If your walls are bare and uninspiring, now might be the time to pick up some prints at 20x200. The clock is ticking on 20x200's 20x2much Sale—offer expires at midnight (PST) tonight!

Enter the code 20x2much in Google checkout for 20% off your total print order of $50 or more before midnight (PST) tonight.

As mentioned in today's newsletter, there's much too much going on at JBP HQ, including an impending office move, so to make things a little more crazy, we're throwing a sale!

There's tons of great photography in the archives, including editions by Hot Shots as well as contenders, like Bryan Schutmaat. Go see for yourself. Happy collecting!

Last month, many of you applied for the opportunity to win our first month's Curator's Choice Award, a selection of books from independent Santa Fe based art publisher Radius, generously donated by founding editor Darius Himes. We'll be announcing the photographer Darius has selected in our newsletter on Monday, but today, we are extremely pleased to announce our second month's guest curator. Nion McEvoy, chairman and CEO of Chronicle Books—and also a HHS! panelist—will review all entries submitted by May 20th, 2010 and select one photographer for our 2nd Curator's Choice Award. Read on for details!

It'd be impossible not to have Chronicle on your radar—they produce a plethora of gorgeous books, gifts and paper goods available across the globe that range from art & design, food, pop culture, travel and literature. But, aside from the breadth of their publications, Chronicle is recognized for their exceptional quality and for the relationships their nurture with their artists, authors, vendors and customers. They deeply value creativity and the process of collaboration, and as evidenced by their blog, written by Chronicle employees, the company itself is rife with intelligent and original minds.

Many JBP artists have collaborated with Chronicle over the years, including Lisa Congdon, Stuart Klipper, Mark Richards and Andrew Zuckerman, producing unique works that celebrate the individual artist's mission.

Every entry submitted by May 20th, 2010 will be automatically eligible to win the following five titles from Chronicle:

Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photopoetry

Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor

Taking Aim: Unforgettable Rock n' Roll Photographs Selected by Graham Nash

Michael Jackson: Before He was King by Todd Gray

Bird by Andrew Zuckerman

All of these books were selected by Nion and the team at Chronicle especially for Hey, Hot Shot! and we're excited to offer them to you, contenders, as a prize. The photographer Nion selects will be announced in our newsletter in early June, featured here on the blog, and notified by email. So, make sure to get your submissions in by May 20th, 2010.

If you happen to be out in San Francisco next Tuesday, May 4th, we're heading out west for our Third Annual 20x200 Collectors' Confab at Chronicle Books. Jen, a few members of the JBP team, and representatives from Chronicle will all be there for meeting and mingling. We'll be serving wine and beer along with a few nibbles, and perhaps have a surprise or two for you too. Many of our Bay Area 20x200 artists will also be in attendance, so come say hello and have a drink on us!

Space is limited, so make sure you RSVP to rsvp AT 20x200 DOT com.

Who: West Coast Collectors, Artists & Team 20x200
What: Collectors Confab
When: Tuesday, May 4th, from 6-9 p.m.
Where: Chronicle Books | 680 Second Street, San Francisco, CA

Hope to see you there!

The international photo festival Hyères 2010, opens today in France, and we are pleased to report that this year's highly-selective shortlist is 20% Hot Shot!

Former juror Joerg Colberg writes:

At Hyères, ten photographers—picked from the pool of applicants—get the chance to meet ten jury members over the course of several days. You can think of this as portfolio reviews, except that each portfolio review can take as much time as it needs to - and all that overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The jury picks a winner, who gets commissioned to do work for the next year's festival, but it's not really about the winning; or rather, the winning is being one of the ten photographers.

Just to give you an idea of what the festival will do if you're one of the ten: They will print your exhibition prints, at the best facilities they have in Paris—at their expense.

On the roster this year are Cara Phillips (Second Edition 2008) and Carlo Van de Roer (Fall 2007) as well as Yann Gross, Yvonne Lacet, Matthieu Lavanchy, Dhruv Malhotra, S. Billie Mandle, James Reeve, Robin Schwartz and Indre Serpytyte. Congratulations to this immensely talented group of photographers from around the globe!

Check out the practical info page for more on how to book a last minute flight (okay, maybe not so practical) and where to stay once you arrive. And, since most of us can't make it out there, you can read more about the work being presented on the photography page. Hyères runs through May 3rd.

The clock is ticking down to Sunday, May 2nd, at 15:00 hours Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is just under three days away. You may be in New York City reading your morning paper, in San Francisco on an early morning bike ride in the Presidio, or in Beijing having a late night beer with friends to cap off the weekend. What else will happen at that moment in time? Photographers all around the world—including you, we hope—will pull out their cameras and snap a picture capturing the world around them.

Photo by Jan Paulick on Flickr

The New York Times is inviting the world to create a collaborative portrait in which they are asking "everyone, everywhere, to join in making this worldwide photographic mosaic, with each photographer submitting their one best picture." They suggest topics like family, community, nature, economy, social issues and work—the possibilities are endless, so long as they happen at 15:00 UTC.

The project pays heed to a 1986 project, A Day in the Life of America, organized by David Elliot Cohen and Rick Smolan in 1986, which was also coincidentally on May 2nd. This project, part of a series of books capturing a day-in-the-life of a specific place in the world, has been published internationally as compelling portraits of our vastly diverse cultures.

You can snap a picture with camera phone, Polaroid, Contax, Canon or Nikon. Shoot digitally, on film, by pinhole, or through your computer's camera. You may be a professional photographer, a hobbiest, or a student. The invitation extends to everyone, all over the world: really!

Once you've taken the picture that represents your moment on time, be sure to submit it to The New York Times. Pictures will be published up to 1000 pixels wide, so the larger the file the better. Then, send your image to submit.nytimes.com/moment anytime before Friday, May 7th. Between the 2nd and the 7th, the photos will aggregate on the Lens blog and the NY Times, where you'll be able to view them by country and topic.

