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.