Untitled by Michelle Arcila

I've been a follower of Michelle Arcila's flickr stream for years, enamored by the square-framed quietude she captures with her Hasselblad 501. Embracing natural light, the seasons, and the colors and textures within the intimacy of her friends' and families' homes, Arcila's images reflect an appreciation for the glow within the everyday: a tree in a snowstorm stands dignified and tall; two men sit on the other side of a window in the glow of dusk light; a woman, above, looks out, looking serene and comfortable.

She writes of her images:

My work lives in an illusive world. It's a world where questions are never fully answered and ghosts wander each room only offering us a glimpse into what their lives may have been. So much of my photography is an homage to the history and stories of my family in Costa Rica. I have collected so many experiences from them that I find myself approaching my camera and subjects, no matter where I may be, with the same hint of mystery and magic I grew up surrounded with.

Her work suggests Arcila ispatiently wandering through her surroundings, observing and then clicking to capture the luminous world of her making.

Julian Alps, Slovenia by Cindy Schafer

At first glance, this photograph from HHS contender Cindy Schafer stirred a flood of images, including 2008's First Edition Hot Shot Derek Henderson's Reids Farm. And it makes sense that there are so many associations because, as Schafer writes, everyone does laundry. Like contender Magda Biernat, she's traveled far and wide and taken photographs to prove it. You might say laundry's a bit of an obsession, and Schafer admits:

I don't think there is any aspect of laundry that I don't like. I also like to think of myself as a feminist: a woman who values political, social and economic equality between the sexes, a woman who has many more educational and career choices than the generations of women who came before her. Yet, laundry, along with other types of housework, has historically been considered "women's work". It embodies the soul of domesticity; the antithesis of everything a 1970's feminist stood for.... Laundry is washed in every corner of the globe, at every level of the socioeconomic spectrum whether one does it themselves or pays someone else to do it. Culturally, laundry unites us. Socially it still divides us.

See more of Schafer's work on herwebsite.

Ms. Jen Bekman and Associate Director of the JB Gallery, Jeffrey Teuton are in Chicago at NEXT Art Fair. They've brought lots of great work from the gallery's inventory with them -- and guess who's included in the mix? A handful of Hot Shots! Ian Baguskas, Joseph Holmes, Brad Moore, Gregory Krum, Hosang Park, and Carlo Van de Roer are all represented along with HHS panelist Kent Rogowski.

NEXT is a showcase of the best of the art world, right now, offering contemporary work from both commercial and non-commercial arts organizations — galleries, project spaces, art publications and key private contemporary collections from around the world.

If you happen to be in Chicago, visit Jen + Jeffrey:
Thursday, April 30 - Monday, May 4, 2009
The Merchandise Mart
Booth 7-8033

Don't have passes? Drop us an email at info at jenbekman dot com and we'll give you some!

NEXT is just *one* example of the opportunities out there for Hot Shots! Make sure you catch Donald Weber's work today on 20x200 and another Hot Shot in tomorrow's special double edition. We'll have more contenders posts right here asap. Promise! AND, if you have not completed your entry to HHS, time is running out! The deadline is this Friday (two days away! yikes!), May 1st at 8 p.m. EST.

San-Zhr Pod Village, Danshui, Taiwan by Magda Biernat

Globe-trotter Magda Biernat spent one year photographing where people live in seventeen countries. A peek at her website reveals a keen interest in structures; she also freelances for architecture firms and design studios. While her images are void of actual people, her perspective is more personable, not to mention colorful than, say, the Bechers, deviating a bit from the typographic vernacular. She writes:

Guided by an interest in urbanism and habitation, I focus my work on the built environment and its influence on global societies... The core vision was to recognize the integrity of the way people live under different, in many cases, extraordinary conditions.

Before embarking on her trip around the world, Biernat worked for Magnum Photos giving her lots of exposure to photojournalism and also an apt departure point for exploring her own work.
She maintains a pretty straightforward point of view but the light surrounding each home varies, revealing more of the place in which she was photographing. Fog shrouds the pod villages in Taiwan and long shadows and blue skies stretch over Tipi Resort in Namibia. The weather starts to inform the places people live as well.

