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