Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, Berkeley, California by Daniel Cheek

For all of you waiting with bated breath today, no news is good news! We're delaying the announcement of the 2009 Second Edition Hot Shots until Friday, December 18th, 2009.

In the past month, we've relocated JBP headquarters, prepared for PULSE Miami at JBG and readied ourselves for the forthcoming 12 Days of Festivus at 20x200. With all this, we found insufficient time to carefully review this round of Hey, Hot Shot! competition's amazing entries. Instead of making a hasty declaration about 2009's newest (and last!) set of Hot Shots today, we're taking extra time to review and prepare this announcement for Friday, December 18th.

In the meantime, read more about the contenders here on the Hey, Hot Shot! blog, find us on Flickr and Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Browsing the Hot Shots' 20x200 editions is also a great way to start your holiday shopping. Until Friday, December 18th!

Fragmented Cities, Santa Catarina, 2007, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, by Alejandro Cartagena

A few days ago we posted about a project called American Palimpsests by contender Stacy Mehrfar, which documents the desolation of suburban and exurban America. South of the border, contender Alejandro Cartagena has been photographing the causes and effects of Mexico's own residential sprawl which, despite all odds, is booming in this down international economy.

As a result of government initiatives granting loans toward buying homes, more than 300,000 new houses have popped up in the areas surrounding Mexico's metropolitan Monterrey area. "Amazingly," writes Alejandro, "even in the financial and mortgage crisis being lived in most of the world, the commission just announced in June that they will position another 500,000 loans for housing in 2009."

Like many development projects, the repetitious rows of houses forsake both their natural surroundings and cultural context. Most of the houses are a kind of boxy, mass-produced approximation of mission-style architecture, a sad nod to an endangered cultural history and an eerie parallel to the pseudo-colonial McMansions that have overtaken American developments. For me, it is painful to watch these spiritless developments envelop the landscape. Alejandro, however, "does not overtly condemn these development projects." Instead he seeks to "openly engage a critically dense examination of the complicated balance existing between economically driven States and the yearning of a society for a fairer World in which to live."

The photographs evoke many conflicting thoughts and feelings about our quest throughout history to create residential utopias. Though Alejandro has tried to present an objective view of this changing landscape, the images seem to shout: be careful of what you wish for.

The entirety of Suburbia Mexicana; Fragmented Cities can be seen at Alejandro's website.

Driving At Night by Kevin Van Aelst

A quick glance at Kevin Van Aelst's photos will probably not do you much good. His subtle images bring inanimate objects to life in a far more sophisticated manner than their commercial applications would suggest. Kevin creates simple tableaux that reveal his witty disposition toward everyday things in space.

Like the surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim and her furry teacup, Kevin uses his objects to hint toward their fantastic possibilities. As Kevin puts it:

The images aim to examine the distance between the 'big picture' and the 'little things' in life—the banalities of our daily lives, and the sublime notions of identity and existence.

While some say Kevin plays with visual accuracy and our perception of truth, perhaps he is actually revealing the intrinsic natures of this minutiae. In this photographic reconsideration, these objects are simultaneously themselves as well as another object that exists within. This is why crumpled laundry can form a heart, and gummy worms can organize themselves as a genome. He makes it clear for viewers to recognize the endless possibilities of everything around us. In a way, Kevin's work points toward the dizzy philosophy of I Heart Huckabees and its existential mantra that if you look close enough you can't tell where my nose ends and space begins.

Untitled, 2009 by Thomas Jackson

Contender Thomas Jackson writes that he "got into photography late," having picked up a camera just a few years ago after working as a writer and magazine editor for over ten years. It wasn't until he had gone through phases of 35mm street photography and "Richard Misrach-style" landscapes that he came to create his own unique body of work. The photographs, which could easily be mistaken for stills from an upcoming Pixar film, blend "pyrotechnically enhanced, sci-fi inspired sculptures with everyday environments."

Approaching the enigmatic glow of an abandoned bonfire is Tom's clunky robot character who appears throughout the entire series, sometimes in surreal settings such as the forest below, and other times doing laundry or driving a wheelbarrow. The series alternates between scenes of ethereal fantasy and the day-to-day grind of domesticity until the line between the two has blurred.

Untitled, 2009 by Thomas Jackson

To me, the images have a strong sense of narrative, which undoubtedly comes from Tom's background as a writer, but also evoke surreal and eerie tones through their carefully constructed lighting. The series presents an unusually imaginative response to our desire to escape the most tedious aspects of our lives.

You can see the complete series over at Tom's portfolio.