We're psyched-beyond-words that 20x200 has been nominated for the 13th Annual Webby Awards in the Art category.

The last day to vote is this Thursday, April 30th, and we need your vote! 20x200 couldn't exist without The Web, great art, great design, and all the art lovers out there like you, so we hope you'll vote us to victory.

To submit your vote, click here, sign in (or create an account), scroll down to the "Art" category and look for 20x200!

Hearse In My Childhood Driveway by Susan Worsham

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Susan Worsham's photographs of her childhood home and town in Virginia are haunted by the past. Worsham returned to this home just prior to the passing of her mother, and has since lost her father and brother as well. The home she knew has lost its former occupants and taken new ones, including a man who houses caged snakes in her father's office.

Her images emanate with nostalgia even though they are filled with portraits of new friends and strangers met since her return. Animals, fruit, and family photographs allude to the living, but are manifest in their more solemn and morbid forms: birds and rabbits lay dead, the fruit is past peak, and the photograph is old and speaks of those no longer with us. Reoccurring characters pose nude and forlorn, against the textures and patterns of the house's wallpaper, bedspreads, and carpets suggesting that there are living spirits still within this house. A woman's pregnant body and a rug scattered with apples make allusion to Eve, rebirth, and new beginnings, while set against the texture of the old home's history. The contrast of the past and present are weighty, but beautiful.

See more from this series, Some Fox Trails in Virginia, on Susan's website.

Polar Bear by Arian Camilleri

Believe it or not, Arian Camilleri completed the body of work submitted to Hey, Hot Shot! with a Holga and without digital manipulation. This image certainly gave me cause for a double take. It's a cross between something from Richard Barnes and Lex Thompson and Colleen Plumb.

Arian's compulsion to photograph is all his own, however, making a departure from the commercial world, he's working to embrace photography for its basics: light and time. What better way to work those elements than with a Holga — what else have you got?

See more of his work on his website.

Shades & Shadows, July 25, 2008 by Rita Maas

Rita Mass is one of several HHS contenders who have included multiple images as one to convey their ideas. Also see the work of Matthew Dallos, Anthony Georgis. For these photographers, the single frame isn't enough.

Maas' images relate more closely to the work of Uta Barth who often uses multiple frames of abstracted interiors and landscapes to convey relationships in perception; and often working, like Maas, with the most simple elements, light and shadow. Maas explains her process:

Viewing each work becomes an experience relating to the viewers understanding of his own surroundings. These ephemeral images evoke the passage of time, seasons and weather. They heighten our sense of impermanence. The subject matter becomes the experience of seeing; common encounters in intimate and familiar places explore moments where content and meaning become inseparable.

Her statement lends the work for comparison to Silvio Wolf's Horizons, where content and meaning are also inseparable. Wolf's film leaders (the part of a roll of film that is partially exposed when loading the film and typically discarded when the film is processed) "reveal(s) a threshold, the clear limit between light and darkness, between matter and language."

See more of Rita Maas' work on her website, which includes more abstract work along with some elegant still lifes.

We're heading into a great summer season of abstraction in photography, spearheaded by The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, curated by Lyle Rexer, and on view at Aperture Gallery in NYC May 15th - July 9th. The exhibition accompanies the release of a book by the same name and a handful of related events, including a panel discussion at NYPH'09 with Rexer and artists Jack Sal, Wolf, and Penelope Umbrico.

At JBP HQ, we're certainly celebrating all of this summertime photo goodness and will be releasing a special 20x200 edition in mid-May with a super special photographer to kick it all off. Sign up for Jen's newsletter for details. And you'll find me and Jeffrey Teuton, Associate Director of the JB Gallery at NYPH'09. Hope to see y'all there as well!

