awash with the even, gray light of an early winter's day. Snow dusts signs, yards, and rooftops and landscapes are dominated by hues of white and gray. This work was created on Thanksgiving Day 2007, when Chalmers traveled from Ithaca to Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side), and found herself intrigued by the semi-urban landscapes several blocks away from the main tourist strip. It is left to question whether these spaces are void of people because it is a holiday, or, as the language on signs and visions of vacant lots suggest, that this is a community in greater decline. Either way, a lingering sadness hangs heavy in the images' color palette and one can imagine Chalmers with her camera as the lone soul who was walking around on this day.

She writes,

The gaudy strip along Victoria Avenue and Clifton Hill seemed dull in the grey light despite the flashing signs of nearly empty attractions. But a few blocks away in the residential and commercial districts I found the sublime and paradoxical in structures and landscapes. The photographs express a struggle between expectations and disappointment, the present and absent, the possible and impossible, the familiar and foreign, loneliness and connection.

Chalmers' series brings to mind several of the images in Alec Soth's well-known project, Niagara, like Balloon (above), which also captures the feeling of abandon and an affronting loneliness in this supposed tourists' paradise. Large, blank building and motel facades at night create a discomforting portrait of a place when juxtaposed with hopeful newlyweds and out-of-towners. Combined, the images make up a uniquely American and unusually uncertain destination.

Visit Carrie's website to see additional projects and more work from In November.

Amy and Miles by Katie Shapiro

Our very first contenders post of the season! We opened the 2009 Second Edition of Hey, Hot Shot! yesterday and already the entries are coming in. We're excited.

L.A.-based photographer Katie Shapiro had the right idea and submitted her work right away while our eyes are fresh and hungry. I recognized Katie's work immediately; she's a previous HHS! entrant and more recently, I saw this image on fellow L.A. photographer Aline Smithson's blog, Lenscratch. As Aline wrote, "the old adage is good things come in pairs" and that's just what Katie's after showing. She photographs couples, examining relationships, physically and visually linking her subjects. In this sweet, sunny image, Amy and Miles are joined by Amy's braid which curves up and echoes the arc in the window coverings, creating more than one visual relationship, that between Amy and Miles and that between the couple and their surroundings.

To see and study more duos, visit Katie's blog Only Diptychs. To see more work from this round's contenders, stay tuned here. And don't forget to enter Hey, Hot Shot! early and often! Kidding, just send us your work soon, we can't wait to see it.

Singing, 2009 by Maureen Drennan,

Its that time of year again-the time for MFA graduates to release to the world the bodies of work they've been pouring their energy, blood, sweat and tears into for the past two (or more) years to turn into perfection. The School of Visual Arts is no exception and the 2009 MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Thesis exhibition is currently on view through next Thursday, June 27th. This year the exhibition is curated by faculty member Bonnie Yochelson and features the work of the 21 graduating students, including our own 20x200 artist and Winter 2006 Hot Shot Jessica Bruah as well as Hey, Hot Shot! contender Maureen Drennan.

One of the great things about the work that I see just from browsing it online, is the diversity in each students interests as well as their approach to the medium. There is passionate photojournalism by Scott Houston, personal narrative poured out in book form by Johanna Heldebro and even voyeurism presented as small intimate shrines by Yiftach Belsky. Can't wait to go see the show in person!

The exhibition is displayed at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th Floor from June 15th-June 29th. It's open Monday through Friday from 10-5pm, so catch it while you can.

Untitled by Craig Reynolds

Once again, we come to images of man's imprint on nature, where the men themselves are devoid from the frame of the image. The imprint here is less about environmental commentary, like that by work of contender William Goldkind, and more about how we forge relationships with nature, and clear spaces in it, to become our own. When did we develop the idea--or is it intrinsic to our adaptive paths--that we could draw lines in the grass for our recreation, or occupy a space in the woods, with a mattress and tarp? What paths that we tread accept the environment as it is, and when and where to we find the need and permission to change it? Reynolds explores his surroundings with open eyes to these intersections of human and natural circumstance, working to discern the fine line between accepting nature and adapting it.

Silhouette 1 by Tabitha L Lewis

The women in Tabitha L. Lewis' photographs begin to take on the characteristics of their natural surroundings. Limbs become branches and light shines through clothing as it does through leaves at the edges of a frame.

Lewis might be better known as Tabitha Soren, MTV VJ of "Chose or Lose" fame. She's done some growing up (along with the rest of us who would remember her from then) since appearing on television at the ripe age of 19. The themes in her work are evidence of this growing up — exploring the changing relationship women have with their own flesh and bones. She writes:

No longer are our bodies considered our genetic inheritance. They are projects to improve, design and update. My images are an attempt to align the varied, natural shapes of women with varied, natural shapes in the landscape.

See more of her work on her website.

Cage by Ania Gozdz

Polish-born RISD student Ania Gozdz's photographs resonate with the sort of existentialism that is central to a lot of Eastern European literature. But philosophical wonderings about the nature of our existence in words is one thing, representing them with images is another.

She writes:

Slipping in and out through the surface of representation, my work aims to highlight the symbiotic relationship between life and death and explore the failings of memory and materiality despite their perceived stability... I'm also intrigued by how flux and memory shape the distressed, porous narratives of our lives, and by how the ruptures in the understanding of ourselves can be the richest well of learning and reflection to draw from.

Gozdz's works walk the line between representation and abstraction, see more on her website.

Thanksgiving by Aya Brackett

Hot Shot contender Aya Brackett writes of her upbringing in a traditional Japanese house in the mountains of Northern California. Having spent some time in Northern California myself observing the bounty of this region's land, I can see why Brackett turns her camera's eye to creating images of food, with aesthetics and arrangement inspired by still life painting.

She writes,

The Between Meals project is constantly ongoing simply because I am continually interested in how food still lifes suggest a greater context and a narrative of human life outside the camera frame. These are not really food shots per se, but compositions that happen to employ food; the inspiration derives from the objects humans consume and use in their everyday lives. I am moved by how these mundane objects can be evocative cues of domestic life, but are still aesthetically exciting.

The work in this series captures moments before and after meals, when ingredients are laid out on a table or counter, or only the last drops of red wine can be seen in the neck of a glass. One sees the rinds and peels of devoured fruit next to cigarette butts and cracked nut shells; the remnants of indulgence and enjoyment and ritual. Brackett captures food without its creators, but their presence can be felt strongly in each of her images.

See additional work on Aya's website.

A Rock Decaying Around Itself by Jeremias Paul

A decaying rock, a dead bird, and a hole in a curtain can be simply taken as objects of everyday life, or, read with the significance of how these items and their circumstance came to be. HHS! contender Jeremias Paul explores "spirit-beings" through photography and sculpture; the works are meant to question existence and coincidence through the language of familiar forms, and encourage inquiry rather than simple answers or explanations.

Paul writes,

Songlines, as believed by the indigenous peoples of Australia, represent ancient paths left behind by ancestral spirit-beings during the creation of the world known as the Dreaming or Dreamtime. These spirit-beings manifested themselves in everyday forms ranging from inanimate objects to people, and even natural phenomena. It is believed that their existence is revealed to us through the signs that they have left behind in the world that surrounds us.

In the above image, a red rock crumbles upon the surface of smaller rocks below it. Where does this rock come from, what causes it's decay, and where is it located? What makes this rock red? One can ask innumerable questions both big and small about both object and circumstance, no matter how minute the point of focus may at first seem. This pushes the viewer to examine the decaying rock, dead bird, and hole in curtain more closely, and then from further away, at each glance of the object.

See addition work from the Songlines series on Jeremias' website.

Inauguration by Simon A Biswas

We're well past Obama's first one hundred days. And the worst economic climate we've recently encountered has proven to be a serious buzz kill. So, I was happy to stumble upon this photograph that gave me goosebumps again (we also have the a/c cranked in the office!).

On that Inauguration Day, people from all over the country gathered on the lawns of the White House, camped out to hear Obama's speech, even if he couldn't be seen and his words came through elevated speakers. It was one of those days that seemed too good to be true and that feeling is evident in the early morning light that echoes the hope expressed by this father photographed with his daughter, too young and too exhausted to really know what's going on.

Photographer Simon A Biswas, it seems, was in the right place at the right time, to capture the right man at the right moment.

Ben by Maureen R. Drennan

The tired eyes of Ben, above, speak to a life full of struggles. He lays in bed, looking one part listless, and one part contemplative; as a viewer, one wonders what it is that might be plaguing him. Contender Maureen Drennan has fixed her camera's eye on Ben for the last year and the ways being a marijuana grower in California puts him in a position of both social and cultural isolation.

Drennan writes,

We met a year ago and through this project have become close. Although marijuana is legal to grow and use in the state of California within strict guidelines, there are many situations in which it is still illegal. It is still not culturally acceptable to be involved in growing or selling pot. Due to the nature of rural farming and the reality of the illegalities of growing and distributing large amounts of marijuana "Ben" is socially and culturally isolated.

Situated between the fine lines of what's permitted and disallowed by the law, Ben becomes marginalized, while trying to maintain a living. Drennan documents small moments in his day: the morning in bed, weighing his crop, and walking down a quiet mountainous road to who-knows-where. Each speak to the lonesomeness that can come about by opting into a contentious trade, where the rules are as easily broken as they are made, because those rules are still as yet so unclear.

See additional work by Maureen on her website.

Sand Storm by Chelsea Brewer

Strange but true, I've managed to pick another photographer, this time Chelsea Brewer, who is working out of California. Maybe it's MOMA's Into the Sunset exhibition that has me subconsciously gravitating towards these photographs?

I was consciously drawn to this work, not because their left-coast-ness was clear, but at first glance, the image above reminded me of Michael Corridore's Aperture Portfolio Prize winning series Angry Black Snake. Corridore's photographs document that very specific moment of euphoria in spectator events when the climax has occurred and the crowd, covered in dust, ash or smoke, physically become part of the spectacle. In Brewer's above photo, the subjects are not watchers or participants, they are instead subject only to the wills of nature and the sand and sun and wind around them. It is these elements that unite her subjects throughout the series: as Corridore's portraits are as much of people as they are of sport, Brewer's photos are as much of people as they are of a place.

See more of Brewer's new work on her website website.

sprinkle by Mary L. Rasmussen

It's warm and sunny and the weather's just right for a little day-dreaming about longer days and later evenings. Most of Mary L. Rasmussen's photographs appear to be taken during that extended period of time between late afternoon and early evening when you're not quite sure when one has ended and the other has begun and all of a sudden you realize that the sun may soon be rising.

Both her portraits and landscapes are dark and mysterious, her subjects are guarded but not distant — they're really a bit of a tease. For more, see Mary's website, appropriately titled faint in between.

Bird teeth lunch of beans, Jonesport, Maine, August 2007 by Jonathan Levitt

Contender Jonathan Levitt writes that the images in the project, Wake to Songbirds Wake to Crows are about the "idea of home." When one looks to this series on his website, one finds photographs of chickens and horses, tractors and trailers, dogs running wild, and fresh tomatoes in the sunlight--an idea of home that is far from the urban bustle of HHS! HQ in downtown Manhattan. The fields looks idyllic and peaceful, like a place where the rhythms of the day move slowly and deliberately.

A photographer who comes by way of culinary school and time spent on farms, Levitt lives-by and observes the land with the eye of someone who has toiled many hours in the sun and dirt. His images whet the tongue with the lure of some kind of quiet life, where carrots are eaten after being pulled fresh from the ground and the eggs you cook with are never more than a few hours old. He tells a story about cycles--of life to death, morning to night, spring to fall--with this growing series of work, capturing elements of the spirit of rural Maine.

See more images by Jonathan Levitt on his website.

Memory Grove, Salt Lake City by John Paul Jespersen

Contender John Paul Jespersen's night images offer up winter wonderlands that, at first glance, appear unreal or created. There is hardly a trace of man in the backyards of condos or on the snowy mountains he captures, but then, in the distance, a light can be spotted off in the distance.

The skies take on green and yellow and purple hues, full of the swirling colors of both ambient and incandescent lights, emanating from street lamps and reflecting off the snow that has piled onto trees and homes. His world is quiet, and at rest, unaware it is being captured through a camera.

See additional work by John Paul Jespersen on his website.

Terrain Vague #2 by Christian Vium

Christian Vium's HHS! entry "explores the fringes of Nouakchott, the windblown capital of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, where [Vium is] currently conducting long-term research on climate change, water scarcity, human adaptation and vulnerability." While his stated purpose is clearly documentary, the photographs remind me a bit of the surreal work by former documentary photographer Roger Ballen. Discarded bits of scattered trash become stage props — a fire burning low and skeletons of ships at sea. Unlike Ballen's work, human presence is marked only by their absence and what they've left behind:

In effect, the objects seemingly scattered in the open space are the traces of nomad encampments, the former residents now most likely inhabitants of the vast slum areas closer to the city, where an estimated 65 percent of the city's population lives. The particular beige light is a result of the constantly blowing winds, which hurls sand particles into the air, blurring the boundary between heaven and earth.

Vium is a photographer and anthropologist currently employed as a Ph.D. Fellow at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. See more of his photography on his website.

When We Finally Came to Rest by Cody Bratt

With just hours left to apply to Hey, Hot Shot!, we're tapping our fingers watching the last minute submissions roll in. One submission that came in late last night was the cinematic trio of images from Cody Bratt's series From Home and Back. Shooting stars criss-cross the desert night sky, taking me to an un-specifiable place out West where I half expect to see a cowboy to stumble across the image. In one image, lights are on in a home that sits alone in a great expanse, and a trailer door flaps open in the photo above, but human presence can only be detected through these hints, rather than seen standing in the open.

The blue, cold hue of the scenes captured here feel like movie stills from the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men. One can imagine the protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, who finds himself on the lam from a cold-hearted killer after finding a suitcase full of cash, in a setting such as these, hiding out for night in this trailer before taking off on the run again.