To find out what time 15:00 UTC is in your part of the world, check Time and Date, then set your timers and have your cameras ready.

Rebel Monkey, Niger, 2007, by Candace Feit

In her statement, contender Candace Feit writes about "the magic of everyday moments," but I found there to be almost nothing "everyday" about her imagery. At it's most basic level, Candace's work is exploratory photojournalism, documenting tribes in India, mountain-dwellers in Morocco and various conflicts in Africa. If you're a reader of The New York Times, National Geographic, or Time, among others, you may already have seen Candace's work in print or online.

However, her images go beyond simple photojournalism in capturing stunningly decisive moments. This is where the "everyday" comes into play. While each series of images functions as a journalistic arc, every image on its own presents a captivating moment in time, removed from—yet in the midst of—economic, social and political conflicts.

Bombay Birds, November 2009, by Candace Feit

As I stared at the images above trying to make sense of their surreal, funny, and scary qualities, it occurred to me that these are everyday moments, but just ones so far removed from life in New York that they appear cinematic. These photographs beg me to expand the boundaries of my own personal map. Beyond New York, there's a big wide world out there.

You can view more of Candace's work on her website.

For some, photography is about capturing the moment. For others, photography is about creating the moment. Some do this by waiting, patiently, and aligning the forces of light, space and object, and some do it by turning their art into an ongoing science experiment that requires a deft understanding of materials and their physical properties.

Colter, 2008 by William Hundley

Contender William Hundley aligns such forces, using photography to capture ordinary objects, floating and bloated -- likely lifted by much more complex staging than is visible to the viewer's eye. There are plenty of visual puns; Hundley's white masses meets other white objects (a colt, a bride, a van) that are identifiable yet in many ways anonymous themselves.

Many of the submitted images come from the series Entoptic Phenomena, a natural occurrence described as "visual effects whose source is within the eye itself." Like optical illusions, the experience of the phenomena observed can't be shared with others because it is due to physical distortions in one's eye—except, in Hundley's case, they can. He makes the entoptic outward-facing, so the illusion of floating, morphing masses that appear to defy gravity is shared, and recorded.

Dandelion Clothesline, Santiago, Chile by William Lamson

Hundley's work draws comparison to 20x200 trickster and photographer, Wililam Lamson, who stages "interventions" with his surrounding environments that play with "ideas of power, control, and human agency." Like Hundley, Lamson uses simple objects like balloons, kites, bananas and balls to demonstrate that yes, nature on it's own is truly remarkable, but nature with the interventions of humans, can elucidate the tensions that exist between materials as they are manipulated into a new man-made balance.

A few months ago Associate Director of Jen Bekman Gallery, Jeffrey Teuton, sent over the work of Chicago-based photographer Adam Ekberg, whose work is filled with refracted rainbows, lens distortions, and other shifts of nature that shoot bursts of light or emit smoke into landscapes and ordinary interiors. The aberrations are a playful announcement of his presence within the frame—a self-portrait through effect rather than cause.

All three artists use the environment as a reference point to work from, recognizing the textures, colors and a basic physicality of their backdrops as tools to work from instead of to work around. From there, all that must be done is to convince you that they know how to defy gravity.

You can see more work by William Hundley on his website.

From May 8th - June 6th at the American University Museum at Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, you'll be able to see the work of over a hundred artists, coming together for a single exhibition. But, to see the never-before-seen work of Megan Cump, Penelope Umbrico, Brian Ulrich, Ryan Boatright, Shane Lavalette or the dozens of other photographers in-person, you'll have to carefully time your trip to coincide with the one hour each of their works will be on display. This is the premise of One Hour Photo: "project a photograph for one hour, then ensure that it will never be seen again."

Shadow by Megan Cump

Project creator, Adam Good and curators Chajana denHarder and Chandi Kelley accepted entries from artists all over the world, asking the selected exhibitors to promise that they never "reproduce, display, sell, or otherwise expose to the public this work after it is project...," which they add is fundamentally an act about giving up control—to allow work to exist and only exist for a designated slice of time.

The exhibit invites show-goers to take a risk, both on what they might arrive to see and the satisfaction they may derive both from their experience with the image and the experience of knowing that the image will not be shared with anyone but in that room. One is asked to observe without documenting and acknowledge without sharing, allowing the images—one by one—to take precedent.

Embarrassing Books b y Penelope Umbrico

There will be an opening on May 8th, featuring the work of Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Megan Cump and Tim Davis, as well as a closing viewing on June 6th featuring work by Penelope Umbrico, Clayton Cotterell, Matthew Gamber, Ann Woo, and Ruben Natal-San Miguel. See the full list of participating artists, and a schedule of the one hour slots you can see their work.

One Hour Photo
American University Museum at Katzen Arts Center
4400 Massachusetts Ave, Washington, DC
On View: May 8th - June 6th, 2010
Hours: 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Tue-Sun

Do you remember your dreams? How well do you remember them? Do you dream in black-and-white? Have you ever kept a dream log, or looked up the meaning of some odd-occurring symbols that visited you when your eyes were closed?

Untitled from The Book of Dreams, 2008 by Sarah Fuller

Winnipeg photographer Sarah Fuller uses other people's dreams as her subjects, and gives them a recipe-like set of steps for them to make a night-long self-portrait with a pinhole camera. From Fuller's artist statement:

The Dream Log project is a collaborative venture between me and participants who agree to record their dreams via pinhole and written text. Each person is instructed on how to use the pinhole camera- the most basic and low tech form of camera that exists - and each person offers up an expertise that they have been born with: the ability to recall the hallucinatory images experienced during sleep. The process is fairly straightforward and accessible: each participant takes home my pinhole camera and sets it up with the aperture facing their bed as per my instructions which are outlined in the back flap of the journal. Before tucking in for the night's sleep, the pinhole shutter is opened and the lights turned off. The person then goes to sleep and dreams. Upon waking, the shutter is closed and the participant records the contents of what was dreamed during the 8 to 9 hour exposure.