Anonymous, Seoul by Grace Kim

Rumpled sheets, blood stains, and drawn curtains are hallmarks of the aftermath of the affairs contender Grace Kim captures in her series, love hotel. Photographing beds and hotel rooms in Seoul, Korea just moments after a secretive couples' departure, the textures of the empty used bed evoke a sense of sadness and loneliness in what has been left behind. The rooms reek of similarity; textured wallpapers and blankets feature graphic flowers and geometric shapes. The sameness is further emphasized by Kim's stark black and white film choice, so the viewer's focus is concentrated on tiny leaks of light through the curtain's edges or the contrast of white sheets against the darkness of the room. The theme of anonymity also extends from the persons partaking in the affair: protecting identity and choosing an indistinguishable place are obvious ways to protect their secret relationship from the other spaces of their life.

Kim writes,

The photographs are personal reflections on the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of love. Absence inspires imagination and nostalgia, and what is secret or forbidden seems genuine in a way, because it actively questions and resists the status quo, rather than remaining complacent.

What is love without a face, and what is love confined to a hotel room? Kim asks compelling questions about what we choose to confide, and also challenges the viewer to ask questions about her access as a photographer to her subject: How does she gain entry to these hotel rooms? How does she find couples engaged in affairs? How does her Korean-American identity aid or inform her photography -- this project and others?

See more from love hotel on Grace's website, as well as her other projects, loveland and one night stand.

Box Turtle by Katy Higgins

If the limits of what we can know about a species can be interpreted by the shape and definition of their environment, then a zoo is a trove of information for geologist, sociologist, and artist alike. Like Ian Whitmore, whom we wrote about yesterday, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Katy Higgins gives us glimpses into interiors without the dweller's presence--in this case, the man-made environments of zoo animals. We are challenged to glean what the animal is and how they live from what is in their space: water, branches, rocks, food, toys, sun or shade, despite it being a construction of their keepers' creation.

Katy writes of her project,

the images in the The Empty Exhibit are concerned with attempts to reduce the infinite complexity of the world to concrete visual representations--in a sense, to diagram life. In this case, my photographs document the false "natural" environments that are recreated in zoos, ostensibly both for the comfort of the animals on display and to inform and educate the viewer. These exhibits, then, hold the promise of presenting some kind of truth about the world, but they are necessarily limited - there is only so much we can learn about an animal and its native habitat through a life-size diorama, no matter how detailed it may be.

See more of Katy's work on her website.

Anna by Ian J Whitmore

Whether you are TV friend or foe, nearly everyone in America is at least familiar with the wooing effects of the television set. They are imbued into the everyday of our culture: we gather at each others' houses for Lost parties, crowd around for the Oscars and Superbowl, and fall asleep night after night to the glow of this electronic box. Years after a series has ended, we make pop-cultural references to the characters of our childhood -- about the moral lessons they taught us, the fashion tips they gave us, or the social scenarios they first introduced us to. What is it about the TV that captivates us, and what does it say about how we see and consume information?

In his series, Channels, Hey, Hot Shot Contestant Ian Whitmore photographs where we place televisions in our households. How do they become a fixation, or mainstay, of our living spaces? Do they dominate the room, or are they hidden away?

He writes:

This work is a visual inquiry into the personal spaces where our televisions reside. This point of contact between the viewer and the world has become customary in contemporary culture--facilitating the exchange of information and the satisfaction of certain desires. In recent years we have developed a collective and public eagerness to peer into each others' life; we see this in our entertainment, news and the Internet. If we view these spaces passively and voyeuristically--the way we view the world through the television--certain questions arise. How are we viewing one another and through which lenses? Through what lens do we find greater authenticity, honesty and clarity?

Whitmore titles his pieces by the homeowner's name, though the person--or persons--are never present. One peers in on their belongings: books, backpacks, posters and trophies, and gets a sense of the dweller. The person is clean or messy, owns a lot or a little, prefers to decorate either sparsely or with gusto. Owning a TV is only as normal as owning a bed, though here, the TV is always on, and a faintly illuminated person on the screen looks back at us. We are made to feel as though we are looking in on them, rather than the TV-owner, a disorienting and thought-provoking role-reversal.

This series brings us to today's 20x200 edition, The Drive with Christine, which also features a television set photographed by Chad Muthard. Here, puzzle pieces meet the screen, blinding the information pouring out from this simple set. It is a conversation, between two people, as well as between the TV and its viewer.