For Bratt, these images are about abandonment and discovery, and he writes,

There are likely thousands of stories in each place and, on the face of it, the voices inhabiting them have long since silenced themselves and moved on. But it is precisely this abandonment that makes these photographs about the opposite - discovery. Or put another way, accumulation. Each shot is a discovery and a love letter to the stories people held dear in these places.

The stories here are left to the imagination, and for Bratt, writing a history in found objects and places, is the beginning of a way to grow attached to what he has discovered.

Settlement 1 by Corinne Silva

Plastic doesn't leave us, it's become ubiquitous. We're slowly training ourselves to not use it and reuse it when we have to but we're a little late in the game. We've all seen Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers and Plastic Bags, 2007 which depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds. But, the plastic habit is not particular to Americans, it's all over the world, and as photographer Corinne Silva points out, it's all over the desert region of Almeria in southeast Spain. Working as part landscape photographer, part documentary photographer, Silva's work examines the many ways plastic is utilized in this arid, isolated, and rapidly developing region and all of the things its use has come to mean.

She writes:

Here on the periphery of Europe, the northern and southern hemispheres meet, as do migrants from both compass points. Historically a contested border territory, Almeria still bears the traces of past empires: crumbling watchtowers guard the coastline and Moorish castles compete for space with ancient Catholic churches.... Increasingly visible in the landscape is plastic, innovatively used and reused. Plastic simultaneously coats and reveals. I focus on the use of plastic and what it represents to examine the physical effects of exclusion, desire and exploitation.

See the rest of the series on her website.

Humming Bird by Kelli L. Pennington

Kelli L. Pennington writes:

My practice uses the snapshot aesthetic to engage desire and intimacy. By photographing my friends, family, lover, and myself, I want to mirror the experiences of tenderness, cruelty, and love directly and with limited mediation.

There is certainly something both tender and cruel, sad and beautiful, and despite Kelli's role as a passive mediator, surreal about this photograph. While the moments when the animal and human worlds collide, most often to the detriment of the former, are fairly common, they often feel out of the ordinary. The power that we wield over the animal kingdom is tangible and the fragility of birds and beasts evident. It can be heartbreaking.

The shirtless subject in Pennington's photo is rendered softly, obscured by the reflections of trees and clouds; the empathy she feels for both the hummingbird and captor is palpable. On her website, Penningon's woven formal and casual portraits with landscapes, fluidly moving from one to the other — it's elegant everyday drama.

Pregnant Girl with Keys by JO ANN WALTERS

Informed by her upbringing in the "Middle West" of America in a small town by the Mississippi River, Jo Ann Walters makes portraits of the men, women, girls, and boys who make up her surroundings, capturing them with the intimate eye of an insider. In the image above, Pregnant Girl with Keys, the young woman clutches her chest and holds a glassy expression in her face, her maybe-visible pregnant stomach hidden by the folds of her soft gray sweatshirt. Walters portraits show subjects with a veneer of poise that seems undermined by their youth, or a questioning stance that suggests an underdeveloped hardness they want to possess. The images bring Tema Stauffer's The Ballad of Sad Young Men to mind in which a series of teens and twenty-somethings are posed along Main Street of blue-collar Binghamton and emanate a visible tension and uncertainty in their gait.

The Shipwreck by Yann le Coroller

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Yann le Coroller sites Americans Gregory Crewdson and Philip Lorca diCorcia and Canadian Jeff Wall as influences on his work but it was seeing the photography of Masashi Asada in Japan that sparked his series about Alonso Quixano. Adopted from and inspired by Don Quixote, le Coroller composes and photographs the lighthearted and surreal adventures of a man "a little bit lost in [his fantasies]."

While the filmic parallels between le Coroller's work and that of his influences are evident, his series is a little less Lynch and Hitchcock and little more Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Juenet's Amelie seems a likely female counterpart to le Coroller's Alonso. Unlike Amelie, Alonso's adventures occur outside of France, in Vietnam instead, exaggerating his stereotypically French appearance.

The photographs comprise a book but each image contains its own story, leaving lots of opportunity to invent your own narratives. Daydream a little on Yann le Coroller's website.

Lauren at the Gorge, Reading, VT by Samuel F. Falls

The first time I wrote about Samuel F. Falls' work, I wasn't sure what to say. All I knew was that the images hit me in my gut in a good/disturbing kind of way.

I was somewhat relieved when I came across Johanna Reed's interview with Falls. If you're curious but a little speechless about the work, it's a must read. Part of the reason the work is so hard to write about is that Falls chooses highly personal, emotional subjects that are often linked only by Falls himself. But as in life, people, animals, and places reappear again and again, providing a semblance of history and the passage of time, and gradually instilling trust in Sam's way of working.

For his HHS! entry this time around, Falls selected three images of his ex-fiancee, Lauren, including a black and white portrait taken with expired film on the Valentines' Day the relationship ended. Falls' statment and images recall the tradition of photographers and their muses, historically including the likes of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti and more recently, Leigh Ledare and his mother. Falls revisited the photographs post-break-up and created a new project, Monocarpic. He writes:

The images here are from this series depicting Lauren over the course of our relationship from its beginning in May 2008 right up until our "disengagement" late this winter... The images I've collected range from places like New York City, Panama, Florida, and Vermont, and traverse extreme happiness to bold sadness. Though the photos were taken with my Crown Graflex, I never intended them as part of a preconceived project, which I believe has allowed me to capture the emotion and natural snapshot feel without loosing the pristine photographic capacity of a 4x5 camera. Lauren has helped me edit these images into a 112 page book, Monocarpic, which means "(of a plant) flowering only once and then dying".

The series also falls into context with Falls' larger body of work on his website.

Campground 086, Winter by Jon Sheridan

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jon Sheridan's How To Fix A Campground series tells a story and a memory about the farm and camp he grew up on in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He writes,

In the late 1960s, my family converted part of our farm in rural Virginia into a campground. We ran it until 1997, closing it when my father died. My family is now renovating our rundown business. We sort through objects and spend time in ramshackle spaces, remembering when they were new. We tear out old rotting walls and burn the debris; we clear underwood and burn the brush. These pictures are about our day-to-day laboring as we try to reverse entropy. Things fell apart. We are putting them back together again, blending old meaning with new.

His work pays homage to a place that was once greater than its current remnants, as his family simultaneously tries to rebuild their campground to its state of former glory. The images show a place that changes with the seasons, and only survives by the efforts of Sheridan's family. They labor in the snow, at night, and through all states of emotion -- sweeping, sanding, and stacking wood--working by the blueprint of a former place to create a place that will exist in their future. He raises questions about humans' relationship to nature, and what it means to create a meaningful physical space that will also serve as a place in our memories.

See more work from How to Fix a Campground on Jon's website.

Sunset, Isla Vista, California by Liz Kuball

Sunshine and palm trees, long stretches of highways and beaches, California is many things to many people. None the least, it's a western outpost, a land of milk and honey, Steinbeck's promised state of epic stories in East of Eden. Like the Trasks and the Hamiltons, generations have immigrated and emigrated to CA, fleeing past lives and loves and searching for something better for themselves and their families. Full of allusions and illusions, the destination may or may not be exactly what one's searching for. Photographer Liz Kuball knows this well, she writes:

When you move out to California from back east, you come for a reason: You're leaving behind a bad relationship, or escaping your hometown, or thinking you'll be a star. And what you find when you get here is that things aren't what you thought they'd be... And you'd think that, after all this, you'd become disillusioned and go back home, and some do, of course, but many more of us stay and instead of growing bitter, we hang on — hang on to a world that, to us, is even more fantastic than the one we thought we'd find, because it's real in its absurdity and because we have stories to tell.

In her series California Vernacular, she's found and documented CA's reoccurring themes of both personal and grand proportions, a visual equivalent to literature. For her HHS! entry, Kuball shared with us a few examples: an orange tree, heavy with fruit, dripping from the other side of someone else's fence, the odd manifestations of best efforts to manicure lawns, and in Sunset, Isla Vista, California (above) evidence of endless vistas and opportunities cropping up in the most unlikely place — on an apartment building with a For Rent sign, large and blocky, edging out blinding light.

Kuball is no stranger to fiction, she has masters degrees in both literature and writing, learning along the way that she was really a photographer. Her debt to schools has not gone to waste, her blog provides good reading fodder, especially for fellow HHS! contenders. If you're still putting your entry together (do it fast, you're running out of time!) or are wondering what it's like to pick just three images for a very discriminating panel, read Liz's post from two Sundays ago, Status Report. Then cross your fingers and hold your breath with the rest of us!

untitled 2 paperbacks by Mary Ellen Bartley

I, like everyone at HHS! HQ, am a lover of the book, so I was excited (beyond words!) to see a submission from contender Mary Ellen Bartley, whose paperbacks series challenges us not to judge a book by the cover, the title, or the spine. Bartley stacks books in towers and rows, exposing us to pages available in myriad shades of white, and asks us to consider the book-as-object, and that object as emotional, even without knowing its interior contents.

She writes,

I'm exploring the possibility of creating beautiful even emotionally moving images by photographing mundane things in a purely formal way, investigating their visual qualities and relationships without assigning them much meaning or significance. The palette I discovered in the stacks, containing chalky Necco wafer pastels, fog grays and tooth colored whites, creates a calm meditative atmosphere. The quiet colors and the deliberate exclusion of clues to the books' contents serve to mute the narratives, information and ideas the books must contain - implying that the act of simply looking can be enough in a photograph.

Mickey Smith, a 2007 Winter Hot Shot and 20x200 artist, first brought us work from the stacks with her project Volume. She, like Bartley, pays heed to repetition, line, and mass, but also celebrates the Pantone-palette of color one can find in the library with works like Word Study and More Books. Bartley's books suggest a quieter relationship to her library, and I can imagine her stacking books one-by-one, rearranging their white-ness until they look just right. Perhaps it is true in this instance, that what's on the outside is more important, than what is on the inside.

Also! If you haven't yet heard, the deadline for HHS! has been extended to next Tuesday, May 5th @ 11 p.m.. Apply here!

Gardner by Ryan Monaghan

At the core of hunting, is the basic mission to kill. Whether killing for food, or as sport, the task is visceral and physical, both for hunter and hunt-ed alike. Hey, Hot Shot! contender Ryan Monaghan explores this culture in his work, showing the two-sided beauty and brutality of hunting and trapping.

He writes,

They [the images] show the results of a tradition that is no longer vital for human survival, but yet has spawned an entire subculture around it. The photographs touch on the complex sentiments felt when successfully acting upon the primitive urge to harvest something wild and elusive, and explore the cold beauty that is often found in a world considered so violent by so many.

Like photographer Erika Larsen, whose photo essays The Hunt and Young Blood also explore the clashing duality of the gruesome and the graceful in hunting culture, Monaghan's portraits of show much more than the blood of capture. Community, connection to the outdoors, and elements of ritual reaffirm the bonds some feel to this age-old pastime.

See additional work from this series on Ryan's website.

Bihac, Bosnia & Herzegowina by Frederic M. Lezmi

Contender Frederic M. Lezmi's series From Vienna to Beirut focuses on the cultural and geographical spaces and signs his finds on the borders between Europe and the Middle East. He calls it the "in between'' and it's clear that there is no clear line between here and there, or if there is one, it's not continuous. There's evidence of history and the present, the East and the West, and young and old intermingling and confusing one for the other. While these themes course through much of our news today, this work is an exploration that is also relevant on a personal level for Geneva-raised, Germany-based, half-Lebanese Lezmi.

While his approach is entirely different, his work is slightly related to that of recent Hot Shot Yijun Liao, and fellow contender Ayano Hisa. All of the photographers blend a little personal history with contemporary global issues regarding the continued cycle of meetings, clashes, and reconciliations between the East and the West.

See the rest of From Vienna to Beirut on Lezmi'swebsite.

Julian Alps, Slovenia by Cindy Schafer

At first glance, this photograph from HHS contender Cindy Schafer stirred a flood of images, including 2008's First Edition Hot Shot Derek Henderson's Reids Farm. And it makes sense that there are so many associations because, as Schafer writes, everyone does laundry. Like contender Magda Biernat, she's traveled far and wide and taken photographs to prove it. You might say laundry's a bit of an obsession, and Schafer admits:

I don't think there is any aspect of laundry that I don't like. I also like to think of myself as a feminist: a woman who values political, social and economic equality between the sexes, a woman who has many more educational and career choices than the generations of women who came before her. Yet, laundry, along with other types of housework, has historically been considered "women's work". It embodies the soul of domesticity; the antithesis of everything a 1970's feminist stood for.... Laundry is washed in every corner of the globe, at every level of the socioeconomic spectrum whether one does it themselves or pays someone else to do it. Culturally, laundry unites us. Socially it still divides us.

See more of Schafer's work on herwebsite.

San-Zhr Pod Village, Danshui, Taiwan by Magda Biernat

Globe-trotter Magda Biernat spent one year photographing where people live in seventeen countries. A peek at her website reveals a keen interest in structures; she also freelances for architecture firms and design studios. While her images are void of actual people, her perspective is more personable, not to mention colorful than, say, the Bechers, deviating a bit from the typographic vernacular. She writes:

Guided by an interest in urbanism and habitation, I focus my work on the built environment and its influence on global societies... The core vision was to recognize the integrity of the way people live under different, in many cases, extraordinary conditions.

Before embarking on her trip around the world, Biernat worked for Magnum Photos giving her lots of exposure to photojournalism and also an apt departure point for exploring her own work.
She maintains a pretty straightforward point of view but the light surrounding each home varies, revealing more of the place in which she was photographing. Fog shrouds the pod villages in Taiwan and long shadows and blue skies stretch over Tipi Resort in Namibia. The weather starts to inform the places people live as well.

Hearse In My Childhood Driveway by Susan Worsham

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Susan Worsham's photographs of her childhood home and town in Virginia are haunted by the past. Worsham returned to this home just prior to the passing of her mother, and has since lost her father and brother as well. The home she knew has lost its former occupants and taken new ones, including a man who houses caged snakes in her father's office.