Magnolia, Texas. April 2006 #1 by Stacy A. Mehrfar

In Stacy Arezou Mehrfar's seriesAmerican Palimpsests, the suburban project born in the postwar boom of the 1950s carries over to the twenty-first century. Photographing in twenty-eight states over the course of five years, Stacy surveyed the ambiguous terrain between wilderness and residence in contemporary society. As she recounted in an interview with Amy Stein on Amy's blog, these journeys began when American residential development was expanding at an enormous pace. Yet for all of this construction in the service of habitation, she found isolation:

Days would go by where I would hardly see a soul. Many of the suburbs were eerily silent. Cold, even when it was hot outside. Empty, even before the foreclosure crisis had begun. Traveling for days in these communities was awfully dismal and lonely.

These uncanny qualities are demonstrated in Magnolia, Texas. A newly paved patch of development bears the traces of construction vehicles, but little else. An environment in a state of suspension, the visible forest around this cul-de-sac will someday disappear, creating another neighborhood in a dead end.

Stacy also recently received an Honorable Mention in the Fine Art category in Blurb's Photography.Book.Now competition, whose lead judge is photobook evangelist and Hey, Hot Shot! panelist Darius Himes. The book she created, American Palimpsests | This Was What There Was, incorporates a second body of work created on her journeys. As mentioned earlier, for the next few weeks, Flak Photo is showcasing twenty-five top books from this year's PBN, including Stacy's.

Mixtape opens at Jen Bekman Gallery tonight, Friday, November 20th from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The group show features forty-five original works and limited-edition prints by thirty-six artists including Hot Shots: Michelle Arcila, Ian Baguskas, Kate Bingaman-Burt, Scott Eiden, Joseph O. Holmes, Gregory Krum, Yijun (Pixy) Liao, Colleen Plumb, , Mike Sinclair and Matthew Tischler, as well as many other 20x200 artists. In the spirit of what Geoffrey O'Brien declared the "most widely practiced American art form," Mixtape brings the studio soundtrack to the gallery walls.

If you're in NYC, we hope to see you at the gallery tonight! If not, please visit the Mixtape exhibition page here, which features the full list of artists and works included in the show.

Mixtape
Opening Reception: Friday, November 20th, 2009, 6 to 8 p.m.
Jen Bekman Gallery
6 Spring Street
(between Elizabeth + Bowery)
NY, New York 10012

The show will remain on view November 21st–January 9th, 2010.

Garage Fire and Casino, Bullhead City, Arizona by Kipp Wettstein

Photographers have long tested the artistic possibilities of the vistas, challenging terrain, and inimitable light of the American West. You can see things there that are impossible to witness in other regions. Kipp Wettstein started a photographic project around the Great Basin to explore the physical and psychic landscapes of his Mormon ancestors, but after a wandering (perhaps not unlike theirs) he settled on the subject of the Colorado River. The resulting series, For Water Will Not Do, is, as Kipp writes,

a story of a declining river, a setting of harsh beauty and thirty-four million people with no reasonable alternative. This is a search for some understanding of the historical forces that led to the extraordinary effort put forth to 'tame' a landscape. It is also an effort to record an environment in transition with a large slice of American culture inescapably in tow.

Working with a handmade, large-format camera (which he explains in fascinating detail on his site), Kipp captures such improbable and enigmatic scenes as the one in Garage Fire and Casino, Bullhead City, Arizona. Even taken at a distance from the conflagration, the picture evokes a sense of confusion and urgency that I recognized from an iconic image from the great photographer of American spaces, Jeff Brouws.

Car Fire, Interstate 40, California by Jeff Brouws

In exploring these daunting territories and landscape photography traditions, Kipp reminds us of the allusive power and real perils of the desert. There is of course more from For Water Will Not Do on Kipp's website.

One of the things that makes Flak Photo one of our favorite photography sites is their excellently curated and generously sized daily photo. Not to mention that Flak's online gallery has been known to feature the work of several Hot Shots, including Colleen Plumb, Brad Moore, and Alison Grippo.

This week Flak Photo started a 25-day showcase featuring the winners of this year's Photography.Book.Now, the photography book competition launched last year by Blurb. Among them will be 2009 First Edition Hot Shot Kurt Tong, who took home two prizes, including first place in the Editorial category.

Several months ago on a Tribeca rooftop, Darius Himes—Hey, Hot Shot! panelist and lead judge of Blurb's Photography.Book.Now competition—gave a speech about the future of photography books and the possibilities self-publishing affords.

Darius said,

Books are ancient vehicles for the dissemination of ideas and resonate with us as objects even today. Photography, by contrast, is no more developed than a toddler in the scope of human history. It is a gift of modernity and it is changing rapidly before our eyes...and all of that is as exciting as anything I can think of.