Fuller's project on dreams has arresting, tactile and collaborative qualities that deepen and enliven her work. Sometimes listening to a friend or a colleague talk about the dream that they had the night before can seem so bland or rote an experience to the listener. But Fuller, by taking the emphasis off of just one person having a dream or a series of dreams, and delivering to us instead an entire stable of dreamers that record them for us in their own hand as well as show us a self portrait of that person, has altered this experience and made it into a series of inventive and particular objects.

Untitled from Rich and Poor, 1985 by Jim Goldberg

Seeing a variety of different individuals' handwriting has always slowed me down to a contemplative pace, even more so when what is being revealed is singular and vulnerable. In this regard, Fuller's work evokes that of Magnum photographerJim Goldberg, who trail blazed the collaborative photographic narrative with his masterful work Rich and Poor.

From Magnum's profile on Goldberg's book:

Jim Goldberg's photographs of rich and poor people, with the subjects' own handwritten comments about themselves on the prints, give us an inside look at the American dream at both ends of the social scale. His pictures reveal his subjects' innermost fears and aspirations, their perceptions and illusions about themselves, with a frankness that makes the portraits as engrossing as they are disturbing.

The current format that Fuller is showing us these images from The Dream Log is unfussy while being systematic and rings true with the immediacy of the dreamer's hand as well as the clipped-in self-portrait in the corners of each recorded dream.

Untitled from The Book of Dreams, 2008 by Sarah Fuller

To see the entire body of work as well as other series by Sarah Fuller, visit her website.

For over a year now, I have been imaginatively obsessed with things that I saw in the National Museum of Denmark: mummified and eerily well-preserved remains of young women buried in oak log coffins and thrown into peat bogs; meticulously and gorgeously crafted bronze lurs, used for a single ceremonial occasion and then thrown into peat bogs; religious artifacts in the form of sun-dieties pulled by a horse and then thrown into peat bogs, recovered over two millennia later. The notion that's been aesthetically and otherwise all-consuming for me in this is that no one really knows why these things got thrown into these bogs. From what can be surmised from the kinds of objects found in them and the condition that they were found in, it appears that only the most precious, the most highly-crafted and prized, are the things that were meant and fit to throw into the bogs.

The idea fascinates: that those who are most beautiful and precious to us and passed from the world too soon, or the most beautiful object a master craftsman has made or will ever make: it is only these rare things that by the very virtue of their preciousness were not meant or fit for human consumption. These are gifts given (and in the cases of beautiful women, sometimes taken by) to the gods. And the quickest method of delivery back in the days of Nordic myth was to throw whatever was most precious and valuable to you into the bog.

Untitled by Francine Fleischer

Which brings me to the work of photographer Francine Fleischer, whose work on first glance appears to be about summer swimming pleasure seekers, but is actually closer to that whole idea of throwing-things-into-the-bog thing. From Francine's statement:

This series was photographed in a sinkhole that was used for thousands of years by an ancient culture for human sacrifice. Today, the deep water is used by thousands of tourists on holiday, for recreational swim. The contradiction of purposes is a bizarre and curious one. The swimmers seem oblivious to the history of the location although the darkness and depth of the water elude to another time and agenda.

Fleischer's images connote the unsettling disparity of place, use and history of this location very effectively. While we know at first glance that these are individuals idly and happily dog-paddling or back-floating in what seem to be serene waters, there is still this pervasive sense that something unfathomably dark and complex—unquantifiable—accompanies them. The waters themselves, Fleischer tells us, are deep, and the fact of their depth is what made them attractive to prehistoric priests practicing human sacrifice. Ominously, deep waters translate as near black in photographs, and the contrasting whiteness of the swimmers' flesh can be suggestively read as tokens or tributes to a tendriled and terrifying water god.

Untitled by Francine Fleischer

Do these swimmers know the history of their fantastic and exotic swimming hole? Would it matter to their holiday plans if they did? Perhaps like other haunted places, there is a specific kind of thrill-seeking to be found by re-contextualizing and re-purposing sacrificial waters for modern-day vacations. Maybe the two extremes aren't so divergent after all. Fleischer seems to intimate that oblivion and sacrifice aren't always such strange bedfellows.

We here at Jen Bekman Projects are social media on steroids. We've got three blogs: (Jen Bekman Gallery, 20x200, and what you're reading now at Hey Hot Shot), a tumblr site, three Facebook pages, three twitter feeds and who knows what else is on the horizon. Sometimes we can cross-dialog well with our audiences of our various projects that might have different agendas and interests from one another.

And that's why I'm writing now, fellow photographers and photo lovers, to alert you to the two-part discussion on photobooks that's been going on over at the 20x200 blog this week.

The first post tackles the changes in point-of-view, production models and consumer trends in the world of photo and art books. We examined both the alarm being displayed by purveyers of traditional publishing models at the sweeping changes in consumer trends and funding for production, as well as the liberty and opportunity to be found by other publishers small and large to be explored during this moment of flux.

The second part looks at what artists near-and-dear to us have been thinking/making/doing in response to this changing landscape: we take a look at recent book work by Shen Wei, Jonathon Gitelson, Chad Muthard, Austin Kleon and William Powhida.

Since being savvy and informed is the best weapon anyone can have in their artistic arsenals, we thought you might want to head on over to our sister site and check out the conversation.

Confections (adorned) #10, 2010 by Amy Stevens

Our culture's intrigue with the consumption of food presents itself in many ways in art. In Wayne Thiebaud's work, the sense of nostalgia prevails as viewers fondly remember gorging themselves on the sugary sweets of their childhood. Martin Parr approaches food stuffs stacked on grocery shelves happily snapped up by senseless shoppers. And of course, we cannot forget blogs like This is why you're fat, for reminding us that in fact, in some way, we are all gluttons who want to have our cake and eat it too.