Her images emanate with nostalgia even though they are filled with portraits of new friends and strangers met since her return. Animals, fruit, and family photographs allude to the living, but are manifest in their more solemn and morbid forms: birds and rabbits lay dead, the fruit is past peak, and the photograph is old and speaks of those no longer with us. Reoccurring characters pose nude and forlorn, against the textures and patterns of the house's wallpaper, bedspreads, and carpets suggesting that there are living spirits still within this house. A woman's pregnant body and a rug scattered with apples make allusion to Eve, rebirth, and new beginnings, while set against the texture of the old home's history. The contrast of the past and present are weighty, but beautiful.

See more from this series, Some Fox Trails in Virginia, on Susan's website.

Shades & Shadows, July 25, 2008 by Rita Maas

Rita Mass is one of several HHS contenders who have included multiple images as one to convey their ideas. Also see the work of Matthew Dallos, Anthony Georgis. For these photographers, the single frame isn't enough.

Maas' images relate more closely to the work of Uta Barth who often uses multiple frames of abstracted interiors and landscapes to convey relationships in perception; and often working, like Maas, with the most simple elements, light and shadow. Maas explains her process:

Viewing each work becomes an experience relating to the viewers understanding of his own surroundings. These ephemeral images evoke the passage of time, seasons and weather. They heighten our sense of impermanence. The subject matter becomes the experience of seeing; common encounters in intimate and familiar places explore moments where content and meaning become inseparable.

Her statement lends the work for comparison to Silvio Wolf's Horizons, where content and meaning are also inseparable. Wolf's film leaders (the part of a roll of film that is partially exposed when loading the film and typically discarded when the film is processed) "reveal(s) a threshold, the clear limit between light and darkness, between matter and language."

See more of Rita Maas' work on her website, which includes more abstract work along with some elegant still lifes.

We're heading into a great summer season of abstraction in photography, spearheaded by The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, curated by Lyle Rexer, and on view at Aperture Gallery in NYC May 15th - July 9th. The exhibition accompanies the release of a book by the same name and a handful of related events, including a panel discussion at NYPH'09 with Rexer and artists Jack Sal, Wolf, and Penelope Umbrico.

At JBP HQ, we're certainly celebrating all of this summertime photo goodness and will be releasing a special 20x200 edition in mid-May with a super special photographer to kick it all off. Sign up for Jen's newsletter for details. And you'll find me and Jeffrey Teuton, Associate Director of the JB Gallery at NYPH'09. Hope to see y'all there as well!

Anonymous, Seoul by Grace Kim

Rumpled sheets, blood stains, and drawn curtains are hallmarks of the aftermath of the affairs contender Grace Kim captures in her series, love hotel. Photographing beds and hotel rooms in Seoul, Korea just moments after a secretive couples' departure, the textures of the empty used bed evoke a sense of sadness and loneliness in what has been left behind. The rooms reek of similarity; textured wallpapers and blankets feature graphic flowers and geometric shapes. The sameness is further emphasized by Kim's stark black and white film choice, so the viewer's focus is concentrated on tiny leaks of light through the curtain's edges or the contrast of white sheets against the darkness of the room. The theme of anonymity also extends from the persons partaking in the affair: protecting identity and choosing an indistinguishable place are obvious ways to protect their secret relationship from the other spaces of their life.

Kim writes,

The photographs are personal reflections on the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of love. Absence inspires imagination and nostalgia, and what is secret or forbidden seems genuine in a way, because it actively questions and resists the status quo, rather than remaining complacent.

What is love without a face, and what is love confined to a hotel room? Kim asks compelling questions about what we choose to confide, and also challenges the viewer to ask questions about her access as a photographer to her subject: How does she gain entry to these hotel rooms? How does she find couples engaged in affairs? How does her Korean-American identity aid or inform her photography -- this project and others?

See more from love hotel on Grace's website, as well as her other projects, loveland and one night stand.

Box Turtle by Katy Higgins

If the limits of what we can know about a species can be interpreted by the shape and definition of their environment, then a zoo is a trove of information for geologist, sociologist, and artist alike. Like Ian Whitmore, whom we wrote about yesterday, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Katy Higgins gives us glimpses into interiors without the dweller's presence--in this case, the man-made environments of zoo animals. We are challenged to glean what the animal is and how they live from what is in their space: water, branches, rocks, food, toys, sun or shade, despite it being a construction of their keepers' creation.

Katy writes of her project,

the images in the The Empty Exhibit are concerned with attempts to reduce the infinite complexity of the world to concrete visual representations--in a sense, to diagram life. In this case, my photographs document the false "natural" environments that are recreated in zoos, ostensibly both for the comfort of the animals on display and to inform and educate the viewer. These exhibits, then, hold the promise of presenting some kind of truth about the world, but they are necessarily limited - there is only so much we can learn about an animal and its native habitat through a life-size diorama, no matter how detailed it may be.

See more of Katy's work on her website.

Anna by Ian J Whitmore

Whether you are TV friend or foe, nearly everyone in America is at least familiar with the wooing effects of the television set. They are imbued into the everyday of our culture: we gather at each others' houses for Lost parties, crowd around for the Oscars and Superbowl, and fall asleep night after night to the glow of this electronic box. Years after a series has ended, we make pop-cultural references to the characters of our childhood -- about the moral lessons they taught us, the fashion tips they gave us, or the social scenarios they first introduced us to. What is it about the TV that captivates us, and what does it say about how we see and consume information?

In his series, Channels, Hey, Hot Shot Contestant Ian Whitmore photographs where we place televisions in our households. How do they become a fixation, or mainstay, of our living spaces? Do they dominate the room, or are they hidden away?

He writes:

This work is a visual inquiry into the personal spaces where our televisions reside. This point of contact between the viewer and the world has become customary in contemporary culture--facilitating the exchange of information and the satisfaction of certain desires. In recent years we have developed a collective and public eagerness to peer into each others' life; we see this in our entertainment, news and the Internet. If we view these spaces passively and voyeuristically--the way we view the world through the television--certain questions arise. How are we viewing one another and through which lenses? Through what lens do we find greater authenticity, honesty and clarity?

Whitmore titles his pieces by the homeowner's name, though the person--or persons--are never present. One peers in on their belongings: books, backpacks, posters and trophies, and gets a sense of the dweller. The person is clean or messy, owns a lot or a little, prefers to decorate either sparsely or with gusto. Owning a TV is only as normal as owning a bed, though here, the TV is always on, and a faintly illuminated person on the screen looks back at us. We are made to feel as though we are looking in on them, rather than the TV-owner, a disorienting and thought-provoking role-reversal.

This series brings us to today's 20x200 edition, The Drive with Christine, which also features a television set photographed by Chad Muthard. Here, puzzle pieces meet the screen, blinding the information pouring out from this simple set. It is a conversation, between two people, as well as between the TV and its viewer.

See more on Ian's website and see more HHS! contenders on flickr!

Little Boys, 2008 by Ayano Hisa

SCAD MFA student Ayano Hisa returned to her home country of Japan to photograph, realizing that after her time in the United States, "My eyes became a lot more sensitive about traces of history, relations between countries and problems and hopes in contemporary world." While she's looking at and addressing issues that are very much a part of this world, there seems to be something very ethereal about her photographs. Her color palette is a little washed out and dreamy and she manages to find situations that also don't seem quite real. This photo of grown men resting in a playground and accompanied by a cat (a cat!) was submitted along with a photograph of a mother and son looking at a memorial made of origami cranes for A-bomb victims and one of two women using umbrellas as parasols as they stroll along a path dappled with deer. For certain, see these images and more of her work on her website.

She bridges the past and present fluidly, illustrating reminders of what has been and how that has shaped and will shape what we see and experience today. But for some reason I can't shake the feeling the Hisa's Japan is a sort of Never Never Land where even the worst of history can't make us grow up. Maybe it is the intimacy and ease with which she photographs that also makes the first words of her statement ring true to an outsider in her world, "being in one culture sometimes makes a person blind to other cultures as well as his/her own culture..." — something that fellow contender Joerg Brueggemann might contend with. And so with these photographs I am learning to see a little better.

Untitled by Stephanie Diani

Marriage--in all its glory and catastrophe--is depicted time and again in literature, films, and song. In fact, many of the expressions of marriage that first come to mind depict its downfall rather than its success through affairs, deceit, and prolonged unhappiness. Rather recent novels like Revolutionary Road and The Corrections articulate dysfunctional families living in the facade of normality, until secrets break lose and emotions explode into situations of ruin. American Beauty takes a similar storyline to film; Desperate Housewives and Weeds (about a suburban housewife who turns to drug-dealing) bring it to TV. There is no shortage of well-dressed, middle-aged married women who become embroiled in misdeeds due to their marital displeasure in our culture, whether they are an accurate portrayal or not is left to question.

Los Angeles-based Hey, Hot Shot! contender, Stephanie Diani, photographs staged, fictional marriages, capturing couples' postures and actions with an air of disillusionment. The couples never make eye contact, but engage in activities often attributed to the specific gender's role: a woman knits (albeit morbidly, by an axe), a man holds a golf club, liquor in his other hand. The relationships here display tense bodies in cinematic lighting, and there is an explicit sexiness in the women's dress and posture without stirring any emotions of intimacy. All of the couples are well-dressed, Caucasian, and appear to be upper-middle class, speaking to problematic marriages as a classed affliction. Whether these portraits of marriage speak an element of truth to how some marriages really are, or more-so adopt a pop-cultural view of dysfunction in relationships, Diani makes a strong stance about her vision of marriage.

See more work on Stephanie's website.

My Parents Eating by Lindsay D'Addato

Man and nature do not always live in perfect harmony, as photographers Edward Burtynsky, David Maisel, and Chris Jordan depict in their respective works. Civilization's toll on Mother Earth has been great--perhaps too great for the human mind to digest--and respect for nature's bounty are not often held to a high standard. But, aside from human's impact on nature, how do we incorporate or live with it? Why do we buy flowers, plant gardens, mow lawns, or live on farms? How do we interact with "nature" we have transplanted to our homes?

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Lindsay D'Addato asks these questions in her series For Paradise, bringing her Toyoview large format camera to the scene of suburban intersections of man and nature.

She writes,

In recreated interactions the images depict the ways in which we domesticate and tame nature in order to make ourselves feel at home, not only in our surroundings, but also with each other. The large color photographs move from the great outdoors towards domestic and suburban landscapes, reconstructing what it means to live in natural harmony. Although our linear understanding of progress can never be satisfied, our present glory lies in our self-conscious paradise.

D'Addato's subjects, posed by a dead deer or sitting next to a massive dining room bouquet, seem unsure of how to interact with the "nature" around them. Their bodies are stiff, their glances askew, often unaware that the nature is even something to notice at all. She suggests that humans are wont to control nature, as they are their social and spatial environments, as inadvertent as the action may be.

See more from this series on Lindsay's website.

Noch ein Winterwald by Anne Schwalbe

Like yesterday's featured contender, Matthew Dallos, Germany-based photographer Anne Schwalbe also photographs the lines and patterns in nature. Schwalbe, however, departs from landscapes into the abstract, often focusing on the subtle minutiae of undulations caused by raindrops, the varying densities of fog, or the asymmetry if a pine tree. She abandons the specificity of a place, avoiding characterizing them by their distinguishing markers. Instead, Schwalbe invites her viewers to interpret the spaces she photographs, saying, "I want to have a complex void in my photographs."

Her work evokes comparison to Japanese photographer, Rinko Kawauchi, who is well-known for her natural-light photographs of details in nature and everyday life: flower petals, an eaten watermelon, a crack of lightning. The similarities extend from subject matter to their both using the 6x6 square format; Kawauchi shoots with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera and Schwalbe a Yashica - Mat 124 G. Both photographers emphasize the beautiful color palettes expressed in nature, and show a welcome talent for honing in on the subtleties so many of us miss in the everyday.

See additional work on Anne's website.

Caravan Storage by Matthew Dallos

Matthew Dallos' multi-panel work presents us with scenes that bridge man and nature. Power lines meet mountain-sides and a trailer park is is crowded, without a soul in sight. Timbered logs lay in a field, now empty of growth, and one feels faintly forlorn about the implied trail of the humans. Photographed on the South Island of New Zealand, the landscape appears at first and second glance, both familiar, yet foreign. Where are the people who tread in these person-less panoramas? And when do they occupy these spaces? The nature of these spaces has been dictated by our intrusion, and we create new lines that change the landscape.

Like the work of David Hilliard, who was also mentioned earlier this week, the multi-panel frame lends to the way one interprets the narrative. The image is partitioned, so reads like a storyboard, even if originally composed as a single frame. Hilliard's images suggest a human narrative, where lights are on in a house and his subjects meandering in foreground and background often experience a passive and mysterious interaction. In contrast, Dallos looks to the lines of the landscape to speak the "story of the place" without human subjects to carry that voice.

See more from this series on Matthew Dallos' website.

Cecil Hotel, Los Angeles by Tom Griscom

San Francisco based photographer Tom Griscom follows the rich traditions of landscape photography in the American West, bridging the past and present by creating black and white images with a digital camera, and focusing on California, the western most state. He writes:

Starting with the survey of the West by Timothy O'Sullivan, to the pristine facade by Ansel Adams, and then to the bleak irony of New Topographer Robert Adams, I follow the evolution of landscape representation in the West and how it was influenced by the social climate of the time.

The view from the hotel room, is of course, a theme in its own right as well. Robert Frank's view in Butte, Montana has influenced many photographers, including Todd Hido (scroll down to see Frank's photo).

While his territory covers far more than the American West, Andrew Hetherington has documented numerous hotel rooms and the sites to see just outside in his project A Room with A View, aptly described by these words from Robert Polidori: "I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It's the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first."

