The Hanging Space by Summer '07 contender Donina Asera.

This picture reminds me of an empty house in the South, one that used to be warm and full of life, but has since then degenerated into a decrepit space. There's something of A Streetcar Named Desire's Blanche in it--soft beauty tarnished by an unfortunate fate. I'm also reminded of the house in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, in which the wife and mother, Addie, is dying, and the family's troubles begin to unravel.

Between the soft blue shade of the wall and the white lace in the frame, there is something really feminine about this image. However, the blue is also fading and the lace is torn, so the femininity is kind of tainted. About her photographs, Australian contender Donina Asera says, "My aim is to create emotionally evocative images. The majority of my photos are unpeopled, although there are often traces of a human presence, like a lingering trace or debris of an event." This lingering, but absent human presence is exactly what I sense in her photograph, and that quality isn't eerie or strange, but particularly sad.

As a photographer, Asera is fairly new to the craft:

I started taking an interest in photography about 3 years ago having started in digital with a Canon 300D, then a 30D. I am now finding myself shifting to large format photography and have an old press camera. I'm attracted to the formality of large format and the process, which to me is ceremonial. An act of devotion. A ritual of respect.

Of her formal training (or lack thereof), she says the following:

My grandfather was an artist in both oils and watercolours and I loved to watch him work in his studio. While I have no formal training in photography or art, he taught me many things about art. In 1990, I was accepted into a Fine Arts course at a university, but declined the offer. I wonder now how my life might have been different.

According to super-string theory, there are parallel universes. In at least one of these, I completed the Arts course. In others, my photography is crowded with people. There are infinite possibilities of pasts and futures. I want to capture these imagined possibilities in my photography.

It's nice to think that as an artist, she was trained in multiple universes--her technique bestowed upon her in a different universe, and her passion for the art-form engendered in this one.

Donina Asera was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1971. Her grandfather, who taught her a lot about the world of art, passed away while she was in her first year at university, studying psychology. Although she considered earning a degree in Fine Arts after his death, she decided against it and left college for the working world. Her interest in photography came a few years ago after she bought a DSLR 3 to take along with her to Europe. Upon her return to Australia, she was encouraged by a friend to further pursue photography. The rest, she says, " is trial and error. Well... Okay, mostly accidents and flailing about uselessly."

Be sure to check out Asera's photographs on her website.

And while you're surfing the web, you may as well head over here and apply to the Summer edition of Hey, Hot Shot!