Untitled (meringue, from the series British Food), 1995 by Martin Parr

Contender Amy Stevens combines all three of these concepts in her series Confections. In this body of work she has photographed upwards of seventy homemade cakes commenting on the domestic realm of creating and consuming. She writes about her series:

Cakes are the centerpieces of celebrations and symbolic trophies evoking nostalgia and awe. Historically, cake has played a significant role in women's lives. Women have used cake as both an outlet of creativity and a symbol of female power politics. In my constructions of these photographs, I am commentating on not only cake itself as a rich cultural symbol, but of the domestic fantasy world of contemporary home decorating and cooking magazines and television shows. It's a fantasy world where entertaining, cooking and decorating unite. It's a place where one needs to have a beautiful home, decorated seasonally, in order to entertain friends with gourmet meals and elaborately concocted desserts.

Despite the cakes' seemingly exaggerated and over-the-top decorations the creator has achieved an impressive level of mastery; she clearly knows her craft. Amy emphasizes the gendering of the images with references to cooking and baking magazines which are stereotypically targeted at women. She also references women's struggles with food and body image and presents this duality: Although women are faced with internal debates about body image, the realm of cooking and comfort is gendered as female making it difficult to balance desires and the media's influence of idealized body proportions.

The colors in the images are made to be saturated, shocking (and possibly intentionally unappetizing), in what may be a reference to the unnatural colors of Parr's work and the color-rich marketing approaches of today's food companies. Despite this, I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt and excitement about the food laid before my eyes. All I want to do is take a giant slice, plop down on the coach and watch a marathon of Bette Midler movies.

Confections #65, 2010 by Amy Stevens

You can see more of Amy's work on her website.

In just a few weeks the photography world will rain down on DUMBO for the 2010 New York Photo Festival. That means the cobblestone streets will be rife with cameras, exhibitions, lectures and panels. But, the festival isn't entirely about looking, listening, and enjoying a picturesque view of the bridge -- you can also have your portfolio reviewed by a stellar group of professionals from the photography community. Jeffrey Teuton, Associate Director of Jen Bekman Gallery will join other gallery directors, curators, photography critics, agents, publishers, designers and editors between March 13th - 15th to review work on a first-come, first-serve basis, and it's a fantastic opportunity to get feedback on a new, ongoing, or existing project.

Jeffrey will be reviewing on Thursday, May 13th, so make sure to book a slot online in advance. See the full schedule of time slots and list of reviewers here and a list of all the ongoing exhibitions and activities over on the NYPH site. See you in DUMBO!

We can hardly believe it, but we're already a month into Hey, Hot Shot! 2010. Today, Thursday, April 22nd, is the deadline to enter to be considered for the first Curator's Choice Award selected by Darius Himes. Darius is the founding editor of Radius Books, and will be picking one entrant who applies by 4/22 to receive a gift bag with three stunningly produced books: Transfigurations by Michael Lundgren, The Spirit and the Flesh by Debbie Fleming Caffery and Domestic Vacations by Julie Blackmon. After this deadline the entry fee of the competition will increase to $65, so apply by midnight tonight to save!

Twice a month we'll be sending a recap of recent contenders, Hot Shots on 20x200 and other photography news we want to share with you. We'll post it right here on the blog as you see below, but if you'd like it in your inbox too, make sure to sign up for our newsletter.

Top: Evi Lemberger, Maya Okland, Joyce P. Lopez, Jessica Auer, Maciek Jasik
Bottom: Bryan Solarski, Tim J. Veling, Vivan Chen, Camila Pombo, Gregory E. Jones

Read about all our contenders from the 2010 competition on the blog.

Maybe you've seen Bryan Schutmaat's Train Yard and Lumber Mill floating around the internet recently? We first came across Bryan's work through his submission to Hey, Hot Shot! (which garnered him an honorable mention). We recently released these two images as limited-edition prints on 20x200! The photographs are gorgeous and we couldn't be happier to have them all ready for you to hang in your home.

+ Alec Soth is out in California this week and asking for tips on where to find bats, hare krishnas, metal detector enthusiasts, and "anything else along this line of thinking." Any leads that result in a finished photograph are promised a nice prize!

+ 5B4 takes a closer look at the beautiful semi-annual Esopus magazine published by Tod Lippy, who is new to the HHS! panel this year.

+ There are just a few days left ('til May 1st) to apply for the New York Photo Awards. Win over $1,000 in prizes and be automatically considered for the New York Photo Awards 2010 Annual. (And don't forget: The New York Photo Festival '10 is fast-approaching on May 12-16th!)

+ Shoot the Moon, an exhibition of 500 Polaroids by Mikael Kennedy is currently on view at the Chelsea Hotel in Suite 524. The images, taken over the span of a decade, will remain on view through May 2nd. If you're curious to see more of Mikael's work, last year we wrote about his series The Odysseus over on the blog.

+ Transplants, a photography show in conjunction with MOPLA (Month of Photography Los Angeles) opens Friday, April 30th from 7 - 10 p.m. featuring the work of ten LA-based photographers originally raised elsewhere. See the work of Liz Kuball, Emily Shur and eight others at THIS Los Angeles.

+ Make sure you're signed up for a Gilt Groupe membership to get the scoop on an exquisite 20x200 edition put together with Andrew Zuckerman. Gilt offers stylish designer goods at deep discounts for short periods, and this time the proceeds of Andrew's edition will go to benefit The National Audubon Society.

See you in two weeks! In the meantime, poke around the profiles of Hot Shots past and present. See anything we missed? Let us know on Twitter @heyhotshot.