See more on Ian's website and see more HHS! contenders on flickr!

Little Boys, 2008 by Ayano Hisa

SCAD MFA student Ayano Hisa returned to her home country of Japan to photograph, realizing that after her time in the United States, "My eyes became a lot more sensitive about traces of history, relations between countries and problems and hopes in contemporary world." While she's looking at and addressing issues that are very much a part of this world, there seems to be something very ethereal about her photographs. Her color palette is a little washed out and dreamy and she manages to find situations that also don't seem quite real. This photo of grown men resting in a playground and accompanied by a cat (a cat!) was submitted along with a photograph of a mother and son looking at a memorial made of origami cranes for A-bomb victims and one of two women using umbrellas as parasols as they stroll along a path dappled with deer. For certain, see these images and more of her work on her website.

She bridges the past and present fluidly, illustrating reminders of what has been and how that has shaped and will shape what we see and experience today. But for some reason I can't shake the feeling the Hisa's Japan is a sort of Never Never Land where even the worst of history can't make us grow up. Maybe it is the intimacy and ease with which she photographs that also makes the first words of her statement ring true to an outsider in her world, "being in one culture sometimes makes a person blind to other cultures as well as his/her own culture..." — something that fellow contender Joerg Brueggemann might contend with. And so with these photographs I am learning to see a little better.

Untitled by Stephanie Diani

Marriage--in all its glory and catastrophe--is depicted time and again in literature, films, and song. In fact, many of the expressions of marriage that first come to mind depict its downfall rather than its success through affairs, deceit, and prolonged unhappiness. Rather recent novels like Revolutionary Road and The Corrections articulate dysfunctional families living in the facade of normality, until secrets break lose and emotions explode into situations of ruin. American Beauty takes a similar storyline to film; Desperate Housewives and Weeds (about a suburban housewife who turns to drug-dealing) bring it to TV. There is no shortage of well-dressed, middle-aged married women who become embroiled in misdeeds due to their marital displeasure in our culture, whether they are an accurate portrayal or not is left to question.

Los Angeles-based Hey, Hot Shot! contender, Stephanie Diani, photographs staged, fictional marriages, capturing couples' postures and actions with an air of disillusionment. The couples never make eye contact, but engage in activities often attributed to the specific gender's role: a woman knits (albeit morbidly, by an axe), a man holds a golf club, liquor in his other hand. The relationships here display tense bodies in cinematic lighting, and there is an explicit sexiness in the women's dress and posture without stirring any emotions of intimacy. All of the couples are well-dressed, Caucasian, and appear to be upper-middle class, speaking to problematic marriages as a classed affliction. Whether these portraits of marriage speak an element of truth to how some marriages really are, or more-so adopt a pop-cultural view of dysfunction in relationships, Diani makes a strong stance about her vision of marriage.

See more work on Stephanie's website.

My Parents Eating by Lindsay D'Addato

Man and nature do not always live in perfect harmony, as photographers Edward Burtynsky, David Maisel, and Chris Jordan depict in their respective works. Civilization's toll on Mother Earth has been great--perhaps too great for the human mind to digest--and respect for nature's bounty are not often held to a high standard. But, aside from human's impact on nature, how do we incorporate or live with it? Why do we buy flowers, plant gardens, mow lawns, or live on farms? How do we interact with "nature" we have transplanted to our homes?

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Lindsay D'Addato asks these questions in her series For Paradise, bringing her Toyoview large format camera to the scene of suburban intersections of man and nature.

She writes,

In recreated interactions the images depict the ways in which we domesticate and tame nature in order to make ourselves feel at home, not only in our surroundings, but also with each other. The large color photographs move from the great outdoors towards domestic and suburban landscapes, reconstructing what it means to live in natural harmony. Although our linear understanding of progress can never be satisfied, our present glory lies in our self-conscious paradise.

D'Addato's subjects, posed by a dead deer or sitting next to a massive dining room bouquet, seem unsure of how to interact with the "nature" around them. Their bodies are stiff, their glances askew, often unaware that the nature is even something to notice at all. She suggests that humans are wont to control nature, as they are their social and spatial environments, as inadvertent as the action may be.

