Monkey Time by Summer '07 contender Taryn Kapronica

This photo reminds me of my younger sister.

Not that she is prone to severing monkey heads, but she does photograph her collection of stuffed animals from time to time, especially her dog. Her desktop wallpaper is of him reading a page in her biology textbook, a section with diagrams on how the eye operates.

Taryn Kapronica also has a playful sense of humor and sees the comedy in the everyday. Her description of the environment she grew up in, a suburb west of Cleveland, Ohio, however, sounds like a place apt for engaging a child with more than your basic everyday wonderment:

[The] landscape comprised of Lake Erie's decrepit waterfront, insular bedroom communities littered with McMansions, crime-ridden industrial towns, sprawling farmlands on the verge of extinction, and the intensely political and social environment at nearby Oberlin College.

Kapronica studied Playwriting and earned a B.A. from Fordham University at Lincoln Center. She started taking photographs as a means of escaping perpetual writer's block. Soon the exercise became an obsession, and eventually, a calling. Kapronica says she wishes to educate people to find the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary:

My images tend to revolve around beginnings and ends. As the world speeds along, and the everyday passes by just a little quicker than the day before it, I seek to document those fleeting instances. I do not intend to stall time, but to capture keepsakes that communicate finding the still moment within the transition itself.

Taryn currently lives and works in New York City.

Enter anytime at your convenience before Tuesday, August 14, 2007 @ 11am Eastern Time.