Have A Nice Day, 85th St., Hollis, Queens 2008, by Alexander Segreti

My lease expires in May and I'm trying to figure out what neighborhood in New York to live in next year. Finding the right place, however, is no easy task. For one, trawling through Craigslist is utterly depressing. Secondly, just when I thought I had things figured out came New York Magazine's Best Places to Live in NYC in which Nate Silver, the statistician who accurately predicted 49 out of 50 states in the last election, scientifically deduced the best neighborhoods in the city based on raw data.

It's not that the rankings aren't perfectly clear, or that that blurbs about each neighborhood are not snappy enough, the problem is that while I can drill down a list of each neighborhood's attributes, I still have no idea how the neighborhood feels. I was instantly reminded of this when I came across Somewhere in Queens, a series of large-format photographs by contender Alexander Segreti. "The place I live" is a familiar prompt but rarely have I been so swayed by the place with which I am presented. Part of this is due to my vulnerable, apartment-hunting state of mind but it's also because Alexander's images perfectly capture the character of neighborhoods I hadn't even known were worth considering.

Alexander writes:

What does Queens represent to the average American, the average New Yorker for that matter? Most people know it as a slow moving, middle class place - famous for its airports and as the home of the Mets. Much of the borough developed within the lifespan of many people still living - going from a quiet celebrity haven in the 1920s, to what would be America's fourth largest city today. While millions reside in Queens, many of the streets remain lightly trafficked. As I peeled back the layers, I began to realize what makes the borough tick.

54th Ave. at Corona Ave., Corona, Queens, 2008

Aside from being good photographs, the series is successful because it cuts away at my preconceptions of Queens (LaGuardia Airport, anyone?) to show a neighborhood that is beautiful and charming in it's own right, perfect just the way it is.

As Alexander puts it:

Residents prefer the peace and quiet - close to Manhattan, yet a world away. Individuality breaks up the sameness of the streets, yet privacy is favored, just as I prefer solitude while searching for my own identity through photography. This body of work takes a closer look at the past, present, and future of Queens and serves as a chronicle of my time spent here. Camaraderie has been established - an unexpected bond connecting the landscape to my own curiosity. My explorations become an intimate retreat and the images, a personal guidebook to the borough.

It's no wonder that Sunnyside, Queens came in third on the Most Livable list. You can see the whole Somewhere in Queens series as well as several others at Alexander's website.

Untitled by Garry Hubbs

To create the images for his series Billboards, Gary Hubbs wanders into empty parking lots, unhurried intersections and empty storefronts at night with his vintage Kodak Vigilant 616, which produces images that lend the eye to narrative in an enticing 2 1/4" x 4 1/4" size. He's trained his camera upon the proliferation of a specific kind of mechanical billboard with timed motors, which sequence through up to three separate advertisements in a given time frame.

Untitled by Gary Hubbs

Gary is most interested in showing us the sensation of all of these signs' visuals and messages intersecting, and so he times his exposures to be long enough so that all three competing messages get equal time on the film's emulsion. Of the project he has written:

By photographing these signs with an exposure long enough to record all three ads on one single negative, an in-camera intervention of sorts takes place. The necessary clarity of the original images is obliterated by the combination of time and mechanical movement - effectively robbed of their intent, they become layers of and contributors to a new, incidental image.

The sign in the real world remains unchanged - the intervention happens only in the camera and on the exposed film...elements of the original billboard advertisements remain in the new composite image - logos, images and copy overlapping - the visual equivalent of a corporate 'mash-up'.

Where Hubbs sees a "mash-up" or an intervention, I instead see qualities more often evoked in painting, something referred to as pentimenti. Pentimenti refers to the visual traces or marks that a painter left of a previous composition or a visible history of a varied kind of mark-making that preceded the finished composition. It is simultaneously a kind of history, residue and evidence.

Such ghost images have always held visual appeal for photographers, and signage itself often presents itself as a ready-made still life that can speak of both the passage of time, the fleeting nature of consumer culture as well as a marker for whatever currently passes for design or advertising of the day. Where Hubbs' work in Billboards connotes all of these things, there are several other photographers riffing off of similar themes that I'd feel remiss in not mentioning here.

Circuit City, Ponderosa Steakhouse, 2008, from the series Dark Stores by Brian Ulrich

Brian Ulrich's recent series Dark Stores concentrates upon the abandoned structures and signage of vast box stores that have become casualties of the economic recession, littering vast tracts of commercial land with empty building corpses and striped-bare branding. In the image above, the familiar red-box that houses the Circuit City logo has been rendered "unreadable" by dint of the erasure of both its logo and the surrounding commercial logos underneath it. The black paint used to obliterate the brand names could be likened to a giant sharpie pen being taken to it to remove all familiar context, rendering an odd sense of these fallen corporate titans having been black-listed.

Burger King, 2004 by Matt Siber

Fellow Chicagrapher Matt Siber plays a visual trick on the viewer by removing the supporting structures of the large highway signs that advertise fast food or car repairs high above the din interstate traffic. Matt writes of the project:

Perched atop very tall poles or stanchions, these corporate beacons emit their message by looming over us in their glowing, plastic perfection. Elimination of the support structure in the photographs allows the signs to literally float above the earth. In some cases the ground is purposefully left out of the image to further emphasize the disconnect between the corporate symbols and terra firma.

Whether undermining corporate logos, commenting upon the culture-jamming effects of their messages running together, or by creating an other-worldly, sci-fi effect of floating branding beacon-hood, it is clear that photography's fascination with signage is a topic that is still ripe for artistic investigation.

Check out Gary Hubb's Billboards project in action at his website.

Can a landscape be captured at a "decisive moment?" This is what contender Greg Jones asks when he carefully composes composites of parks and street scenes, crafting narrative by layering multiple frames of ordinary interactions between humans and their environments. Jones cites his photographic influences mostly as New York and Paris-based European landscape painters, including Claude Lorrain and William Marlow. Looking to their longitudinal studies of town squares, parks, sea ports, and other hubs of everyday activity, the paintings of Lorrain and Marlow emphasize dramatized (but believable) landscapes of their day, and the human form, posture and dress, of people within these environments. Their skies are saturated with color, trees are in peak bloom, grasses are lusciously green, and the natural elements are often blossoming with the richest of their possible palettes.

