Image by Casey Kelbaugh

Casey Kelbaugh, a Spring 2006 Hot Shot, will have work in a benefit show opening tomorrow, Friday, March 27, at Jack the Pelican Presents in Williamsburg. Old School: A Big Show of Accessibly-Priced Little Gems, will be a salon-style showing of work that is priced with sensitivity to our trying financial times.

OLD SCHOOL
A Big Show of Accessibly-Priced Little Gems
Friday, March 27, 7-10pm
Jack the Pelican
487 Driggs Ave, Between N. 9th and N. 10th
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

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.

Ms. Jen Bekman will serve as juror to the Photographic Center Northwest's 14th Annual Photographic Competition Exhibition, Photo-Op. Winning images will be exhibited at PCNW in Seattle July 13th - September 4th, 2009. In addition, cash awards in the amount of $1,000, $500, and $250 will be awarded to first, second, and third prize winners; each will also receive a $75 gift certificate of Blurb Scrip.

Photographers of all levels and processes are encouraged to apply; the juror will look for work reflecting a larger series. The entry fee is $47 with a minimum of five images. Submissions will be received until 9:00 p.m. on Friday, May 15th.

More information about the competition and entry forms are available at PCNW'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.

The Inge Morath and Magnum Foundations have announced the sixth annual Inge Morath Award, created in memory of the Austrian-born photographer affiliated with Magnum Photos for half a century. $5,000 is awarded on an annual basis to a female documentary photographer under the age of 30 to support a long-term project, a grant that reflects Morath's dedication towards supporting female photographers.

Submission will be accepted through April 30, 2009 and a winner and two runners up will be announced on July 9, 2009 on the Magnum Foundation and Inge Morath Foundation websites.

More information and application details are available at the Inge Morath Foundation 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.

Nymphoto: Conversations Volume I will open at Sasha Wolf Gallery on May 6th, 2009, from 6-8:00 p.m. and be on view until May 20th.

The show features work by Michele Abeles, Juliana Beasley (Fall 2006 Hot Shot), Rona Chang, Michal Chelbin, Nina Buesing Corvallo, Candace Gottschalk, Jessica M. Kaufman, Klea McKenna, Talia Greene, Maria Passarotti, Susana Raab, Emily Shur, Tema Stauffer (one of Jen Bekman Gallery's first exhibiting artists), Jane Tam (former HHS blogger and JB intern), Garie Waltzer & Jennifer Williams. The show accompanies the release of Nymphotos' first publication by the same name Nymphoto: Conversations Volume I.

COMING SOONER! Nymphoto's very first Call for Entries Deadline: April 3rd. From the entries, Nymphoto will cull and curate Nymphoto Presents @ Sasha Wolf Gallery, opening two weeks after Conversations. Upload 2-5 images to have your work considered for this exhibition. One note: as Nymphoto is a collection of women photographers, you must be female to participate. Sorry guys!

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.

Women in Photography, co-founded 2008 Hot Shot Cara Phillips and Amy Elkins last summer to showcase the works of female art photographers, has announced their first grant, funded by Lightside Photographic Servces and co-sponsored by LTI. One grant will be awarded in the amount of $3,000.00; applications will be accepted online at wipnyc beginning on April 1, 2009 at 12 a.m., when the submissions will be possible through the site.

The grant award-winner will be announced at the National Arts Club on June 10th, 2009, where a slideshow of the winner's work will also be presented.

Visit Women in Photography for more information about curators Elkins and Phillips, and look forward to the grant application on April 1st.

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.

Fall 2006 Hot Shot, Joe Fornabaio, was one of eleven renowned photographers selected for the USA Network's Character Project. During the summer of 2008, the photographers--including Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Renaldi, and Sylvia Plachy--set out about the United States to document characters far and wide: off highways, in farms, in the city, and in the country. Fornabaio's project focused around the common American ritual of the haircut. He ventured into salons and barber shops of all calibers, seeking the "visceral experience we share with our stylist or barber."

Forabaio's images join the work of the other photographers in a forthcoming book titled, American Character: A Photographic Journey, published by Chronicle Books this month. The work will also be displayed in a two day exhibition sponsored by the Aperture Foundation open today and tomorrow from 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. at Stephan Weiss Studio, 711 Greenwich Street.

Here's something to consider after you submit your photographs to us humble folks at Hey, Hot Shot!
The Center for Photography at Woodstock is currently accepting entries for their Photography Now competition. The competition will be juried by Charlotte Cotton, Curator and Head of Photographs, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

All the information you need is located here. Winners will have their work published in the Center's publication, Photography Quarterly. Not so coincidentally, two Hot Shots have graced the cover of PQ in recent years, Mickey Smith (PQ#95 / 2006) and Brad Moore (PQ#97 / 2008).

Buona fortuna!

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.