See more from this series on Lindsay's website.

Macau from Gregory Krum's series Hard Times

In addition to making photographs that he describes as being "a little bit romantic, and perhaps embarrassed", Summer '07 Hot Shot Gregory Krum is the retail director for the Shop at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Krum selects unusual and delightful things that reflect his passion for "craftsmanship, quirkiness" and "contextual relevance". His efforts have not gone without notice, and this weekend T Magazine has a profile on the talented Mr. Krum, with a few of his favorite things that he stocks his shop with.

Krum has had two edition prints offered on 20x200, and only one remains. View more of his photographs that explore "territories or concepts of control, organization, and security, states of sensitive, deep affection, inference, isolation, complexity, importance, insecurity, vulnerability" and "bliss" on his website.

Noch ein Winterwald by Anne Schwalbe

Like yesterday's featured contender, Matthew Dallos, Germany-based photographer Anne Schwalbe also photographs the lines and patterns in nature. Schwalbe, however, departs from landscapes into the abstract, often focusing on the subtle minutiae of undulations caused by raindrops, the varying densities of fog, or the asymmetry if a pine tree. She abandons the specificity of a place, avoiding characterizing them by their distinguishing markers. Instead, Schwalbe invites her viewers to interpret the spaces she photographs, saying, "I want to have a complex void in my photographs."

Her work evokes comparison to Japanese photographer, Rinko Kawauchi, who is well-known for her natural-light photographs of details in nature and everyday life: flower petals, an eaten watermelon, a crack of lightning. The similarities extend from subject matter to their both using the 6x6 square format; Kawauchi shoots with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera and Schwalbe a Yashica - Mat 124 G. Both photographers emphasize the beautiful color palettes expressed in nature, and show a welcome talent for honing in on the subtleties so many of us miss in the everyday.

See additional work on Anne's website.

On your marks, get set! The countdown is on! This round of Hey, Hot Shot! competition will close on Friday, May 1st at 8:00 p.m. EST. That's just two weeks and two weekends away, not much time to complete your entry. Jump in and get your work out there today, or tomorrow, but soon! (Psst! The sooner you upload your photos the better chance you have of seeing them on the blog. We'll continue to post about as many contenders as we can until competition closes.)

As a reminder: competition is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. If you are a photographer seeking NYC gallery representation, you are eligible. That's it, that's all. Hey, Hot Shot! strives to provide photographers at all stages of their careers the support, recognition, and exposure they deserve.

Need a refresher on the details? Visit the HHS homepage. Ready to apply? Upload your images.

Have a great weekend!

Caravan Storage by Matthew Dallos

Matthew Dallos' multi-panel work presents us with scenes that bridge man and nature. Power lines meet mountain-sides and a trailer park is is crowded, without a soul in sight. Timbered logs lay in a field, now empty of growth, and one feels faintly forlorn about the implied trail of the humans. Photographed on the South Island of New Zealand, the landscape appears at first and second glance, both familiar, yet foreign. Where are the people who tread in these person-less panoramas? And when do they occupy these spaces? The nature of these spaces has been dictated by our intrusion, and we create new lines that change the landscape.

Like the work of David Hilliard, who was also mentioned earlier this week, the multi-panel frame lends to the way one interprets the narrative. The image is partitioned, so reads like a storyboard, even if originally composed as a single frame. Hilliard's images suggest a human narrative, where lights are on in a house and his subjects meandering in foreground and background often experience a passive and mysterious interaction. In contrast, Dallos looks to the lines of the landscape to speak the "story of the place" without human subjects to carry that voice.

See more from this series on Matthew Dallos' website.

Summer '05 Hot Shot and 20x200 artist,Noah Kalina, has launched an eponymously titled magazine, Kalina Magazine. Each issue is themed, and the sopohmore issue, available now, focuses on his adoration for his cat, Bean.

See more of Noah's work here and here.

Words and images have a natural need for one another. Ms. Jen Bekman has a vast visual and poetic memory which she uses to pair the two superbly on her blog, Personism. A beautiful example follows with an image from Spring 2006 Hot Shot and 20x200 artist, Ian Baguskas.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

- William Carlos Williams

You can easily spend half of your morning looking, reading and dreaming through all of Jen's thoughtful pairings. I entreat you to start here.