Highland Park 5.19.09, 2009 by Gregory E. Jones

Jones' work adopts this lush palette along with often vivid lighting , but also pays close heed to the angles and curves created by man-made elements and how they intersect with the characters in his frames. In his work in parks and grass knolls, Jones captures casual passerby on paved paths, unaware that their mundane activity is being recorded as part of a storied picture. In Highland Park 5.19.09, three threesomes engage in separate dialogues, on their own unremarkable. But, by layering multiple frames, the triads of park-goers are put in conversation, asking the viewer to observe the textures and dimensions of the space.

St. Paul Street 3.20.09, 2009 by Gregory E. Jones

Jones also takes his technique to the street, with a style of lighting that channels the photography of Jeff Wall, who also cites painting as a crucial informant to his photography. Like Wall, Jones sees the frame less as a moment to document the "truth," but as a canvas on which to craft a scene, and applies controlled lighting and placement of his subjects—and their actions— to do so. He writes in his statement, "I think part of what I'm trying to do is to establish a link with those old paintings to show that at the core of our experience, our relationship to the world; there are things that will never change."

You can see more work by Greg Jones over on his website.

Torso, 2009 by Camila Pombo

Memory and nostalgia frequently appear in photography because of the medium's ability to document and preserve changes that happen over time. Contender Camila Pombo has chosen to explore these themes through documenting her family to place herself in its transitory heritage. She writes about her work:

For the last two years, my photography has revolved around my family and what we are based upon. I was born in Spain but moved to the United States when I was just two years of age; once in the U.S., I was never in the same house and/or town for more than a couple years. By the time I turned fifteen I had lived in three different states six different homes. Because of this, I have never felt like I truly belonged to any one place. I do not consider myself Spanish nor do I consider myself American. In my images I have tried to find a truthful way to represent my home in order to understand it better.

Father's Shoes, 2009 by Camila Pombo

Her series functions as a step back to observe the relationships she has grown up with but never had the chance to consider or deconstruct. As viewers, the stark environments and objects in solitude—like her father's shoes or a Virgin Mary statue— force us to look for a deeper connection beyond what's obviously presented. We are able to piece together a narrative of the family and characters, even though their faces aren't present in the images.

Mom Posing by Green Wall and Dad Watching TV, 1984 by Larry Sultan

Camila's work reminds me of Larry Sultan's Pictures from Home, which documents his aging parents over the course of a decade. He explores their relationship to one another and to their surroundings, which are odd and hilarious but full of care and intent at the same time. The narrative that emerges from the series is strong because—for me at least—there is a familiarity to the daily processes, family dynamic and the interactions I observe in my own life. As with Camila's series, I am able to sense more clearly my own personal narrative, through the documentation of her family.

You can see more of Camila's work on her website.

Taxi by Vivian Chen

One of the most persistent and favorite aesthetic ideas that I have ever been exposed to is the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi. Put very simply, it can be thought of as the notion of finding quiet beauty in banal or even ugly places. There is a pronounced emphasis on noticing (or even actively cultivating) imperfections in an object or work of art, which in turn reinforces the twin notions that someone's hand other than your own once touched or made the thing in question. You are made aware that this earlier moment has long since passed and the moment right now of you presently engaged with this object will also soon pass.

The writer and designer Leonard Koren has written at eloquent length about Wabi-Sabi in his tome Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. Briefly, here is some of what he outlines Wabi-Sabi consisting of:

Wabi-Sabi can be called a "comprehensive aesthetic system." Its world view, or universe, is self-referential. It provides an integrated approach to the ultimate nature of existence (metaphysics), sacred knowledge (spirituality), emotional well-being (state of mind), behavior (morality), and the look and feel of things.

Metaphysical Basis: things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness.

Spiritual Values: Truth comes from the observation of nature; "greatness" exists in inconspicuous and overlooked details; beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness.

State of Mind: Acceptance of the inevitable; Appreciation of the cosmic order.

Moral Precepts: Get rid of all that is unncessary; Focus on the intrinsic and ignore material hierarchy.

Material Qualities: The suggestion of natural process; Irregular; Intimate; Unpretentious; Simple.

- Excerpted from Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren

The work submitted by Vivian Chen evokes many of the precepts of Wabi-Sabi: her images tend to look not just at, but into a subject or scene. Notice, for example, in Taxi (above), the particular and idiosyncratic beauty of a discarded or now useless and torn promotional poster on the facing wall, a tiny sliver of light on the gravel hitting this fleeting moment, a weather-beaten and water-stained wall, and the spare, empty and stark formal qualities of the shapes and patterns observed.

In both the images she submitted for consideration here, and the expanded portfolio viewable on her website, she maintains this thread of engaged noticing in often passed-over or otherwise unremarkable scenes. Bits of quiet humor and visual jokes are evident in her eye as well, such as this image of nude pin-ups playfully hiding behind some laundry hanging out to dry:

Laundry by Vivian Chen

Citing important tenets of Wabi-Sabi in the Taoist ideals of emptiness and nothingness, Chen writes about what she is chiefly concerned with in her photography:

I seek to bring aspects of the world that we ordinarily fail to see into images as unbounded as they are precisely defined. The negative spaces words scarcely touch -- the quiet, neglected crannies and vast hollows of big cities, the voids that open up in landscapes, and the slight but overwhelming gaps within dense crowds—are places my eye readily resides, and form the heart of my work.

Natural light, open and seemingly empty spaces, a loving, lingering eye over discarded details characterize not only the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi, but every image that Vivian Chen gave us to review.

View more of Chen's work at her website.