What one saw first could also describe O'Sullivan's works. He photographed as pioneering explorers ventured west, often illustrating the weaknesses of man up against the vastness of the wilderness. Ansel Adams' photographs departed from what one actually saw to what one might really like to see, glorifying landmarks of the west and making cause for their preservation. Robert Adams picked up where Adams left off, documenting the altered and often destroyed landscape. See more of what Griscom sees now, in our current social climate, as he continues to work along this distinguished lineage on his website.

Also of interest, if you are in NYC, MOMA's exhibition Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West. I haven't seen it yet but with works from Robert Adams, John Baldessari, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O'Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston, and Carleton E. Watkins it promises to be a thorough study.

Drop Goal by Anthony Georgis

At any level, the practice and dedication to sport is full of emotion and drive, whether a pickup game of backyard soccer or a competitive professional league. In his series, Blood Makes The Grass Grow, Portland-based photographer, Anthony Georgis captures the myriad roles of a young woman as a high school student, teenager, and competitive rugby player. He observes the complex emotions and physical display of these girls' determination on the field, and also focuses on how their game-time mentality gives way to the everyday of school, home, and teenage relationships.

The dichotomy is presented as diptychs, contrasting notions of individual vs. team and player vs. referee. They create the beginnings of a storyline that we look forward to seeing further explored, whether it takes us through the arc of a match, or off the field into these athletes' everyday lives.

Coney Island Apartments by Charles Koegel

New York City native Charles Koegel photographs his hometown's architecture, studying and documenting that which appears to be constantly in flux, "a product of continuous deliberation over development and the environment." The above image is a digital print from Polaroid film, shot with a pinhole camera. Koegel is adept at exploring his subject of choice via a variety of mediums, photographic and not. His website features digital, silver and platinum-palladium photographic prints, as well as series of paintings and drawings that reflect his interest in geometry and the built environment. The drawings appear to most inform both his paintings and photographs but his works in all three mediums are strongly linked.

The use of traditional photographic processes to address contemporary issues in architecture, American architecture and development in particular, is akin to Jen Bekman Gallery artist Beth Dow's newest series, Ruins, currently on view. Dow's gorgeous platinum-palladium prints document the bizarre manifestations of recreated Classical monuments plopped down in the Midwestern landscape.

Third Bar, Nam Song River, Vang Vieng, Laos by Joerg Brueggemann

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Joerg Brueggemann sends photos from the lands of Lonely Planet: Ko Pha-Ngan in Thailand, Arambol in Goa and Vang Vieng in Laos. He writes:

Here the world's traveling youth gathers to fall in love, experience drugs, ride elephants or just to have beer or two. Every year millions of young people from first world countries travel the planet taking with them nothing more than their backpacks. These modern travelers are hoping to find freedom, cultural exchanges and a lot of fun. It is a very hedonistic youth that is very much concentrated on itself. Backpacking has become a tourist industry on its own that has developed its very own touristy infrastructure.

It's true, for some reason, we're a generation that has an unprecedented desire to see the world and the will and the means to travel. Not since Kerouac inspired legions to hit the road have we had such a propensity for exploration. We've even elected a president who is known and lauded for his own wanderings; we admire and revere the traveler and long to be on the go too. But for what? Brueggemann's photos seek to answer this question; they are an incisive and insightful rebuttal to work like Ryan McGinley's I Know Where the Summer Goes. Where McGinley staged dreamy, epic moments of hedonism — naked boys and girls leaping, running and falling from the heavens like gods — Brueggeman's documented the real indulgences of mere mortals, the better and the worse.

Brueggemann's series Same Same but Different won an honorable mention in CENTER's Project Competition and can be seen on his website.

Olympia 4548 by Richard Gilles

In his series, Signs of the Times, California-based contender Richard Gilles looks at blank billboards peppered along America's roadsides. A common sight to anyone who's made a roadtrip--or, traveled any amount of distance on a highway-- the boards suggest advertising has expanded beyond it's own capacity for communicating effectively, and serves as a confused medium for encouraging consumption. Photographing those billboards left blank and looming over the varied landscape, Gilles plays with perspective articulating the way the empty signs dwarf buildings in the horizon.

Gilles writes,

In photographing with this new series of photographs, I am exploring what these signs say about us or to us when they are empty. Is a blank billboard an advertisement for an economic recession? Or is it a minimalist object whose message is only that which viewer brings to it?

The images bring to mind Hiroshi Sugimoto's series of Drive-In Theaters, where blank, glowing white screens suggest an other-world, where one is alone with a veritably empty slate on which to impose their imagination. These blank screens, whether at one point showing films or advertising, suggest the impact of visual culture and passive information consumption we engage in. Both suggest the experience can be isolating, even though we're all partaking in it at one point or another.

For those of us born to an immigrant parent, or parents, the tension between being American and being "other" create complex identities entangled in multicultural traditions. Hey, Hot Shot! contender Katrina d'Autremont has returned time and again to Argentina, her mother's native land, opening her camera's eye to her family and exploring her relationship to them as well as how they influence who she is. Nationality acts as one variable in this familial exploration, but d'Autremont also considers the idea of "home" and the idealization of a space as factors in her work.

Her images offer an intimate, but controlled look in to her maternal family. Relatives are posed, though rarely in direct eye contact with the camera and the setting is uniformly indoors, creating a feeling of privacy. In the series Si Dios Quiere on her website, recurring subjects in her extended family start to become familiar to the viewer, building a narrative for the family she continues to discover.

Untitled from the series What Light Remains in the Absence by Adam E Thorman

Writing from a cafe in sunny San Francisco, it seems geographically appropriate to reflect on the work of Bay Area artist, Adam Thorman today. Thorman is heavily influenced by his natural surroundings and the interplay of light on nature, as well as poetry, which he incorporates into his work in collaboration with others.

In the images submitted to Hey, Hot Shot! from the series What Light Remains in the Absence, the play of light off of water, through windows, or as the glimmer of energy in an otherwise dark space, articulate the way that light can define a space or a mood. The time of day is often ambiguous--is this dawn, dusk, or somewhere in between? Even light and strong glows work in interplay, whether off an otherwise ordinary surface, or off a subjects face and body.

See more at Adam Thorman's website.

untitled by Jenny Pfeiffer

In recent months, images of foreclosed homes, unfinished houses, and emptied-out businesses have filled newspapers and magazines. Areas hardest hit by the foreclosure crises, like the Midwestern cities of Cleveland and Detroit, are often looked to as the most striking examples of mass abandon, but suburbs and cities in every state are facing the same types of devastation.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jenny Pfeiffer, an Oakland-based artist and photographer, looks at foreclosure in a housing development in Tracy, CA.

She writes,

Only about half of the new homes were completed and the open space created an unnerving atmosphere. I wanted to capture both the high expectations of the neighborhood yet also the sadness of living without neighbors. Regardless of the barren landscape, the new settlers are still trying to make this place their home. They take care of their yards but at the property line they stop and go no further. They have moved to Tracy for space and a sense of community, yet it feels like they are out there all alone.

Pfeiffer looks at the homes in Tracy from the exterior, showing the vast emptiness of undeveloped plots of land and residents alone in their supposedly growing communities.

Her work evokes thoughts of several other projects we have come across on the web that help us visualize the housing crises and the recession. Photographer Todd Hido, who exhibited work at Jen Bekman Gallery in A New American Portrait, creates images of foreclosed homes' interiors, with marked eerieness to their emptiness. Brian Ulrich, a Midwestern-er who also exhibited in the same show, photographed the series Stores That Are No More for Time, where the carcasses of familiar stores lay empty and in overgrowth.

Perhaps what is distressing about all these images--Pfeiffer's, Hido's, and Ulrich's--is that they are devoid of people, their only residue left behind in the form of worn carpets, empty driveways, and abandoned shopping carts. They suggest that our physical toll on the world, in the form of houses and businesses, is not so easily erased even when we have departed these spaces, and forces us to think about having a greater conscientiousness about the places we occupy and create.

untitled by Mikael F Kennedy

As inspiration to his The Odysseus series, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Mikael Kennedy looks to the classical myth, The Odyssey, one of Homer's epic poems telling the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus' decade-long journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Odysseus is faced with tests of physical strength and mental will as he faces the unknown, forced through the full gamut of human emotions during his expedition.

Kennedy's work looks to both the sea and solid ground, returning again and again to the notion of the journey. This is captured through images of paths and roads, and of lone men looking out into the horizon or out on large bodies of water, as though peering into the unknown, but with the intent of heading somewhere. The scale of man is often dwarfed by the scale of the landscape, also suggesting the force of nature is a beast not easily overcome.

Kennedy writes,

In The Odyssey, the character begins his story sitting on the shore staring at a "wine dark ocean" longing for his home. This is where we begin, staring out into the horizon with a sense of longing, absence or lack and from there wander out into a world that is both foreign and familiar in its terrain....This collection of photographs revisits that perspective: the one of cresting the hill to unknown plains or coastlines, reminiscent of the work of the Hudson River Painters and American exploration artists who were moved to capture and portraying the vastness and isolation of this new world. The Odysseus becomes a journey through the vistas of America - this search is for a renewed vision of the land, a vision that carries both the excitement and isolation of exploration.

See more from Kennedy's The Odysseus series on his website.

Martini Man by Pierre Drouin

Like Anita Cruz-Eberhard, Pierre Drouin is one of several photographers we've seen this year who are not using a camera. He begins his process by making about seventy flatbed scans of his subject, using only the light that the scanner itself emits. He then edits the resulting images together, composing "a cubist picture, just like if you unfold a sphere on a flat surface."

Photographer Jonathan Johnson also uses a scanner to create images. He's scanned the height of an entire tree and the lifespan of a garden. Working outside, natural light provides an unpredictable element that clashes with the light from the scanner, yielding entirely abstract results. Drouin's results are also abstract but relatively precise, each scan yields a crisp file to work with. In the distance between these two artist's work, the diversity and range of the scanner as a photographic tool are evident. The results feel very painterly, with Drouin, of course, most closely referencing Picasso and Braque, and more recently, David Hockney's photo montages.

A little bit farther out of the art park lie other creative uses of the scanner: Via enthusiasm unbridled, I stumbled upon scanwiches: scans of sandwiches for education and delight! (Just for fun, it is Friday after all!)

Working with or without a camera, we want to see your work! Send it our way!

While news of the Iraq War appears on the front page of international newspapers regularly, the day-to-day lives of Iraqi citizens are rarely explored in depth. The consequence of the war on Iraqis' civil rights, everyday freedoms, and simple safety, are overlooked by many, but for those who are experiencing raids on their homes, have endured torture by the militia, or have lost loved ones, the realities are glaring and enduring.

Lebanon-born photographer, Amro Hamzawi, takes viewers through a painful, but enlightening journey of Iraqi refugees in his series Iraqis Today (Testimonies). Here, he illuminates the struggle of families--showing physical suffering, deteriorated homes, and many who are grasping onto the little they have left. Descriptions of the scenes at hand illuminate that the images are only a taste of the depth of the atrocities; invisible and emotional wounds supplement those we see.

He writes,

It's difficult to give a precise estimate of the number of civilians who perished or were injured as a result of the invasion, but by all accounts the conditions on the ground are a humanitarian disaster with the civilians caught in the line of fire between the occupation forces, the militias that have taken over the country and the various insurgent groups wreaking havoc. With its infrastructure destroyed and its resources pillaged, Iraq has become a shadow of itself....This collection of portraits of Iraqi refugees seeks to bring the human dimension to the forefront and show the ravages of war from personal perspectives.

Spring 2007 Hot Shot and Jen Bekman artist Nina Berman is another photographer who looks at the effects of war on individuals. Her series Purple Hearts focuses on soldiers who have returned from war, injured, and lives forever changed. Both her project and contender Hamzawi's exploration of testimonies and stories of their subjects enable individuals who have experienced the traumatic nature of war to have a voice and share their stories.

See more on Amro Hamzawi's website.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Laura Graham combines the enigma of the mask with the stylistic effects of a custom wet plate large format camera to create ephemeral images that evoke the quality of an artifact found. A life-long collector, Graham describes roving for objects at antique stores and flea markets, then finding inspiration in what she finds.

Like Sally Mann, another female photographer who photographs on wet plate collodion 8x10 glass negatives (hers over 100 years old), the process is intrinsic to the images aesthetic. The negatives are exposed while the plate is still wet, creating effects like swirling focus and vignetting. Graham describes the method as enabling her as an "alchemist"; the final product is unpredictable, but can be transportive.

No. 06 from the series DIGITAL IKEBANAS by Anita Cruz-Eberhard

Anita Cruz-Eberhard creates fictitious photographs of Ikebana floral arrangements. The arrangements exist only as digital files or prints and are comprised of images taken from the online databases of university biology departments. Cruz-Eberhard explains that the images "have been repurposed to investigate the relationship between artifice and nature."

Visually, the images relate to Martin Kilmas' Flowers; and he's also playing with ideas of nature — in particular, gravity — and artifice, the somewhat false ability to see things that we wouldn't otherwise, via photography ala Muybridge.

I think the work actually might be closer to that of 2008 First Edition Hot Shot, Colleen Plumb. Plumb began her series, Animals are Outside Today, looking at "fake nature." You can see this work on 20x200; you'll also see that as she's worked her initial intentions have broadened to examine not only simulation but also "consumption, destruction, and reconstruction as well as notions of endurance and the reality of loss." When considering these other ideas, Cruz-Eberhard's images get interesting, she's certainly deconstructing and reconstructing, and creating something that could, technically, live forever, without actually existing in "real" life.

***Quick reminder: if you want to see your work here, on 20x200, or maybe even in a group show at Jen Bekman Gallery, you have five weeks left to get your entry together and apply!

Mexico-based photographer, Jan Smith, explores abandoned structures around the world, photographing remains of former inhabitance with ghostly bodies in their midst. The loosely defined bodies of nude men and women take form in spaces like the one pictured here--Gunkanjima Island--a former under-sea coal mine in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, which was abandoned in 1974, and also in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Namibia. The remains share remarkable similarity despite their distant geographies, suggesting a similar spirit inhabits abandoned spaces, regardless of place.