Miss Kitty Litter/Stephen, Brian, & Courtney by Chad Houle

Chad Houle's series, Homodomestic, focuses on gay couples and families in their homes, creating examples of an aesthetic Houle never knew while growing up in Rhode Island. He writes,

As a gay man, I grew up without any real gay examples of a relationship. I never was able to make the connection between being gay and the ability to be in a strong, lasting love. Now, in a long term, committed-and fabulous-relationship, I look back not knowing who I was or how there were so few images of that life I so greatly yearned for. My work is a manner of creating a barrage of examples of gay normality in love and life to infuse the world with what I never saw at a critical point in my life.

His images have a posed formality and take place largely in well-styled, well-furnished, and evenly-lit homes with couples seated at the dinner table, in front of the TV, or in the bathroom brushing their teeth. The "normalcy" is often pronounced through these actions, which can be interpreted as things that normal--or ideal--couples and families have the chance to partake in together.

Several other photographers' work come to mind upon studying Houle's images, which also tug at elements of domesticity and homosexuality. Amy Elkins' Wallflower series posits men against floral wallpapers, a symbol of the domestic interior. The sexuality and male-ness of the men are called into question by the contrast of these "feminine" patterns against the men's bare chests and skin. Whether pale, tan, tattooed, hairless, freckled, or hairy, the men are bared against the backdrop, forced to open up to the camera.

David Hilliard's multi-panel work also examines gay couples at home, or in nature, doing everyday tasks like folding laundry or taking a swim with ambiguous interaction between the men. The two subjects often face the same direction as one another and the viewer is aware of them not making eye contact with each other. Their body language enigmatic and it seems as though their relationship is an open question, both to them and those looking in on the moment.

Lastly, Molly Landreth's Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America also makes a journey through the queer community, identifying the who and the where of what comprises this community. Her images capture a young generation of lesbian, gay, and transgender individuals and couples, often at home caught in a formal embrace, some partially undressed and looking as though they are trying to find comfort in their own skin.

All of these works evoke questions of normality in relationships, both gay and straight. What a relationship "looks" like has many heterosexual references in everday culture, popular culture, and in art, whereas the aesthetic of the gay relationship is still very much being defined and in flux. All of these artists offer some insight here, and suggest that homosexual home-life and relationships are equally, if not more complicated than heterosexual relationships.

Cecil Hotel, Los Angeles by Tom Griscom

San Francisco based photographer Tom Griscom follows the rich traditions of landscape photography in the American West, bridging the past and present by creating black and white images with a digital camera, and focusing on California, the western most state. He writes:

Starting with the survey of the West by Timothy O'Sullivan, to the pristine facade by Ansel Adams, and then to the bleak irony of New Topographer Robert Adams, I follow the evolution of landscape representation in the West and how it was influenced by the social climate of the time.

The view from the hotel room, is of course, a theme in its own right as well. Robert Frank's view in Butte, Montana has influenced many photographers, including Todd Hido (scroll down to see Frank's photo).

While his territory covers far more than the American West, Andrew Hetherington has documented numerous hotel rooms and the sites to see just outside in his project A Room with A View, aptly described by these words from Robert Polidori: "I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It's the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first."

What one saw first could also describe O'Sullivan's works. He photographed as pioneering explorers ventured west, often illustrating the weaknesses of man up against the vastness of the wilderness. Ansel Adams' photographs departed from what one actually saw to what one might really like to see, glorifying landmarks of the west and making cause for their preservation. Robert Adams picked up where Adams left off, documenting the altered and often destroyed landscape. See more of what Griscom sees now, in our current social climate, as he continues to work along this distinguished lineage on his website.

Also of interest, if you are in NYC, MOMA's exhibition Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West. I haven't seen it yet but with works from Robert Adams, John Baldessari, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O'Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston, and Carleton E. Watkins it promises to be a thorough study.