Untitled, 2008, from Pre-marital Bliss by Tim J. Veling

Pre-Marital Bliss is a body of work entered by contender Tim J. Veling. Where at first glance the work appears to reference the blown-out flash photography of Terry Richardson, the subject and heart of the work—intimate domestic relationships—seems closer to Larry Sultan's Pictures From Home.

Tim writes:

Lizzie and I began dating in 2006. Before long we moved into a ramshackle, Victorian style two room apartment together. Our bedroom doubled as my studio space, with cameras, printers and work prints covering most surfaces. Lizzie did her best to make the place feel like home, finding knick-knacks in thrift shops and offsetting my mess with quirky ornaments and details. Not long after settling into our new, shared life I started photographing it.

The photographs, part of a series of about fifty, capture both the good times and the bad, the funny and the ordinary, and the thick and the thin of their relationship. However, the work is much more intimate than objective. Like the title, mashing-up "pre-marital sex" with the 50's archetype of "marital bliss," the images are honest, funny and modern.

Mastectomy Scar, 2006, from These are the days, by Tim J. Veling

Another series on Tim's website, These are the Days, documents his mother's experience with breast cancer; as Tim puts it, "the story of a family regaining strength by dealing with a grief that once pushed them apart." The same kind of honest, intimate documentation as in Pre-Marital Bliss is what makes these photos so poignant. Again, the large set of images fans out to document the surroundings and effects of it's subject matter. Tim writes that, "Having spent most of his adolescent years bedridden with chronic Crohn's disease, the camera became the perfect excuse to step outside his own personal sphere." However, both of these series seem to reside in the relational space between himself and other people.

Tim is currently a practicing artist and professor of photography in New Zealand. You can see more of work, including all the photographs from both of the series above, on his website.

Bullfight (Madrid), May 2008 by Bryan Solarski

The first words that came to my mind when viewing the work of Bryan Solarski were "constructed photography." Just thinking this provoked a meta-response of, "Well, isn't all photography essentially constructed?" While there are photographers that actually physically construct dioramas or stage scenes in miniature, and still others that might utilize the vastly kitsch appeal of lomographic action sample sequences, or photographing in 3-D, what we have here is someone that shows us the world made smaller, more colorful and appealingly more manageable.

Bryan utilizes an in-camera technical manipulation known as "Tilt/Shift" in order to create these colorful, miniaturized versions of actually experienced scenarios and events. Cartoonish, and alternately soft and then sharp-focused, looking at a world rendered through this lens induces not only perspective shifts but psychological ones as well. The viewer is cast back into a period of childhood, when everything one experiences feels larger-than-life.

Tuscany, May 2008 by Bryan Solarski

While largely sticking to immediately recognizable places in our collective, global consciousness, Solarski depends upon our familiarity with these scenes in order to playfully manipulate our picture-perfect mental images of places like the canals of Venice or a hockey game at a major sports center. Instead, he presents these scenarios to us in toy-like technicolor, devoid of any actual personalized or otherwise contextualized meaning. You might thank him, really, if having been to one of these points-of-interest yourself, you had an emotionally complex experience or one fraught with personal "growth," and can now look at this collection of images as a tabula rasa of the place. Here you need only to recollect the color, the light, the sensory waves of the place, and enjoy being unencumbered by any of that pesky, grown-up contextual baggage.

The Camera Club of New York is one of the city's oldest art organizations, existing as a home for photographers to display, create, discuss and learn about photography since 1884. These days, CCNY continues to house lectures, exhibitions and residences, offer studio rentals, darkroom and digital facilities, and continue to pursue their commitment to photographic education and practice.

Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1 by James Casebere

CCNY's Annual National Photography Competition is now open for entries, but only through next Monday, April 19th! With the purchase of a $40 membership to the club, there is no additional fee to enter the competition. Photographers can submit up to six images from a cohesive body of work, and the first place selection will receive a $500 cash prize. Each photographer will have the honor of having their work reviewed by James Casebere, whose striking and oftentimes haunting images include large-scale photographs of complexly constructed housing models. Several of these works are currently hanging on the second floor of the Whitney Museum as part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and can be seen as you step off the elevator. A bold and seemingly cheery palette couple with cinematic lightning to at first suggest that Casebere is capturing bucolic afternoons in the suburbs, but upon closer glance, the streets are eerily abandoned and windows shuttered.

Casabere will select applicants to be featured in an exhibition at the CCNY gallery in the summer of 2010 and winners will be featured on the CCNY website. Head over the competition website for full details, and to learn more about juror, James Casebere.

Alec Soth needs your help! He's heading out West next week for a new project entitled, The California Sleepwalker's Treasure Hunt and is actively seeking leads to the following people, animals, hangouts, and actions-in-progress:

-Condors
-Sleepwalkers (specific individuals would be best)
-Punk hangouts
-Self-mutilation/flagellation, scarring
-Horror film (in progress....otherwise horror makeup artist)
-Star Wars iconography / Star Wars collectors
-Dolores Huerta / United Farmworkers
-Bats
-Hare Krishnas
-Metal detector enthusiasts
-Hang Gliders
-Frankenstein
-Emo's in Tijuana or Mexicali
-anything else that fits this stream of thinking

Alec Soth's treasure hunting route

If you're familiar with Alec's work, you know that he has a proclivity to wander along the wayfarer's path, whether that's down the Mississippi River, to and from Niagara Falls, or on a birthday trip to Las Vegas. Some of these travels are now being documented in his new blog in The New York Times, "Continental Picture Show"; last week's first installment took viewers to New Orleans in the aftermath of Mardi Gras, which begins with a shot of a barelegged Alec watching celebrations on TV from his hotel room then continues with an annotated foray into Nawlins. As expected, Alec's wanderings reveal a few truths beneath the celebratory veneer and those revelations surface much to the viewer's delight.