Smith writes,

Such structures exist for themselves only when they are abandoned. Without stewards, they achieve this transformation in exchange for mortality and disappearance from our memory. They live in a realm that shows itself and at the same time withdraws from us. Their acquired consciousness is like a horizon that defines itself by what we see, but also more largely by what remains veiled.

Smith's project, Ausencia y Abandono, is ongoing and you can see work from this series on his website.

Breakfast with Stephen Frost by Ryan Carter

Ryan Carter, a staff reporter for The National newspaper in the United Arab Emirates who has traveled and photographed communities in vast regions of the world, explores Old Crow, a remote Arctic community with a shrinking population in the Yukon, Canada with his submission to Hey, Hot Shot!

He writes,

With a declining population of less than three hundred, the Vuntut Gwitchin of Old Crow have hunted migratory caribou for thousands of years, and share an intimate relationship with these transient animals. Twice a year, the Porcupine Caribou Herd travels through this community to and from their calving grounds on "1002 lands" - a coastal region of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. The 1002 lands are an unprotected portion of ANWR being explored for oil and natural gas. It is estimated over 6 billion barrels of oil exist below these Arctic plains. The controversial debate to develop this region has burdened the American government since this land became a federally protected area in 1960....My project doesn't confront or explore ANWR, its ecology, the 1002 lands, or the oil industry. Instead, the photography aims to quietly document a small First Nations population, its fading traditions and dependency on ancestral lands, all threatened by North America's need for energy.

Carter's series brings to mind the images of Fall 2007 Hot Shot and 20x200 artist, Birthe Piontek, whose recent series, The Idea of North, also took her to the Canadian Yukon. Her work also explores those who live in a territory less trodden, with focus on individuation found in people's quest for the glory of imagined remoteness.

Carter's camera also finds and intimate place with the Old Crow community, whether out hunting caribou or in a resident's kitchen. Work on his website from Guatemala, the United Arab Emirates, and the Eastern Democratic Congo, also show how Carter seamlessly enters geographies of transition, documenting communities with an observant eye. Carter has completed assignments for The New York Times Magazine and International Herald Tribune, among others, has also been a nominated for a World Press Photo Award and been awarded a National Geographic Grant, participated in The Eddie Adams Workshop, Barnstorm XVIII, and has been selected for numerous group exhibitions in both the United States and abroad.

Reforestation, 2007, by David Ondrik

Albuquerque denizen David Ondrik is in search of the sublime. As he defines it, "the sublime is a combination of the grotesque and the beautiful". Using a Holga 120S camera, Ondrik creates musing landscape images of New Mexico.

From his artists statement, he writes:

In artistic expressions of the Sublime from the 19th century, man is small, in awe of and overwhelmed by the purity and enormity of Nature. The sublime in the 21st century has "transcended" this. It is no longer possible for man to be in a Romantic fog, far removed from the muck. I am no longer awe struck by the great vastness of untouched wilderness, were it even possible to find such a place. I am instead awestruck standing on the precipice above a drought-stricken reservoir, a superfund site, an (utterly avoidable) forest fire. These consequences of modernity are what make me feel small and powerless.

Ondrik's approach is a fitting foil to fellow contender Erin Tyner. Both are concerned with the scale of things--Ondrik by the enormity of Nature, and Tyner with the miniature bittersweetness of daily life.

Tilt-shift lenses, often used in architectural photography because their focal plane enables capturing buildings along parallel planes, has gained popularity as a mechanism for creating scenes in miniature. A similar effect can also be created through macro lenses, which is how Atlanta-based photographer, Erin Tyner creates miniaturization in her series, Half Awake.

She writes,

I find myself drawn to subjects possessing bittersweet qualities....In my Half Awake series I construct scenes using household items, natural objects, and model train figures. By pairing figures and context I create characters that are engaged with an unfolding narrative.

By recreating scale to the size of the miniature--whether it be person or object--the viewer departs reality into a land of the photographer's imagination. Photographers such as London-based artist, Slinkachu, who will release a book titled Little People later this year, have been placing scenes of tiny people under park benches, on sidewalks, and in the subway for years, leaving them to be discovered (or stepped on) by passerby. Whether creating scenes in your bathtub, front yard, or in public spaces, the photographers utilizing this lens technique must shrink their world--albeit temporarily--to the few from just a couple of inches off the ground in order the create their new and tiny worlds.

Cycles of consumption, recycling, and their effects on the earth have been brought to light in the art world by photographers like Edward Burtynsky and Chris Jordan. Each of these photographers focuses on the effects of what we consume on the environment, drawing attention to the mass of consumption and the havoc of disposal.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender William Goldkind also turns his attention to recycling, particularly scrap and junk metal, looking at the connection between the earth and the manufacturing industry.

He writes,

The recycling industry has become a prominent and lucrative sphere of manufacturing. The reuse of materials is central to this body of work. The machinery and processes that enable the makers of primary materials to use scrap again, creating a closed cycle of consumption is both a critical component of the economy and mimics the natural circle of life. Metal as we know it begins life deep in the earth, it is mined and manipulated into refrigerators, cars, jewelry, and other products, as its use diminishes and ages the metal returns to the recycler and their furnaces for rebirth to be used again.

By honing his camera in on metal both on the micro and macro levels (from crushed aluminum cans to the large-scale carcass of an airplane), Goldkind looks to the big and small metals that are re-incorporated into use. He works to redefine what is "junk" and where the cycle of production truly ends.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Diego Ravier had an unlikely beginning as a project manager in the automobile industry, but has since switched paths to focus his camera on on exploring the discrimination and social rejection endured by those living with genetic disorders and stigmatized diseases. Trained in Paris and residing in Frankfurt am main, Germany, Ravier's work is set in villages of equatorial Africa.

In his series, Genetic Contrast, Ravier explores the world of Africans suffering from albinism. Their skin lacks melanin, making it whiter, and their eyes are often gray, blue, or brown -- a much lighter hue than those without the disease. Many suffer problems with their vision and skin, and are extremely sensitive to the sun.

He writes,

They also face the indifference of the rest of their community about their suffering. In addition, their peers suspect them to be related to good and bad omen. Often, they live in hiding from the unforgiving communities around them. It is difficult to define what "normal" means because there are plenty of non-written rules by society. Some physical anomalies make one look different from the majority. If this causes social prejudices, the result is always suffering and little or no social integration.

Ravier's images show the sense of isolation brought about by albinism--children without playmates, a grown woman unaccepted by her husband's family, young men and women who struggle to get jobs because of their skin color--as well as the struggle of the community around albinos to understand how to accept individuals born with this genetic anomaly.

See more work on Diego Ravier's website.

As a clinical social worker for thirty-five years, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jane Alt is familiar with the inside of the psychiatrist's office. In her series, The Treatment Room, she brings her camera into the usually off-grounds office, and captures images of patients, environment, and the doctors, all anonymously. Through her images, Alt hints at the body emotions of conflict, focus, resolution, and anxiety in a space that offers both comfort and frustration.

In her statement, she writes,

The Psychiatrist's office is an intimate place with a mystique of its own. ... I explore these spaces and their meaning with my camera. The office, as a site for many dramas, functions as an empty stage waiting for its players. Behind closed doors I release the shutter, providing visual access to a world veiled in privacy.

In a recent NY Times slideshow, psychoanalyst Mark Gerald brought his camera into the offices of others in the same profession all around the city. In contrast to Alt's project, he chooses to reveal his subjects in their settings, focusing on the psychoanalysts themselves, inspired by both the offices similarities and differences.

See more from The Treatment Room at Jane Alt's website.

Horizon # 2, 2008 by Christopher Paquette

Philadelphia photographer, Christopher Paquette, has submitted work from his series Collected Horizons. I'm reminded of Mark Rothko and Andreas Gursky, and how their approaches flatten and challenge our way of seeing.

Christopher writes:

This project consists of a series of minimalist and abstract horizons taken in a variety of locations, both indoors and outdoors. It is a study of layers, textures, depth, and perspective.

View the series here, and visit Christopher's Photography blog here.

Plänterwald #3, 2007 by Ina Senftleben

Hot Shot contender Ina Senftleben photographs Berlin's defunct Spreepark in her series Plänterwald. Ina's images are bewitching in their eerie quietude, and make me think if I were to enter them I'd somehow be living in a Douglas Coupland story about the end of the world. When viewing the complete series one cannot help but recall Anna Gakell's photographs, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition. What if, at the end of the world, the planet were overrun with identically clad nymphettes? See what I mean on Ina's site.

In contrast to 2008 Hot Shot Hosang Park, whose images of parks in Seoul, Korea are void of people, and highly attentive to the geometries created in these man-made spaces, the work of 2009 Hey, Hot Shot! contender Kurt Tong speaks to his memory of--and relationship to--recreational spaces in China. Tong is inspired by worn and yellowed childhood photos of himself and his siblings in Chinese parks full of bumper cars and ice cream stalls--the objects and emblems that made the parks unique. With time, the parks have changed, and his memory of the parks of his childhood are fading.

He writes,

In 1958, at the beginning of The Great Leap Forward, when private ownership was banned, many existing parks were renovated and new parks were built all across China for the people, many were renamed People's Parks. Over the years, they became main focal points of the cities, where families have their outings and couples meet. China is changing at a staggering pace, the economic miracle means that the Chinese are enjoying a much more affluent lifestyle. Shopping and Internet have replaced bumper cars and Ferris wheels. Many of these parks have fallen to disarray. Millions of older Chinese would have grown up with these parks and have memories of time spent in them. Just like the parks, their memories are slowly fading away with time.

Tong's People's Park series and other projects can be viewed on his website.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jordan Tate, introduces us to his series Blur, a collection of works that challenges the viewer to find understanding in subjects without immediate focus. He asks that the camera be acknowledged as an optical device that mediates sight, separating the viewer or picture-maker from his or her subject.

He describes the series as,

an examination of and reconciliation between photographic seeing and ocular seeing. In a sense it is an examination of how we see, what we see, and what is worth looking at. Much of my relationship with the work recalls peripheral vision, where the banal can occasionally seem extraordinary.

Tate cites Uta Barth--whose experimentation with depth of field, focus, and depth play with the power of allusion--as a reference to his own work; he too makes work with the intent of creating tensions of focus and the desire for clarity for the viewer.

Currently living in Berlin, Tate is a Fulbright Fellow with work held in several collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender and Reproduction.

Pocono Gardens Resort, Paradise Valley, Pennsylvania by Nicole Lloyd

Nicole Lloyd now calls Los Angeles home. Originally from Allentown, PA, she spent the last few years roaming the country and photographing. Of this process she writes:

Through this exploration I realized that home was not just a specific place, but that home was also a feeling. This became apparent when I started to discover landscapes that were not a part of my past, but that evoked a strong sense of comfort and familiarity, the same feelings I experience when exploring the landscape of my youth. By connecting these disparate places through their common bonds the images become part of larger landscape that is universally familiar: they create a sense of place that is emotionally tangible yet elusive.

Melbourne-based photographer Ward Roberts, is our first peek into the work of contenders for the 2009 Hey, Hot Shot! competition. We are excited to watch the submissions come in and see the new work brought to our attention by this season's contenders.

Roberts turns his eye to repetition in built forms and their intersection with nature, exploring familiar landscapes like parking lots, shopping carts, and highrise apartment complexes. With a muted, cool color palette, Roberts takes us to the edge of lonely forests and parking lots, where vacancy appears indefinite.

His submissions come from the series, landscapes about us, described as:

"...a distilling exploration of loneliness and isolation... Rich in all life but human, a sense of desertion & desolation resonates across these landscapes." [-Kate Adams]

Other series on his website show the versatility of Roberts' minimalism; the human body and man-made objects are explored with equal distance and control.

Roberts accolades include being named the Victorian photography student of the year (portraiture), winning the ACMP Les Walkling award for Architectural, Industrial or commercial photography, Irwin Maclaren Landscape Award, and the Blindspot exhibition peoples choice award.

It's my last contenders post of 2008! I can hardly stand it. It feels like Christmas! Tomorrow we'll have 5 *brand*new* Hot Shots. The only thing that could make the evening more magical would be some of those fluffy white snowflakes that graced NYC so briefly on Saturday. But instead, it's just really, really cold so, to sustain the suspense, let me present the work of James Griffioen. Or rather, let me let him present the work:

I live in a shrinking, once-great city and I document the indifference of nature as it reclaims the urban landscape block by block, building by building. I am interested in the duplicity of this urban flora as somehow both innocent and strangely sinister. Detroit has long suffered from a natural disaster worse than that wrought by a hurricane or an earthquake. Cries for help from Detroit don't bring FEMA, the press, or Robert Polidori. Our natural disaster is one of simple indifference to the suffering caused by racism, post-industrial decline, crime, and implacable poverty...

Even though he's making work that is very close to home, Griffioen lives in Detroit, it first reminded me of the work of a photographer who habitually travels from Manitoba to Chernobyl, David McMillan. I feel like both photographers are out to prove that this planet will be a better place without us, or at least, that it will survive even if/when we perish.

These two also share an intense respect for a sense of place, in this regard, Griffioen's work reminds me of Philadelphian Zoe Strauss. And truth be told, Detroit and Philly are two cities that could see a little more attention, and not just in times like now, when bad gets even worse. Griffioen and his wife maintain a blog that shows their love for their fine city, Sweet Juniper! Check it out and see why they are "just two more people raising their kids in the most dangerous city in America." It'll give you some good reading material while you're waiting for the big announcement....