The Fifth Annual BAMart Silent Auction featuring works by over 120 artists including 20x200 edition-makers Rachel Papo, Greg Lindquist, and Carrie Marrill, is open for bidding online through Monday, May 11th at 8 p.m. There's lots of work we're lusting over, including Lady Birley by Maira Kalman, who illustrates a column in the NY Times, And The Pursuit of Happiness, that is rather beloved by the JBP team. A live exhibition featuring the work will open to the public on Wednesday, April 29th, where you can also bid in person. BAMart will also host a cocktail reception on May 9th, 5-7 p.m. at the Peter Jay Sharp Building located at 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn. Please visit the website for more information, details on the work available, and to make your bid!

Drop Goal by Anthony Georgis

At any level, the practice and dedication to sport is full of emotion and drive, whether a pickup game of backyard soccer or a competitive professional league. In his series, Blood Makes The Grass Grow, Portland-based photographer, Anthony Georgis captures the myriad roles of a young woman as a high school student, teenager, and competitive rugby player. He observes the complex emotions and physical display of these girls' determination on the field, and also focuses on how their game-time mentality gives way to the everyday of school, home, and teenage relationships.

The dichotomy is presented as diptychs, contrasting notions of individual vs. team and player vs. referee. They create the beginnings of a storyline that we look forward to seeing further explored, whether it takes us through the arc of a match, or off the field into these athletes' everyday lives.

Third Bar, Nam Song River, Vang Vieng, Laos by Joerg Brueggemann

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Joerg Brueggemann sends photos from the lands of Lonely Planet: Ko Pha-Ngan in Thailand, Arambol in Goa and Vang Vieng in Laos. He writes:

Here the world's traveling youth gathers to fall in love, experience drugs, ride elephants or just to have beer or two. Every year millions of young people from first world countries travel the planet taking with them nothing more than their backpacks. These modern travelers are hoping to find freedom, cultural exchanges and a lot of fun. It is a very hedonistic youth that is very much concentrated on itself. Backpacking has become a tourist industry on its own that has developed its very own touristy infrastructure.

It's true, for some reason, we're a generation that has an unprecedented desire to see the world and the will and the means to travel. Not since Kerouac inspired legions to hit the road have we had such a propensity for exploration. We've even elected a president who is known and lauded for his own wanderings; we admire and revere the traveler and long to be on the go too. But for what? Brueggemann's photos seek to answer this question; they are an incisive and insightful rebuttal to work like Ryan McGinley's I Know Where the Summer Goes. Where McGinley staged dreamy, epic moments of hedonism — naked boys and girls leaping, running and falling from the heavens like gods — Brueggeman's documented the real indulgences of mere mortals, the better and the worse.

Brueggemann's series Same Same but Different won an honorable mention in CENTER's Project Competition and can be seen on his website.

Olympia 4548 by Richard Gilles

In his series, Signs of the Times, California-based contender Richard Gilles looks at blank billboards peppered along America's roadsides. A common sight to anyone who's made a roadtrip--or, traveled any amount of distance on a highway-- the boards suggest advertising has expanded beyond it's own capacity for communicating effectively, and serves as a confused medium for encouraging consumption. Photographing those billboards left blank and looming over the varied landscape, Gilles plays with perspective articulating the way the empty signs dwarf buildings in the horizon.

Gilles writes,

In photographing with this new series of photographs, I am exploring what these signs say about us or to us when they are empty. Is a blank billboard an advertisement for an economic recession? Or is it a minimalist object whose message is only that which viewer brings to it?

The images bring to mind Hiroshi Sugimoto's series of Drive-In Theaters, where blank, glowing white screens suggest an other-world, where one is alone with a veritably empty slate on which to impose their imagination. These blank screens, whether at one point showing films or advertising, suggest the impact of visual culture and passive information consumption we engage in. Both suggest the experience can be isolating, even though we're all partaking in it at one point or another.

For those of us born to an immigrant parent, or parents, the tension between being American and being "other" create complex identities entangled in multicultural traditions. Hey, Hot Shot! contender Katrina d'Autremont has returned time and again to Argentina, her mother's native land, opening her camera's eye to her family and exploring her relationship to them as well as how they influence who she is. Nationality acts as one variable in this familial exploration, but d'Autremont also considers the idea of "home" and the idealization of a space as factors in her work.

