Joseph O. Holmes is a Jen Bekman Gallery favorite. He was a Fall '06 Hot Shot and a Ne Plus Ultra, and he's had a few great 20x200 editions too. Kara Canal spoke (wrote!) with Joe about topics such as --

His favorite photographer:
"The photos of Thomas Roma, a friend from my neighborhood, have been a tremendous inspiration. It took me a long time to understand and enjoy Lee Friedlander's work, it was something I had to work at, but all of a sudden one day it all fell into place. And, of course, Alec Soth."

His influences:
"When I read or hear or see great art, I get filled up with an irresistible impulse to create. I used to read Don DeLillo, for example, and then immediately feel compelled to start writing, short stories pouring out of me. It was the same way with songwriting, and it's the same with photography: Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi powered me for days."

His own art collection:
"We have paintings and photos from friends on our walls, but I don't consider us art collectors in any way. The term 'art collector' suggests to me certain investment motives. This is exactly the kind of attitude Jen Bekman is battling with projects like 20x200."
His 20x200 favorites:

"I really enjoy Jason Polan's delightful drawings; Eliot Shepard has the freshest eye I ever knew; I'm really envious of every photo I see by Brian Ulrich; and Bert Teunissen's mission is wonderful and his photos are gorgeous."

And she gets the dirt on what Holmes is working on now, what he'd be working on if it wasn't photography and more!

Read all of Kara's interview on the 20x200 blog.

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.

Noah Kalina, Untitled (20080629) by Noah Kalina

Summer '05 Hot Shot Noah Kalina has an amazing piece in an auction organized by Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

Emerging Photographers Auction
Presented by Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York
November 14 - December 10, 2008

All lots are on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art during regular business hours and by appointment.  511 West 25th Street, #506
, New York, NY 10001,
 212.255.8158. Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.) The auction is taking place on iGavel.

This is the first Emerging Photographers Auction held by Daniel Cooney. "The auction is a curated group of 25 images by very promising emerging talent. This is a special opportunity to introduce young artists to collectors at all levels as all reserves are set at $200," the gallery says.

20x200 artist Dana Miller is also featured in the auction.

Buy Noah's 20x200 work too.

A Man and His Horse, 20x200 edition by Spring '06 Hot Shot Alison Grippo

Today's 20x200 print is the second from Spring '06 Hot Shot Allison Grippo. Ms Bekman writes:

"A Man and His Horse is our second photography edition from Hot Shot Alison Grippo and its subject and setting make it a fitting follow-up for yesterday's Koolman. Alison captured her cop not that long ago, but the photo has a certain timelessness to it, in part because it's black + white, but also because mounted police officers seem more nostalgic than practical in these modern times. (Shouldn't they be on Segways or something by now?)

As with Kevin's commemorations of decay (in yesterday's edition), Alison's lens is often focused on the gritty, everyday city. A city girl like myself, she too finds beauty in what might be dismissed as ugly or overlooked entirely. Unlike me, she's brave enough to be a street shooter who doesn't just survey the landscape. I'm always impressed by someone who's brave enough to take a stranger's picture. (And this one a cop no less!) He seems at ease too -- while he is obviously aware that his picture is being taken, the moment captured is private and tender. Such incongruities afoot! Aren't cops tough guys? Aren't the streets mean? Not always, just sometimes."

Grippo launched her photography career as a Spring 2006 Hot Shot. She was named a Ne Plus Ultra and is represented by Jen Bekman Gallery. She spends most of her time working on a documentary photography book that covers amateur and entry level professional boxing in New York. She says that she has a strong addiction to cheese and generally posts her work on her website and blog.

A bonus, here is one of Grippo's winning images from Hey, Hot Shot!

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.

Spring '07 Hot Shot Nina Berman's Homeland exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery has been extended until November 29th.

Jen Bekman Gallery is pleased to present Homeland, an exhibition of fourteen color photographs by award winning photojournalist, Nina Berman. The exhibition features a selection of images from her new monograph, Homeland, published by Trolley Press, 2008. Berman's first solo show with Jen Bekman Gallery, Purple Hearts, received international attention and acclaim. In a review for The New York Times, critic Holland Cotter proclaimed, "the images add up to a complex and desolating anti-war statement." Berman's powerful, often chilling images, culled over the last seven years as she photographed across the United States, give us insight into the bizarre manifestations of homeland security and the ideologies that have reshaped post 9-11 America. Her portraits of American military wounded in the Iraq War, Purple Hearts, and her award- winning, iconic and devastating Marine Wedding, laid bare the war's toll on its young veterans. With Homeland, she once again pushes us to look at American power and myth as it plays out in the heartland.

Berman has received much attention and many accolades (including awards from the World Press Photo Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Open Society Institute documentary photography fund) for her photographs of the American political and social landscape. She is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography in her hometown of New York City.

Jen Bekman Gallery
6 Spring Street
(between Elizabeth + Bowery)
New York City 10012

Nina's website
Buy Nina's 20×200 editions: 9-11-02 and and G.I. Goat
Nina's portfolio on JenBekman.com
Homeland reviewed in Le Monde.

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.

Untitled 06
Series: The Chinese 'Dust Bowl'
Ink Jet Art Canvas
39 X 58 cm
2007
Hongsibao, Ningxia, China

Félicitations are in high order for 2006 Hey, Hot Shot! winner Benoit Aquin, as he was awarded the 2008 Prix Pictet prize. In case you are in the dark as to how tremendous this news is:

The Prix Pictet is a major new global prize in photography that focuses on perhaps the greatest single issue of the twenty-first century: sustainability. The award is sponsored by Pictet & Cie, in association with the Financial Times.