It's really a bummer that HHS contender Sandra Fine doesn't have a website. But I'm not going to hold it against her because it's the second thing we have in common: I'm also a photographer who hasn't yet managed to put my own site together, and we're both Pratt MFAs. So, I included all three images from her submission. They're tiny but they're lovely, aren't they? Sandra writes:

Since 2000, I have traveled every year to China visiting ceramic and porcelain factories. The factories range from very modern mechanized facilities to small artist studios. While involved in production work at the factories, I always ask for a tour of the facilities. It is during these tours that I carry a small portable camera. While observing the factory production, I have the opportunity to photograph the visually rich environments. Because of the parameters of these visits, I have to photograph extremely quickly and unobtrusively. I consider these images, 'Still Lifes.' 'Still Life,' as a genre celebrates the beauty in everyday life.

While her process seems to rely on furtive shooting like a photojournalist, her resulting photographs are well-composed and clean, so much so that their formal qualities remind me of Sean Scully's paintings. Of course, Hiroshi Sugimoto's Colors of Shadow project also comes to mind, but for some reason, I link this work, and maybe because of its subject matter, more strongly to painting, including Giorgio Morandi.

Morandi and Sugimoto are two of my favorite artists, so thanks to Sandra for bringing them to the forefront, for five minutes of some peace and quiet and contemplation on an otherwise hectic deadline kind of day! There's a lot in the works around here this week, including the benefit for Thrilla in Manila, which Jen Snow's been busy keeping you all up-to-date on. And of course, we'll be announcing the winners of this round of Hey, Hot Shot! competition about this time, tomorrow! Stay tuned!

It's the last weekend of anticipation for Hey, Hot Shot! contenders and hundreds of you have dotted your Is and crossed your Ts just as surely as these shoes are lined up on their shelves. So, I hope that you all are relaxing, knowing that you've done what you can and now it's up to our esteemed panelists to separate the cream of the crop, the 5 contenders who will be 2008's Second Edition Hot Shots and featured in an exhibition at the gallery next year. One thing is for sure, this year's contenders were of the strongest and the best that we've ever had, making the judging harder than ever.

Among this talented pool of entries, floats the work of Austrian photographer Monika Holzner. The glowing, creamy palette of this photograph runs through all the work in book 1 on her website. The images are warm renderings of other people's private spaces, investigations into the details that define a person's existence. As Monika writes:

I'm generally concerned with the way people live their lives, which of this immense array of our world's aspects they choose to build up their own worlds. In my photography I seek to find instances of the individuality of these worlds, moments when this individuality becomes visible.

See more work on her website.

HHS contender Zack Seckler is funny. At least, he makes funny photographs, ones that will definitely make you laugh out loud, or at least snort, a little. And at the end of a long week after a holiday, I'm pretty grateful for that. Who doesn't need a good guffaw? As Zack writes:

Humor functions as a way to process and escape the reality of everyday life. It may entertain, but it may also serve as a therapeutic tool. At this point in history, with major problems at home and abroad, we need, more than ever, the opportunity comedy gives to come up for air, to reframe our images so they are no longer uniformly dark. My imagery gives an opportunity to buoy the spirit by letting in a little light.

I'm not even going to try to be as clever as he and make any jokes here, so happy Friday everyone!

Hey, Hot Shot! contender My Le Nguyen's work looks like selected screens from a filmstrip, or freeze frames of a public access television show. Men on TV loom large over what seems to be a fitful woman sleeping. Trying to sleep. Maybe just lying there, but moving. It is the movement that seems most important. We see moments from what one can assume is a stream of movement. The television shows drone on, the scene changes every second on the screen and the figure in the foreground moves through her night -- or her nap -- too.

She writes:

"Two encounters with my father in Vietnam after 20 years separation elicited a need to create the story of my parents. Because of the nature of my mom's routine after supper, my watching her watch TV and then falling asleep became the means by which I could explore my parents' story. The story contains 13 images. Each image has two elements: my mom lying in the foreground, and a man on the Television set in the background."

Nguyen continues and offers a fairly literal explanation of the prone woman/mother and man/father separated by the distance of a screen. But she calls it like we see it. An interesting looking series, for sure.

View Nguyen's previous entry, in 2007.

Happy birthday to me, 2007, by Christopher Handran

There's so much going on here at Jen Bekman Projects, it's hard to keep track! But, don't worry, I'm counting down the days until we announce the winners of 2008's Second Edition Hey, Hot Shot! Competition next Tuesday! 5 days to go! And I've got a contenders post lined up for every last day.

I'll start with Aussie photographer Christopher Handran. Here's what he had to say about his series, Happy birthday to me, including the above image:

My practice draws on the most basic principles of photography, seeking to re-enact the experimentation and alchemy of early photography using materials and subjects drawn from my immediate surroundings. Employing d.i.y. techniques, junk shop materials and op shop technology, I make and modify cameras, lenses and viewers. By deconstructing and reconfiguring photographic processes and materials, my work explores our relationship to photography in everyday life... the resulting photographs present a fragmentary time lapse of my own life, recorded in a haze of photographic grain. In these works, the nature of the photograph as a trace and the physical experience of perception is foregrounded.

Before I knew what he was up to, Handran's images reminded me of Peter Coffin's Aura Portraits and Noah Sheldon's North series, both featured in the current issue of Blindspot, and of course, 2007 Fall Hot Shot Carlo Van de Roer's project, The Aura Portrait Machine. Carlo's new work received a write-up in the NYTimes Magazine blog and Kara posted about it over on the 20x200 blog. If you're checking out this other work along with me, you'll see, yes, the color palettes are similar, and there is also a soft, un-photographic feeling throughout all of the images, I think, because, all of these photographers are trying to capture those things that are left out of photographs, things that, sometimes, even in that moment the photograph is taken, aren't seen, only felt.

On top of that, both Carlo and Christopher are using modified equipment, Carlo, an Aura Camera 6000, and Christopher, a macro lens he created with rubber bouncy balls, pointing to the fact that cameras, on their own, might not be enough. Further distorting images, Christopher is re-photographing his childhood birthday photographs, records of the day of every year past that he blew out candles on a cake.

Re-visiting old photographs and re-considering how they function is something I touched upon when looking at James Reiman's HHS entry. And really, what these two photographers seems to be getting at is that idea put forth by Barthes, that the photograph is not so much a document of 'what is,' but 'what was' and 'what has ceased to be.'

So, why do we photographers even bother to take pictures when it is so hard to translate what was and what is and all of those thoughts, feelings, and things that can't even been seen to a 2D plane? Because sometimes, we come close.

HHS contender, German photographer Marlon Kowalski was one of the first to complete his entry. I saw the work and wanted to write about it then but for some reason, didn't. But, weeks later, I'm thinking about it again, in spite of the onslaught of entries in the last few days of the competition. The work is simple but clever, exploring the ever-narrowing boundaries between painting, sculpture and photography. While many of the images, like the above, Circle, stand alone, Kowalski pairs images on his website, creating visual puns that reconsider the relationships between the three-dimensional world and the two-dimensional picture plane, livestock on a hillside and sunbathers on the beach, swans and ruffled paper, and light and physical objects, among other things.

Bandage, June, 2008 by Melissa R. Kaseman

It's hard to make compassionate photographs about illness, especially the illness of others. Remember Nicholas Nixon's show Patients at Yossi Milo earlier this year? What was he thinking?
So, I was wary when I noticed the titles of Melissa R. Kaseman's photographs which include Bandage, above, and After Treatment. But because I was not struck by what she was photographing until after reading the titles, I found Kaseman's approach comforting. It seems to align more closely with Elinor Carucci's highly personal work in her series, Pain.
Kaseman writes:

Photography has the capability to suspend moments of transition. I am interested in using this to visually describe the moments that are significant to my life experience, using the images as a map of the human experience.

Sometimes, when I am using Google maps to find directions, I enter extra addresses, just to see what the street views look like. Park Ho Sang's aerial shots are what I dream of finding on Google. His work is fantastic; un-exaggerated realities that caused me to look at the screen, foolishly, for a button I could use to zoom in.

Sang explains:

The objects I photographed is a small park located within a living space in downtown. I paid attention to images seen from a bird's-eye view and proceed working on them. While working, I focused on not relating special stories to them but presenting spaces. I think that the pictures presented that way can be a pathway to remind viewers of their thoughts on familiar places. In particular, their thought or discussions regarding parks. The parks seen here and the details taken of bird's eye view will reflect characteristics of downtown area and distorted realities. In addition, I also presume that they will also reveal fabricated Korean-style space and stark realities of democracy in a more comic way. These parks are that of fragmented space intended as patronizing and face-saving move, a park that mimics real parks and a place intended to be used as a park. That case is an outcome of scars of Korean-style capitalism, simulacra. Every apartment complex decorates the park and is adorned with playgrounds and strange-looking installments, the place created along with green areas of land demonstrates coarse, improvised landscape architecture, an artificial scenery. I captured such interesting, but strange-looking, scenes.

Tonight I e-mailed with old friend Ed Park (author of the fantastic office-novel Personal Days) and also I shot some photos at the National Book Awards 5 Under 35 event, where Joshua Ferris, author of another office-based literary staple, Then We Came to the End, introduced one of the "emerging" readers. I no longer work in a stereotypical American office, and, I admit, sometimes I miss it. If you miss it, or are in the midst of it, you'd do well to pick up both books. Each is brilliant, in its own way.

All that said, look at Hey, Hot Shot! entrant Rylan Steele's work. The piece above, Office, is just sterile enough to imply that there is a force -- other than the workers -- in charge of the space. That the offices in his depictions operate, like most offices, on a mix of logic, nonsense, and mysterious directives from afar, is obvious. Everything is a little too neat. A little too well-lit. About as eerie as I imagine my old offices would be if I visited them now.

Ms. Bekman reminded me of one of the best (the best?) office poems ever: Theodore Roethke's Dolor.

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,

All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,

Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,

Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

The photographs in Hey, Hot Shot! contender Cara Phillips' series, Singular Beauty, feel similar to Taryn Simon's An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar: these are things we aren't meant to see. As Cara writes:

Cosmetic surgery is now a common, if still stigmatized, part of our culture. When you enter the offices of Cosmetic Surgeons you not only discover the promise of happiness but also the fear, self-loathing, anxiety, and desire of millions of Americans. This collection of photographs, resulted from both a personal struggle with body issues, and a long history in the beauty business. While photographing these doctor's offices, I was less interested in capturing the actual place or thing, than in capturing the experience of it...

Street Advertiser | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Lives on $432 fixed monthly income, 2007, by Mark Menjivar

What we keep behind closed doors, in drawers, places we think that no one else will see, can tell a lot about us. As of late, it seems, a lot of photographers have been peeking and prying into these private spaces: Coke O'Neal documents strangers' medicine cabinets, Paho Mann photographs junk-drawers, and Hey, Hot Shot! contender Mark Menjivar records the contents of refrigerators.
He describes his process:

This project began as I spent time with people who have experienced hunger. As I traveled around the country going to food banks and soup kitchens, my thoughts increasingly turned to the food items they ate on a daily basis. If we are what we eat, then what can we learn by looking closely at the foods we consume? A refrigerator is both a shared and a private space... I see these photographs as portraits of those I have come to know. They are rich and they are poor. Vegetarians, Republicans, the hungry, members of the NRA, Liberals, Catholics, under-appreciated, Atheists, the unemployed, former soldiers in Hitler's SS, midwives, mentally ill, dreamers, and so much more.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Heather D. Kehoe crafts scenes that are sort of absurd. Observational and humorous, her work puts life-sized paper dolls in real-life, and often suburban, scenes. I tend to like a lot of suburban-themed work. I don't like it at all, however, when I comb through entries and see multiple instances of not-so-hot imitations of any of the suburban greats. "The poor man's version of..." sometimes becomes a game, a tired trope (as do the oft-entered shopping carts and empty swimming pools - ugh). Kehoe's work, however, is original in scope. And, in the photo above, she uses little green army men, an icon I tend to like. (See some old Ryan McGinness.) It isn't clear whether she crafts these dolls herself, or if she procures them and places them in her scenes. It doesn't much matter. They help her tell her stories either way.

With so many entries pouring in at the verylastminute, I spent some time sifting before finding the photographs of contender John Mann.

Mann's images rose to the top, in part because they were familiar. I came across them last week in a newsletter from Newspace Center for Photography where he exhibited work as one of three photographers selected by Darius Himes for Newspace's 2007 National Juried Exhibition. Darius serves as one of HHS' super-star panelists as well.

The photographs also caught my attention because they are gorgeous and smart, turning the genre of travel photography on its head, suffusing the beginning and the end of the travel experience, marking the time when a place on a map ceases to be, and also remains, just a place on a map. Is this confusing? Mann is a little more clear:

Following five years of photographing the landscape and those who travel through it, the series Folded In Place finds its exploration of place though a visualization of the map as the final destination.

Many photographers, including Hot Shots Juliane Eirich, Ian Baguskas, Youngna Park, Kate Orne (to name a few), and contender Mann, are also travelers. We have a desire to know the unknown, to be out of our element, to experience something new, and sometimes we just want to be somewhere else. But we always come "home," eventually, and all of the knowledge and experience gained in the last adventure, no matter how engaging and exhilarating, are subject to memory which is a tricky map in itself.

Mann's maps, thoughtfully altered and photographed, tell stories seen and spun, long forgotten and oft recalled, from near and far. Take your own wander on Mann's website.

We are no longer accepting entries for the 2008 Second Edition of Hey, Hot Shot!, but we'll certainly still be featuring our favorite Contenders here each day. Keep joining us for updates on the entrants, on previous competition winners, for tips and tricks, to-dos, and, occasionally, interviews.

Above, take a look at Birthday Princess by entrant Ashley Kazanjian. It is a Nice Shot, and an appropriate and welcome sight as we sort through the tons of great submissions we've received in the past/last day. It's like a party, sort of. We got a lot of presents and we're not wrapping anything up.

It looks like we have a super set of photographers vying for our five coveted Hot Shot slots.

The last few hours of HHS can be hectic with scores of you trying to enter before the deadline. We want everyone to be aware of a few possible hiccups so as to preemptively calm nerves.

The good news:
If you initiate your payment via Google Checkout by 11:00 p.m. EST TONIGHT, you will be able to enter.