Her images offer an intimate, but controlled look in to her maternal family. Relatives are posed, though rarely in direct eye contact with the camera and the setting is uniformly indoors, creating a feeling of privacy. In the series Si Dios Quiere on her website, recurring subjects in her extended family start to become familiar to the viewer, building a narrative for the family she continues to discover.

Untitled from the series What Light Remains in the Absence by Adam E Thorman

Writing from a cafe in sunny San Francisco, it seems geographically appropriate to reflect on the work of Bay Area artist, Adam Thorman today. Thorman is heavily influenced by his natural surroundings and the interplay of light on nature, as well as poetry, which he incorporates into his work in collaboration with others.

In the images submitted to Hey, Hot Shot! from the series What Light Remains in the Absence, the play of light off of water, through windows, or as the glimmer of energy in an otherwise dark space, articulate the way that light can define a space or a mood. The time of day is often ambiguous--is this dawn, dusk, or somewhere in between? Even light and strong glows work in interplay, whether off an otherwise ordinary surface, or off a subjects face and body.

See more at Adam Thorman's website.

Things are awfully green, gorgeous, and sunny around here but, no, we're not in Anaheim, we're in San Francisco! The whole 20x200 team, which means the whole Hey, Hot Shot! team is in the Bay Area for the weekend and we're throwing a party on Monday. Join us!

What: 20x200 Collector's Confab
When: Monday, April 6th, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Where: Chronicle Books | 680 Second Street (between Brannan + Townsend)
Why: art + you + us = a very good time

Please let us know you'll be there via email: rsvp at 20x200 dot com or on Facebook.

The party is a follow-up to our NYC Collectors Confab which brought photographers, artists and collectors together for an evening of cocktails and conversation. For our San Francisco sequel, we owe a big thanks to Chronicle Books and their (and our) friends at 7x7 Magazine for helping us pull the party together.

In case you can't join us (if you can, you should!) Chronicle is offering a lovely consolation prize: 30% off + free shipping when you enter the code 20x200 at www.chroniclebooks.com (Even if you come to the party, you can book browse and buy when you get home, the code is valid through the end of the month!)

Hope to see you soon!

untitled by Jenny Pfeiffer

In recent months, images of foreclosed homes, unfinished houses, and emptied-out businesses have filled newspapers and magazines. Areas hardest hit by the foreclosure crises, like the Midwestern cities of Cleveland and Detroit, are often looked to as the most striking examples of mass abandon, but suburbs and cities in every state are facing the same types of devastation.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jenny Pfeiffer, an Oakland-based artist and photographer, looks at foreclosure in a housing development in Tracy, CA.

She writes,

Only about half of the new homes were completed and the open space created an unnerving atmosphere. I wanted to capture both the high expectations of the neighborhood yet also the sadness of living without neighbors. Regardless of the barren landscape, the new settlers are still trying to make this place their home. They take care of their yards but at the property line they stop and go no further. They have moved to Tracy for space and a sense of community, yet it feels like they are out there all alone.

Pfeiffer looks at the homes in Tracy from the exterior, showing the vast emptiness of undeveloped plots of land and residents alone in their supposedly growing communities.

Her work evokes thoughts of several other projects we have come across on the web that help us visualize the housing crises and the recession. Photographer Todd Hido, who exhibited work at Jen Bekman Gallery in A New American Portrait, creates images of foreclosed homes' interiors, with marked eerieness to their emptiness. Brian Ulrich, a Midwestern-er who also exhibited in the same show, photographed the series Stores That Are No More for Time, where the carcasses of familiar stores lay empty and in overgrowth.

Perhaps what is distressing about all these images--Pfeiffer's, Hido's, and Ulrich's--is that they are devoid of people, their only residue left behind in the form of worn carpets, empty driveways, and abandoned shopping carts. They suggest that our physical toll on the world, in the form of houses and businesses, is not so easily erased even when we have departed these spaces, and forces us to think about having a greater conscientiousness about the places we occupy and create.