With a single annual prize of CHF 100,000, the Prix Pictet will reward photographers and the images they use to tell stories of urgent global significance. Each year the Prix Pictet will focus on a distinct sustainability theme. The theme for 2008 is water.

Now you'll never forget. Once you've earned your ranking as a Hot Shot, who know what good fortune will float your way...

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...

SPINE
2006

Mickey Smith's star is rising rapidly, and it is fair to say that Hey, Hot Shot! has opened a door or two. Since her christening as a Winter 2007 Hot Shot, Miss Smith has shown internationally, and is opening her first solo exhibition in NYC this very evening!

MICKEY SMITH | YOU PEOPLE
November 14 - December 21, 2008
Invisible-Exports
14A Orchard Street
Wednesday through Sunday, 11-6:30pm

Mickey's 20x200 edition prints:
WORD STUDY
MORE BOOKS
A 20x200 interview with Mickey
Mickey's site

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

Hey, Hot Shot! contenders, I couldn't wait two more hours to remind you (again) that you only have 24 hours to start and/or complete your entry. So now you get a head's up and 26 hours instead of 24 to enter. I'm good to you, huh.

What are you waiting for? Apply.

The deadline is TOMORROW, Tuesday, November 11th at 8:00 p.m. EST.

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

I trust that you are spending some time this weekend completing your Hey, Hot Shot! entry. When you are done with it, though, I urge you to consider submitting something to Postcards From the Edge: a benefit for Visual AIDS.

Visual AIDS is a great group. In college I was sort of in awe to learn that a favorite photography professor had worked with them in 1990-91 and the result was the creation of the red AIDS awareness ribbon. Such a simple symbol. And their annual benefit -- Postcards From the Edge -- is such a simple and spectacular idea.

A $5 donation gains you entry into Metro Pictures, where the gallery walls will be filled from floor to ceiling with postcard-sized works of art. Postcards From the Edge is a benefit show and sale of original postcard-sized work. No artist names are displayed; all works are signed only on the back of the card. They distribute a list of all participating artists, but give no indication of which piece is which. Luckily the list is long, and provides for some good imagining during the usually long wait to get in.

Every piece in the show is for sale for $75. You walk around, have a volunteer write down the number next to the piece you want, someone takes it off the wall, and you go home with a piece you love. And, as a bonus, you either take home the work of a master (past contributors have included Marcel Dzama, Nina Katchadourian, Renee Cox, Mitch Epstein, Brian Finke, Miranda July, Milton Glaser, Yoko Ono, Vik Muniz, Julie Mehretu, and so many more) or of a great "unknown" or emerging artist.

So, you're an artist, you're done with your HHS entry, and you want to donate a piece to the show?

To participate in Postcards From the Edge click here for details and forms. SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Wednesday, December 10, 2008.

Visual AIDS is also looking for volunteers to process postcards, to help install the show, to work at the preview party and benefit show, and to de-install the show -- if any work is left!

The 11th Annual Postcards From the Edge: A Benefit for Visual AIDS
Hosted by Metro Pictures | 519 West 24th Street, NYC | January 9-10, 2009

Benefit Sale -- ONE DAY ONLY! Saturday, January 10, 2009 from 11:00 - 6:00 $5, suggested admission Over 1,500 original postcard-sized works of art. $75 EACH. Buy 4 cards and get 1 free! First-come, first served.

Preview Party
Friday, January 9, 2009 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Your only chance to get a sneak peek at the entire show. No sales but one lucky winner will select any postcard! $75 admission includes one raffle ticket. Additional raffle tickets $20. Participating artists attend free.

All proceeds support the work of Visual AIDS, utilizing contemporary art for AIDS advocacy and historicizing the work of HIV-positive artists while offering career support.

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.

Yes, remember when we forewarned about our shorter-than-usual entry period?
It's been fast and furious but the countdown is officially on! You have 4 days left to enter!

Really, we mean it, the deadline is firm:
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 @ 8:00 p.m. EST.

Do it now, this weekend, puh-lease don't wait until 7:59 p.m. on Tuesday, November 11th.

In the meantime, we'll post about contenders as per usual until the deadline AND continue to do so until the winners are announced!

Still have questions? We've got answers! Read more about us on the homepage, don't forget to check out the rock star panelists who will be checking out your work, and also visit our FAQs.

As always, best of luck!

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.

We've joined Jen Bekman Gallery and 20x200 and all our friends over on Facebook. Come find us!
You can check in on this blog, receive reminders about deadlines, announcements about the winners, and invitations to Hey, Hot Shot! openings at the gallery.

Come one, come all!

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.

Congratulations to Birthe Piontek! Birthe will be opening a solo show at Gallery Kominek in Berlin today. The romantic series, Sub Rosa will remain on view through December 13th.

From the press release:

Sub Rosa reminds us of a time, a stage in one's life which could not have been more intimate, and nevertheless exists as a romanticized blur in our mind today. No period in life is so comprehensively enriched with emotions, frustration and high expectations as the stage between our youth and adulthood. Adolescence, the loss of prolonged innocence and the desire to belong and to be different at the same time, seems to be an unconquerable obstacle in the journey of discovering our identity...

Gallery Kominek has also published a book of the exhibition available here.

Birthe's gallery images on JenBekman.com
Birthe's edition print on 20x200
Birthe's website

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.

You only have eight more days to enter the Second Edition of 2008 round of Hey, Hot Shot! But as of right now you have less than 24 hours to vote.

So go, now. And take photos when you do. Take photos if you have problems. And take photos if you have no trouble at all. Use Twitter, use Plodt (my new favorite web thing), use Flickr, use your blog. You don't need to hear this from me, you know what you need to do. Do it and document it.

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.