A few other things:
1. Everyone who has paid the entry fee by 11:00 p.m. EST will be allowed to complete their entry; don't worry if you have last minute problems. We'll sort them out and get your entry processed.

2. Google checkout can take up to two hours! to fully verify credit cards, so the email from us with your unique upload form url will not arrive immediately. (We know this is annoying, it is to us too!) Do not panic, the email with your unique url get there... we know you're eager to get us your work.

3. If you are waiting on your url, check your spam folder in addition to your inbox. Please do not email us until have looked there too.

4. If you have problems uploading images with our entry form, we can manually enter the images for you. But first, make sure your files are jpegs between 800-1000 pixels wide and have .jpg file extensions and that you have filled in all the other information.

5. If you have any issues not listed here just email info AT heyhotshot DOT com and we'll do our best to take care of your problems promptly.

I'm picking up Jen Snow's new category for HHS: Nice Shot with this photo taken by Nicholas Gaffney. The minute I saw Sunday (Bather) I was convinced that Lisette Model's subject in Coney Island, New York City, Bather Standing was still roaming the beaches around Brooklyn, at least in spirit.
I don't believe in ghosts, not the kind you can see at least. But I certainly think that we are given to inclinations that we can't explain. While I, of course, don't know for certain that Nicholas Gaffney ever saw Model's photograph, I think that in all likely-hood he did, but regardless, the same thing that made me recall Model's photograph probably stirred in Gaffney, whether he knew it or not. Our world is flush and overflowing with iconic images from the photographers who preceded us; it's nice when they come back to visit.

My first reaction: for real?! Bist meshugge?* My second reaction: this looks good and is hilarious.

Upon reading HHS entrant David Eric Davis' statement, though, I'm not sure that he was going for funny. He writes,

"I make art to uncover that which is messy, primordial and preconscious in me. In sharing what I find, I push past my own notions of what is dirty and shameful. For this body of work, I collected the lint and hair from my navel for ten years and photographed the most figurative specimens using a high-resolution scanner. The resulting images, each a massively magnified record of one day's harvest, suggest fuzzy, biomorphic figures with luminous bodies and swirling flagella. The specimens are a direct record of my existence and represent the unique signature of my body. Free from interference by my thinking mind, they are the product of automatic felting. 'Pipik' (or 'pupik') is Yiddish for bellybutton. 'Contemplating your pipik,' or 'navel-gazing,' means being turned inward, disengaged from the world."

Oy. The work looks good, even if the explanation is a bit literal.

*Translation: Are you crazy? (David, I speak some Yiddish.)

P.S. Another Yiddish phrase about belly buttons, in case you were looking for one: "A shaynem dank dir im pupik" = "Much thanks to your belly button." Or, "thanks for nothing."

Picket Fences
2005

I have always been fascinated with model homes. When I was a kid growing up in the sprawling South Jersey suburbs, we used to break in to model homes and just imagine what adult life might be like. Mobile homes also hold a special place of wonder for me, so I naturally feel a connection to the model mobile homes series by Amy Eckert.

Manufacturing Home attempts to understand definitions of "home" and to explore the multi-billion dollar industry selling the idea back to us. The manufactured homes in my pictures are brand-new, having come off the assembly line complete with curtains and wall-to-wall carpeting. Once on the sales lot, they are furnished and propped to present a homey, blank slate for the buyers' dreams. The decor generates a kind of nostalgia which can veer into parody. These display homes are earnest and infused with a sense of potential: the poster fireplaces roar, the flowers stay fresh, and the ice cream never melts.

See more of Amy here

HHS contender Samuel F. Falls submitted images that are simple and elegant, with the exception of this one; it's simple and elegant and unsettling, border-line nightmarish. Really, it makes my skin crawl. It's disconcerting but a gut reaction, good or bad, is usually the best reaction.
Falls writes:

Lately I have been taking more biographical pictures, thinking less about 'why' and 'what does it mean', and taking more photos just because they feel right.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Tanja Geis is currently completing a Master's in Marine and Coastal Management in the city of West Fjords, in Iceland. I am not sure that this is something we need to know, but I definitely feel Iceland in the background of her work. Or, I feel what little I know of Iceland: a dreamy mix of precipitation and visual clarity.

Nevertheless, Geis's work is great. In photos like the one above, she first draws, from memory, the faces of those she knows. Then, she shoots their portraits and layers the two. The result is one that asks the viewer to contemplate which came first -- the drawing or the photograph -- and whether that answer even matters at all. The line drawing is a tracing, either of memory or of the recorded object, the photographic portrait of the person. Geis's combination of the two is key.

It's a little late in the game*, but I'd like to introduce a new category of HHS blog post. "Nice Shot." It is exactly what it sounds like. One post = one great photograph.

The photo above, by HHS entrant Sarah Kane is a perfect fit. Look at it. All that bright white, the bits of color on the price and item signs posted on the sides, the amazing "Thank you" signage all the way at the end of the aisle. All told, a "nice shot." No need to belabor the point. That is all.

*Note: all entries for the 2008 Second Edition of Hey, Hot Shot! are due tomorrow, Tueday, November 11, by 8:00 p.m. EST. Enter now! And return to the HHS blog in the next few days for more contender picks from the team.

As always, everything reminds me of something else, and in this case, I am reminded of Finnish photographer Esko Männikkö. There is just something about the brilliance of Scandinavian light mixed with the stark simplicity of remote villages...
French photographer Celine Clanet's images of Norwegians living above the Arctic Circle in Máze depict the daily life of people, animals and landscapes of "a reality that will be soon impossible to see due to cultural integration and the global warming disaster in Arctic".

See more from Celine's Máze series here.

I love this image from contender Anna Krachey (yes, it immediately reminds me of Laura Letinsky's work). Krachey seems to be interested in making bittersweet images that capture what we leave behind, and, as her statement declares "this passion for the tangible might not be so possessive, since the pleasure is so widely available, much of it is ephemeral, and some of it is cheap, or free as clouds."

Sigh.

See more of Anna's images here

Image from Sharzad Kamel's Silent Mountains, Lonely Shores series

Hey, Hot Shot! Contender, Shahrzad Kamel, submitted images from her Silent Mountains, Lonely Shores series shot along the borders of the Caspian Sea.

My ancestry is also tied to these regions: my paternal grandparents were originally from Azerbaijan. My maternal grandmother was born in Turkmenistan. Whilst on a personal search for my own roots and selfhood I am also discovering countries still in a transitional period in the post-Soviet world, dealing with issues of their own long suppressed national identities. Iran of course undergoes its own identity crisis in the wake of an Islamic Revolution. The Caspian Sea has become for me a perfect place to investigate my own questions of identity. I aspire to show the beauty in the region, the eccentricities of it, and the splashes of color and life we find in sometimes somber environments. The Caspian Sea has become for me a perfect place to investigate my own questions of identity. I aspire to show the beauty in the region, the eccentricities of it, and the splashes of color and life we find in sometimes somber environments.

As an Iranian American, raised mostly in the UK, Shahrzad uses photography to attempt to connect to a culture and impossible reality of what life might had been like had she been raised in Iran. Her images are rich with an imagined nostalgia and, as the title of the series suggests, deeply lonely.

See more of Shahrzad's dreamy images here.

Master of the Universe Preparing For Battle from The Best Memories I Never Had series, 2008, by James W. Reiman

In the office last week, we had an interesting conversation about how the role of photographs in memory is a sort-of generational thing. Raul has this theory that our parents and grandparents attached memories to objects. We (late 20s, 30s and, 40-somethings) grew up with photographs and albums. Generations growing up now will probably attach memories to less tangible things like jpegs.

HHS contender James W. Reiman is a part of our generation, the one that still attaches memories to photographs. He uses his old photographs in his work, replacing his father's figure with his own in the images and forcing us to consider, as he has had to do, what happens when the things in those photographs, the toys, the old homes, and especially, the people, cease to exist? What happens to those memories if the other people who were a part of them don't continue on with us?

James' work considers these things, see his website to see more.

Hey, Hot Shot Second Edition of 2008 contender Erin K. Malone's entry is gorgeous and gruesome. Whether the disasters she displays are real or imaginary, she freezes a moments, instants, on an otherwise super-fast highway. And she totally caught me with the photo reprinted above.

I've taken some photos while driving. I hate driving to begin with, and do it as little as possible, and only out of necessity. It makes me anxious. Probably definitely the worst possible time for me to take photos. I doubt I'll be able to do it again without thinking of Malone's images first.

This photo is of some very excited members of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club's during ther annual New Year's Day swim. The are running into and toward the near-frozen waters off the coast of Coney Island.

This photo has nothing and everything to do with America and patriotism and/or how most of us are feeling right now. And it is a good shot. And so it is a contender, in the Second Edition of Hey, Hot Shot! for 2008.

Look at some more of entrant Shizuka Minami's work on her website.

Stripes, May 2007, by Meredith Andrews

The entire country is a buzz about the election and who can blame us!? So, I couldn't resist the temptation to write about an image that appeared, initially, to be oh-so-American. Really, what is more American than stripes and shopping carts? Upon closer inspection though, you'll realize these aren't the shopping carts you see in this country, they are instead those that you would find if you were a consumer in post-Soviet Russia.

HHS contender Meredith Andrews explains:

In post-Soviet Russia, where the mighty petro-dollar rules amid entrenched oligarchs and newly emerging entrepreneurs, lies the awkward struggle of the old and the new, the past and the inevitable.

Hers is an approach entirely different but not in opposition to fellow HHS contender, Davin Ellicson. Both are exploring the awkward transition between socialist and capitalist economies, the meeting of agrarian and consumer cultures, and the fight over the Lexus and the olive tree that is happening in post-Soviet countries and all over the world in the name of progress. Both also raise the question, what is progress?

Progress and change are long overdue in the U.S. and with our new president (fingers crossed, holding breath!) we'll be facing new challenges and awkward struggles against the inevitable, but for now, hope remains as strong and bright as these red stripes.

Polar Bear Chained, 2005 by Lex Thompson

First time HHS contender Lex Thompson hails from Minneapolis, the same great photographic city as fellow contender Colin Kopp. These two Minneagraphers are in good company at home in MN, as well as in this round of Hey, Hot Shot!

While Thompson's working from the Midwest, his interests take him all over the United States. In his artist's statement he writes:

All Our Pleasant Places is a series of color photographs of ruinous landscapes, amusement parks, museums, zoos, and private homes that explore the American myth of Manifest Destiny and its seemingly endless horizon of optimism and possibility. The images depict the construction of fantasy and desire in our landscape, offering a return to the innocence of the Garden, but revealing the frailty of the hopes we bring to the world. From religious conviction to Manifest Destiny to Disneyland, America struggles with fusing two desires, to return to a state of childlike innocence and to realize a future utopia.

This photograph, like many others in Thompson's series which you can see in full on his website, vacillates between tragic and funny. It's tragic, of course because we've all seen the fate of polar bears, swimming in the sea where they should instead be sliding around on icecaps. It's funny because it aptly shows how we humans both over- and underestimate our impact on the life around us, and funny of course, because it's a tacky statue, chained to trees. It strangely shows the control we wish to have (really, assume to have) over other life and just how bizarre that desire is.

Hey, Hot Shot! Second Edition 2008 contender Jowhara AlSaud scratches the emulsion of her negatives and makes prints from the line-drawing-like images that remain. Her work takes on the appearance of hand-drawn cartoons, albeit sad ones, censored ones.

She writes,

"The latest body of work began as a comment on censorship in Saudi Arabia and it's effects on visual communication. There are regions in Saudi Arabia where people still draw a line across throats in photographs (figuratively cutting the head off.) There are blurred out faces on billboard advertisements. Skirts are crudely lengthened and sleeves added to women's outfits in magazines with black markers. Figurative work is still considered by many to be sinful. As with everything else here, there's a lack of consistency, and things change from region to region, but overall images are highly scrutinized and controlled.

In an attempt to comment on this censorship, I tried to apply the language of the censors to my personal photographs...

It became a game of How much can you tell with how little. When reduced to line drawings or sketches, the images achieved enough distance from the original photographs that neither subjects nor censors could find them objectionable. For me, they became autonomous, and I became interested in the minimal narratives they created."

AlSaud currently lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and her work is on view through December 13 at the Schneider Gallery in Chicago.

I just saw Synecdoche, New York. Or, as I've started referring to it since, "Synecdoche, My Life." Okay, it's not exactly my life, but it sort of is everyone's life. I loved it. Much like the last movie that Charlie Kaufman wrote that I loved (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), this one has wonderfully crafted sentences but it also looks, visually, SO good.

If I may project, Fred Muram's work seems a bit of a kindered spirit. I mean, part of his statement reads sort of like a textbook report on either of the films above. Muram writes,

"I want my audience to experience images and video that can be understood within the context of similar experiences that might have occurred within their own lives. As individuals we share so much in common with other people, but we are isolated within our own minds. There is a disconnectedness created between every individual and their surrounding universe that is fundamentally integrated through that personʼs ability to accept sensory information and respond with language."

First of all, as a theme, "kissing the ceiling" is great. It's silly and sweet, and just absurd enough, but not too absurd. In the photo above, the girl, clutching at the top of the door and the delicate balance of her shoe on the knob are great details. In the tiny thumbnails I saw of thw work at first, I figured she was "floating" up to kiss the ceiling/sky. I was relieved to see the full image, for it goes far beyond what could have been trite, a trope.

I also tend to fall for repitition. Muram's series is filled with many perfectly quirky moments. Also enjoyable, some of his other work: The Rug Series and I'm Going Baldessari. There is more Kissing the Ceiling too.

Untitled from the Traveling Dream series by Angela B. Kidwell

I do love, love black and white photography. I was that student in grad school who insisted on working in the darkroom; scanning and editing on a monitor just didn't (and still doesn't) amount to the same experience for me, (plus the mural room was slightly larger than my apartment). So, I get really excited when I see silvery HHS submissions; there are too few of them!