The Photography.Book.Now contest was not just another "photography" contest. This was a photography-book contest—and specifically, one that celebrates print-on-demand technology. Many thanks and shout-outs to all the photographers who submitted, attended the party and decided to participate in something fresh and exciting, without really knowing where we're all headed.

You can read the rest of the speech over at Darius' blog, and don't forget to check in with Flak to see the great books that they'll be featuring through mid-December.

World Exclusive! by Peter Bugg

In June, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Peter Bugg spent a week interning with a paparazzi photography agency in Los Angeles. Peter, who had previously worked with appropriating celebrity imagery, spent two days chasing stars across the streets of LA and three days filing through the agency's archives. His series of appropriated imagery, World Exclusive!, comes out of this weeklong experience.

About his work, Peter writes,

In order to sell more photos to magazines, the [paparazzi] spice up their images by sensationalizing them with text. Without these explanations to color the reader's interpretation of the images, the pictures quickly lose their intrigue. On the other hand, without the photographs...these texts are freed from the constraints of the images and take on a life of their own. Instead of existing as simple captions for bubble-gum pictures, the phrases become colorful, quotable, inside jokes.

Approaching the intersection of photography and conceptual art, Peter captures these caption bubbles with a flatbed Epson scanner. The graphic, text-filled circles raise questions about how we interpret imagery, and the value of photographs created for consumption. While other contenders such as Joshua Scott have attempted to extract art from a commercial photography context, Peter's series isolates the prompts which help transform relatively inert images into commercial products.

Daily Dose by Peter Bugg

And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum 2 by Justin James King

Justin James King radically intervenes in the common spectacle of the tourist vista by removing the view itself. A lone figure stands on a promontory gazing out into the utter void. Commenting on the reflexive act of looking (and by extension, on the rich traditions of landscape photography), Justin says,

Perhaps all we see when we stand in front of the landscape are archetypes: preconceived notions and pre-experienced views....Our perception grows out of how we have seen the landscape represented and how it has been delivered to us historically and in popular culture.

By removing the sweeping natural view, Justin undercuts the entire premise of the conventional landscape, pulling off the tricky business of making a photograph about the invisible.

Earlier this year Justin was a recipient of the Arthur Griffin Legacy Award from the Griffin Museum, and winner in the Best Personal Work as Photographic Art Series category at the New York Photo Awards. There is more from And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum, as well as from other bodies of conceptual work on Justin's site.

Slideluck Potshow XIV, the now regular meeting of photography community and a potluck dinner will be convening once again this Friday, November 13, 2009 at The Aperture Foundation. The event will be co-curated by one of our very own Hey, Hot Shot! panelists, Lesley Martin, book publisher at Aperture.

This edition will feature presentations by Hot Shot Birthe Piontek, 20x200 artists Kent Rogowski and Andrew Hetherington as well as Abelardo Morell, Alexander Gronsky, Amelie Escher, Andrew Dosunmu, Andrew Moore/Yancey Richardson, Chuck Close, Filippo Mutani, Francois Robert, Harri Kallio, James Worrell, Jeff Harris, Jon Feinstein, Jonathan Torgovnik/MediaStorm, Jowhara AlSaud, Lori Nix, Mathieu Laverdière, Mashid Mohadjerin, Narinda Reeders, Nora Herting, Paolo Woods, Richard Mosse, S. Billie Mandle, Sara Terry, Sarah Hughes, Sophia Wallace, Tiffany Walling & John McGarity, Tim Davis, Todd Fisher, Vincent Laforet, Yoav Galai/100 Eyes, Yvonne Venegas and Zack Seckler.

Tickets for the event are $10 and proceeds go to support SLPS and The Aperture Foundation. Beverages will be provided, but each attendee is asked to bring a dish to contribute to the table following the theme of Inside Out. Advises SLPS: "Make a pineapple upside-down cake, inside-out rolls, bring "outside" food in, or take an ingredient out and make the recipe differently."

Slideluck Potshow will also be accepting fresh produce and/or canned goods for a food drive to benefit the local Soup Kitchen on 9th Avenue and 28th Street, which provides 1,200 hot meals a day for the homeless.

Slideluck Potshow XIV
Friday, November 13th, 7–11 p.m.
The Aperture Foundation
547 W. 27th St, 4th Floor
New York, NY
Buy tickets here!