Angela's images resonate with the work of black and white mastersSally Mann, Roger Ballen, and Duane Michals. They are dreamy and mysterious and packed with stories that come from the subconscious. As she explains: "...random moments combine to form sleep stories that are rich narratives, ripe with symbolism. With that as my model, I construct sets, use props and invite myself and models to perform in a natural, intuitive way."

I checked out Angela's website which is chock-full of photographic fiction, perfect for Friday morning fantasizing and daydreaming, and wasn't disappointed.... until, I found out that her prints are Epson inkjets. Doesn't anyone else miss the smell of fix?
I'll forgive Angela for now; I'm sure her prints are as luminous and lush as they appear on screen.

Will we have the opportunity to see Angela's inkjets here in NYC? That's for time to tell; we're all picking favorites and holding our breath until the panelists step in and determine the fate of all the fine photographers who have submitted their work here at HHS. Just having your work in front of the eyes of these peeps is a pretty good fate if you ask me, so don't miss your chance! Competition closes one week from Tuesday!

HHS Second Edition 2008 entrant Manuel Vasquez's work looks like a cross between those framed office-worthy Successories posters and the magic-eye posters that all of my friends had on their walls in elementary school (described recently by one as "One of those 3-D posters that were all the rage in the 90s where you have to let your eyes go out of focus to see the hidden picture within." That applies to my first thoughts of Vasquez. Exactly.) This sounds, clearly, like a recipe for something awful, and yet, I spent a good long time staring at his work.

Much like the magic eye posters, I don't think I really get it at all. I was never once ever able to see the fighter jet or panda bear or rocket ship or soaring eagle dolphin that supposedly was hidden there. And here, in this work, I think I see something, but I'm not sure quite what. Like the oddball decorations, though, I am positive that other might see something.

Driver's Seat by Alan George

HHS contender Alan George's name was slightly familiar as I was scanning the entries yesterday afternoon. Familiar, I realized, because I had recently seen it on a list of photographer's selected to participate in The Exposure Project's Graphic Intersections. Graphic Intersections is loosely based on the Surrealist drawing game, the Exquisite Corpse. The first photographer is given a word or concept to work from; s/he shoots, selects an image and sends it to the next photographer, who makes an image based purely on a philosophical, visual, emotional, or intellectual response to the photograph received, and then sends her/his selected image to the next photographer who repeats the process. Sounds like fun, huh?

Among the photographers participating are Alan, of course, and Winter 2007 Hot Shot, Scott Eiden. The work of both Scott and Alan make me particularly nostalgic for the West, even more so than I usually am. Sure, there's something slightly foreboding about the barbed-wire bound, chain-linked fence in the background and the doberman behind the wheel of this RV that's certainly seen better days, but, the big sky behind it implies big dreams. This thing might have been parked for weeks, or months but there's nothing stopping it from arrowing down south, Baja-bound, with the pup at the helm.

While I'm a sucker for the dreamy, creamy gray and blue palate of this photograph, Alan's other photos of homes on wheels are worth checking out along with the rest of his portfolio on his website.

Dear fellow HHS blogger Sara,

I disagree. This photo is easy for me to write about because it is, is, by far, one of my favorite images entered this round. (Not that we vote, but still.) Look at that girl's face! Her head tilted next to the rabbit's droping, lolling head. Look at her grin! The rabbit looks far more demure than she does. The girl's excitement and intrigue are tangible. In this shot, Donald Weber has created/captured an amazing character. That + the hilarious mimicry of the composition = why it's an easy one for me to write.

Love,
Jen Snow

Korean Notebook #25, 2008 by HHS entrant Ellie Brown

Hey, Hot Shot! Second Edition 2008 contender Ellie Brown explores personal typologies via photographs of handwritten notebooks. She found and kept these notebooks during an extended stay in Korea and although, in her statement, she seems conflicted about something related to the trip, her images are head on. Her re-chronicling by photographing feels like an attempt to figure something out. This makes sense. And as such it's a successful series. The images show diaries that are cut up, collaged, and water-stained/streaked. The words (Korean? English?) are obscured. The viewer is made to search too.

I looked a bit more, at some of Brown's other work. Some of the work on her site seems like she's studied a bit of Lauren Greenfield. Greenfield is great, so learning from her is never a bad thing.

Wecome to Alton, Illinois, from the series DOG TOWN, winter 2008 by Jo Ann Walters

It's hard to write about photographs, (really, it's a tough job but someone's gotta do it!).

It's especially hard to write about your own photographs. So when you read an artist's statement that's fluid and powerful, it kind of knocks the wind out of you.
This was the case when I read HHS contender Jo Ann Walters' statement about her series DOG TOWN. Since I'm pretty sure I won't be able to say it any better, here's what she wrote:

Though I have employed the well-worn mannerisms of photographic documentation the work is not only a record, per se. It is also an elegiac work of remembrance. The images are mined from my earliest recollections, and are made up of tired light, dog days and falling, rending time through the luminous reflections of winter light. Together they comprise a quiet + stoic meditation on the mineral wastes and dregs of an unsparing economy, as well as, a song of MOURNING + MEDIATION for my father and men at work in a different time and place.

She's right, isn't she? That's what these photos are (sorry, I know you only get to see one here, you'll have to take my word for it on the others). If you don't believe me or her, yet, (and I have faith that you will) you can see a little more (but not enough) of her work on her temporary website.

Since it is clearly always all about me, I'll admit, it is 2:45 a.m., as you probably already saw in the time stamp, and I am awake. And working. And chatting intermittently on instant messenger with, among others, fellow non-sleeper Jen Bekman.

Look at entrant Sarah Fuller's work. Fuller submitted three photographs from a series titled Dream Lab,which is a collaboration between her and the Dream and Nightmare Lab at The Sacred Heart Hospital in Montreal. She creates portraits in an attempt to "produce new knowledge about the hypnagogic stage of the sleep cycle."

What is fascinating, though, is a mix of the experiment and her imaging technique. Fuller captures her subjects, including herself, at the super vulnerable moment of literally falling asleep. Before "falling," actually, as she notes that the camera's shutter is tripped even before the customary head nod at the start of sleep.

Looking at her portraits, the moment of falling seems both magical and so normal, so recognizable. Her photos are so honest and so silly and so special at the same time.

Fuller writes:

"Artists like Salvador Dali used this stage of sleep to harness creative imagery and problem solve. Dali also employed the 'upright napping' technique which involves falling asleep upright and seated in a chair. I have used this technique in my series. Typically in the lab, sounds are used to awaken the participants but the study I am currently working uses a flash (visual stimuli) and the sound of the camera (audio stimuli) to waken the person from an upright nap. Participants sit quietly in a darkened room lit only by a single black light and try to fall asleep. When the researcher observes the EEG indicating a shift to sleep, the camera and flash are triggered, thereby illuminating the room. In essence, what results is a photograph of the exact moment the person is falling asleep, just before the customary head nod. Conceptually I am intrigued by the fact that as this photograph is taken, each person is literally in another state of consciousness."

I must admit, a few days ago I fell asleep while getting my hair cut. Not during the quiet part where my hairdresser (Keith at Devachan) cut each curl individually, methodically. No, I fell asleep while my head was inside of one of those huge hair dryers attached to the wall. Also, the hairdresser was pointing a second hairdryer into my hair drying helmet in order to do some sort of special, extra (and extra loud) drying to my hair. And I fell asleep. One of those falling asleep sitting up things where your head actually falls forward. My head fell forward and hit the inside of the hair dryer. I wish I could make this stuff up. I also wish that Fuller had been there to capture it on film.

Haymaking, Valeni, Maramures, Romania July 2003 by Davin Ellicson

It's difficult to place HHS contender Davin Ellicson's photographs in 2003, the year they were taken in the Maramures region of Romania. It is even harder to suspend disbelief when you realize that this is the same country that delivered the stunning (and very contemporary) film 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days just last year. The traditions and way of life he is documenting in the village of Valeni have long disappeared in the West and are slowly disappearing in Romania too as the country embraces the shift from Communism to Capitalism.

I've been fascinated by these transitions since studying in Prague as an undergrad in 2001 and recently, for reasons that don't need to be explained here, found myself delving into post-Ceausescu Romania and was shocked to read that it's possible still to see women sweeping stoops with brooms made of sticks and men steering carriages drawn by horses. But now, seeing Ellicson's photographs, and seeing more of them on his website, and reading about them on his blog, I know that it's true. It's true in spite of the fact that this is also the country that was dazzled by the soap opera Dallas and is home to a sprawling replica of the set.

The remarkable thing about Ellicson's photos is that they do not show any malignant signs of Capitalism, especially not the particularly offensive American brand that seems to have manifested elsewhere in the country. In fact, he shows no evidence of this change at all, effectively creating nostalgia for a time and place that, in most places of the western world, have ceased to exist, and making a solid case for preservation.

I can't help but think of the brilliant body of work, Czech Eden, by Matthew Monteith. Monteith's photographs feel like modern day myths among the everyday. Ellicson's works seem mythological for plainly showing what is "everyday" in this part of Eastern Europe. He does for us viewers what he sets out to do for himself: "I want to personally savor this magical, peaceful place before it vanishes forever..."

Image from Luke Cassady-Dorion's series on Ramkamheang University in Bangkok

Did you, dear readers, ever see the UK television The Prisoner? If you have, I bet you'll agree with me that the image above looks very much like a secret room in Number Two's residence in The Village. If you haven't see the series, you needn't rush out to rent it, unless you are a serious sci-fi fan. Suffice to say that the image above captures something familiar and completely uncomfortable, much the same way The Prisoner made me feel. Nothing was quite right, although it seemed like things could be okay...if only...if only.

See more images from Ramkamheang University on Luke's site.

Motel (#1) 2005 by Bethany M. Souza

In her bio, Bethany Souza writes that she's delighted she no longer has to shovel snow in the winter. A recent relocation from Chicago to southeastern Louisiana has her exploring areas of central Florida she grew up in. She continues in her statement:

Was I still a Floridian or if I had become a tourist again; or did the truth lay somewhere between these two extremes?... My intent is that these images work together to represent the unique dichotomy, between home and away, that exists not only in me personally, but in the everyday lives of most Floridians.

I definitely feel like "the other", not because I am actually sitting at a desk but because of the way Bethany has composed her image, her subjects are protected by that lurking yellow building (which is appropriately ambiguous, a hotel or an apartment complex? and also, btw, reminds me of these buildings shot by fellow sunny clime photographer and recent Hot Shot Brad Moore), and there is also a great distance between her and her subjects.

Thankfully, for me, and Bethany too, we are encroaching on an actual weekend, even for us northerners and non-Floridians, so it's ciao for now. For more weekend/weekday photo goodness, check out Bethany's site.

Wow. I just really like this photo by Chris Bentley, current entrant to Hey, Hot Shot! 2008 Second Edition. I can picture it in a gallery and on someone's wall in someone's home.

I sort of want to lie down in front of a large print of this photo. I don't want to watch a movie on it. Just to look at it. I'm afraid I won't find a drive in anywhere near my home in Brooklyn anytime soon. I"m afraid that this was all, somehow, too much information from me.

Unsurprisingly, Bentley is also a filmmaker. And, according to his submission, this isn't his first time. He entered Hey, Hot Shot! last year too. Which I think is a good thing. Admirable persistance. How American.

Read a bit of Bentley's statement after the jump.

Forest. Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl, February, 2006 by Donald Weber

This photograph from Donald Weber is not my favorite photograph of all the images he submitted. This one is. But this photograph of an orange car as seen from the woods around Chernobyl is much easier to write about than the photograph of a young girl grinning at a rabbit skin while a man behind her dresses the flesh of the animal for dinner, which is part of Weber's point. He writes:

What's important about this work, in my view, is that it reveals the fateful intersection of history and the human soul. The West has its own versions of materialism; we may pretend that these people and their sad condition have nothing to do with us. But something in their eyes tells us more than we want to know. We are being tested, all of us. These photos confront us with the inescapable truth: life is a journey through a dark wood. We must take it one step at a time.

"When we were small, my younger sister, Cheryl, played with a set of dolls she called the 'McCann Family.' They were a thinly disguised version of our family. Cheryl decided she was 'Tom McCann,' the spunky boy doll. I was, 'MaryAnn,' the girl doll. Cheryl often had Mother McCann say to Tom, 'Mary Ann is wonderful.'(If I wrote the script, Mother would say, 'Tom is so gifted' and 'Mary Ann is average.') At first Tom could stand on his own. Later he always lost his balance. Cheryl diagnosed Tom with Polio. She fitted him with crutches and braces just like hers. (Cheryl was born with spina bifida.) Tom thought Mother disliked having a disabled child. He felt bad about that. One day Father's leg fell off. Cheryl taped it back on as a prosthesis. After he became an amputee, Father was a lot more understanding about his son."

I admit, all that I can think about is swimming. Even the indoor pool at my YMCA is suddenly insanely appealing. How lucky, then, that swimming pools are another oft-photographed subject among Hot Shot entrants.

Above, a great image from Carlo Van de Roer's "Swim" series. Carlo is a Hot Shot from Fall '07 and his work has been featured twice on 20x200 too. Carlo's work pays grand attention to form and function, to the color and feel of these man-made bodies of water, but he also pays particular attention to the human element and emotion in each frame.

Maybe he's working on another series now and I can accompany him on a shoot? A girl can dream.

Forces of Nature by HHS entrant Zack Bent

I fell in love with Zack's work when I saw it in other contexts — highlighted at various times by the Asthmatic Kitty record label and website — so I was thrilled to see this entry.

Bent's images are familial and familiar. He captures moments that manage to be both joyous and mysterious. I find myself looking at his photos and really wondering what his characters are actually up to.

Peony Bay, by HHS entrant Myriam Lutz.

Myriam Lutz combines found photographs with self portraits. I like that in this one, Peony Bay, she is not dressed up as a character from the photograph's time. I like that it's her, in today's clothes, and that she's placed herself, sort of awkwardly, posing in the past.