Marvin by Beth Yarnelle Edwards

The portraits of Beth Yarnelle Edwards explore the relationships "between people, their living spaces, and their possessions." Many portrait artists strive to portray their subject's psychology through expression, gesture, and other hints of demeanor. In taking her subjects' environments as another level of rhetorical expression, Beth demonstrates the ways we all use our personal items to reinforce the stories we want to tell about ourselves.

Beth collaborates with her subjects in recognizing and enhancing these emblematic, if not quite fictive, aspects of their personal settings. She says,

I seek out intersections of the mythic and mundane. As I attempt to reveal some basic truth about my subjects, I'm attracted to the peculiar or surprising. This can take many forms, ranging from humor to visual quirkiness to a sense of universality, or even the uncanny.

There is much more environmental portraiture at Beth's website.

Sour Cherries, Hungary by Monika A. Merva

Monika Merva's Sour Cherries, Hungary portrays what is likely a minor scene in the day of a pedestrian crossing: a bunch of cherries have spilled on the street. Surely a prosaic accident, but then again you'll never know what this event comprised. If ever they were meant to be displayed, these colorful stone fruit would have created a dignified tabletop tableaux; here they are merely a small-scale slaughter. A trivial loss, but perhaps sour in more than one way.

A committed portrait artist, Monika is lately turning to more oblique ways of storytelling. Of this new direction, she says this work retains an "ingredient of the human element, but not as the focus." Centering her earlier work in people, Monika produced a years-long project in her family homeland, Hungary. The result was City of Children, an extensive document of a government-run housing program for runaways and at-risk teens. There they forge a semi-autonomous community with whom they share the key youth experiences that their absent and dysfunctional families would have otherwise witnessed.

Rabbit Ears, Hungary by Monika A. Merva, from City of Children

The sense of sorrow and hope bound up in City of Children is palpable; the qualities it shares with newer work like Sour Cherries, Hungary is in proposing stories "without a certain answer." The matter-of-factness common to each belies an ambiguous but perceptible turmoil.

For San Francisco residents, Monika's series City of Children will be on view at the mighty RayKo Photo Center at 428 Third Street. Monika will be on hand at the opening reception this Friday, November 6, from 6 to 8 p.m.; stop by to experience the eloquence of her uncertain stories and meet the artist.

Tara Misenheimer loves hair. She draws hair, she paints hair and she's even brainstormed about hair as a Hollywood hair consultant. This obsession stems from her greater love of 60s and 70s era advertisements, featuring enviable bobs, bouffants and braids. Standing somewhere in between found photography and the cut-and-paste age of graphic design, Tara takes pictures of overlapping retro magazines on a copy stand.

She writes,

My work seeks to make connections between familiar and fundamental properties of hairstyles and sensationalized commercial objects of the era, such as cars, diamonds, swimwear and fashionable trends.

Looking back at another recent contender posting about Aline Smithson, the past is similarly romanticized in Tara's work. Her casual compositions seem randomly conceived yet wholly familiar and comforting. Perhaps all these pastel-colored images of nostalgia from a bygone era provide a fleeting sense of bliss in this time of current economic confusion. These images she's chosen to include are colorful and fun-loving, reminding us of seemingly better days in the imagined history of ourselves. Kind of like a Paul Simon song.

Untitled by Scott Eiden

Hot Shots Cara Phillips and Scott Eiden both have work featured in Graphic Intersections, a collaborative online photography project presented by The Exposure Project. The series of photographs is based on the Surrealist game The Exquisite Corpse, a visual version of the old camp game, telephone. If you aren't familiar, here's a rundown of how it works:

The first photographer made a photograph, which was subsequently forwarded to the second in line. The 2nd then, based solely on their own visual, emotional, intellectual or philosophical response, in turn made photographs in artistic reaction to the one they were given. The artists involved were not given any written material to accompany the photograph, nor did they know whose image they were responding to. This was designed to propagate chance, or as the Surrealist's put it, exploit "the mystique of accident."

The system behind the creation of the images leads you to examine each frame in the context of the photographs before it, after it, and the series as a whole. In the age of the Internet our three-second attention spans can lead us to make snap judgments about what is and isn't interesting. Collaborative work like this, that demands slow consideration and unpacking, is not only a joy to behold but a triumph!

You can check out Graphic Intersections online.

Congratulations to the Hot Shots and to all the photographers included in the project:
Ben Alper, Anastasia Cazabon, Thomas Damgaard, Scott Eiden, Grant Ernhart, Jon Feinstein, Elizabeth Fleming, Alan George, Hee Jin Kang, Drew Kelly, Michael Marcelle, Chris Mottalini, Ed Panar, Bradley Peters, Cara Phillips, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Irina Rozovsky, Brea Souders, Jane Tam and Grant Willing.