In an interview with the Walker Art Center in May 2006, shortly after completing NIAGARA, Soth spoke of his lists, and how they inspire his framework for looking:

PS: If you're starting a new project, how does that work? Do you just start shooting and see where it takes you?

AS: No. I did this project recently in Niagara Falls, and it started before I'd ever been to Niagara Falls. I had these pictures in my head of things I'd hoped to find. I have a list of things I want to shoot. One thing is "men in pajamas." I've yet to find a man in pajamas, but it's something I'm looking for. Why is that? That's the way I go out into the world, is looking for certain things.

This time around, Alec is crowdsourcing your insight and expertise to guide him from Los Angeles to San Francisco by way of condors, Hare Krishnas, hang gliders and punk hangouts. If you have hot tips you can leave them in the comments over at Little Brown Mushroom, where there is also an ever-growing discussion about the list itself.

The earliest photographic portraits, made in the mid-nineteenth century, were solemn, uncomfortable events. In efforts to keep a sitter still enough to render a likeness in an eight-minute or longer exposure, all kinds of tactics were employed: metal clamps behind the sitter's head to hold their posture in place; others were dosed with laudanum (opium) to make them more docile and compliant, and still others were threatened at gunpoint to maintain their positions!

As technology improved over time, these drastic measures ceased to have to be taken and realistic portraits of individuals could be made in split seconds of time. Film as well as actual camera mechanics improved quickly so that beyond just rendering a likeness, portrait photographers would soon strive to be able to depict much more idiosyncratic and nuanced gestures of a subject, showing the viewer something much beyond the physical by hinting at ineffable interior qualities made feasible by technological leaps.

Coming full circle nearly 150 years later, we've arrived at a period of time where photographers are process to question what might have been lost by losing the blur. Could it be that the psychological interior of a subject might be tapped by diffusing/confusing the actual physical representation of that subject in a photograph? Would an intentional return to the blur be able to tell us both something about the photographer and the photographed that would not be intelligible otherwise?

Contender Maciek Jasik approaches these and other related questions in his body of work A Thousand Souls. Begun almost a year ago, Jasik began approaching portraiture in a new way after a trip to the National Gallery in London. In the early days of this project Maciek wrote on his blog:

Linda by Maciek Jasik

At the National Gallery in London I was inspired to try to recreate some of the feeling inherent in post-Impressionist painting. Works by Vuillard, Cezanne, Degas and others are compelling, evocative, emotional with just a few splotches of color. The exactitude of photography works from the opposite approach, through incredible detail of every feature. Could I produce both through one medium? That was the question.

After a full year of working on this project, Jasik appears to have come to incorporate many other notions of what these kinds of portraits can be made to mean, invoke and reference. Stating in his entry that through portraiture he seeks to, "... [use] mystery to re-imagine documentary photography and portraiture as something less knowable, less able to be consumed and then tossed aside." From his artist's statement:

The idea of the single soul is the basis of Western religion and society. It is the source of our individuality and our desire. And the portrait defines this self, by exposing the soul through a clarity of vision. We feel we can sense the texture of this soul through the details and subtleties of the subject's expression and manner.

We can instead conceive of the soul as a composite of thousands of disparate souls, extracted by circumstance and reaction. This series seeks to shed light on this great expanse within us, beyond what we aim and hope to be seen as, and into the far reaches of our psyche, dark corners unknown to us until the very moment they emerge.

Joshua, May 2009 by Maciek Jasik

My sense in looking at Jasik's work is that he succeeds in reaching some collective emotional button in us with his use of blurred gesture and surreal color, and that the earlier sought-after connections with post-impressionist painters has been achieved. But perhaps more than this, Jasik's work also recalls for me a kind of sympathy for another contemporary photographer's work that shares many of our contender's concerns as well as approach. South Korean photographer Kyungwoo Chun has created multiple bodies of work wherein the subjects sit for his camera for minutes, hours or days at a time, depending on the goal of the specific project. In one of his most well-known projects, One Hour Portrait, Chun leaves the exposure time of at least one hour for his subjects, but remains in the room with them, believing that in the longer duration of this photographic event, a certain kind of empathy is arrived at between himself and the photographed subject that will be rendered in the final print of this prolonged encounter.

Untitled from One Hour Portrait by Kyungwoo Chun

This process of photography is, according to Chun, equal to an exchange of souls. Chun firmly believes that his images can only be created through this dialogue and exchange between himself and the subject.

While perhaps not articulated as such yet by Jasik, this process of encounter photography between artist and subject is clearly at work in A Thousand Souls. As with Chun, there is the impression that in the course of the sitting a certain kind of subjectivity usually present in quick snapshots is dropped, and what emerges instead is a new kind of energy field between two protagonists in the same room; a place where potentially more could be revealed in the final print, speaking of both photographer and photographed, than could ever be realized through any other means.

More of of Brooklyn-based Maciek Jasik's work can be viewed at his website.

Machu Picchu, Peru, 2007 by Jessica Auer

Jessica Auer photographs the world's most photographed places: Niagara Falls, Machu Picchu, Yellowstone National Park. Each of these "natural" destinations has also become a part of travel vernacular— representational as emblems of the concept of traveling itself. The places Auer visits are often overrun by other visitors, hankering to document that they were there, then proliferating the images they make, thus making the photographs of the place even more ubiquitous. It is an exponentially expanding representation, supporting the economy of tourism that—ironically—depends on the continued preservation of the place.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming #2, 2007 by Jessica Auer

Auer, who hails from Canada, writes, "This on-going project invites the viewer to consider the historical and cultural significance of these places as well question the tourist's responsibility in observing these sites." What is the tourist's responsibility in observation? Does photographing a destination further objectify the place? Or is it simply part of the act of travel? Auer asks these questions as she arrives as dual photographer and tourist, and tries to create an image that both encompasses all other photographs of a place, but is also differentiated from them.

Leaning Tower by Beth Dow

I am reminded of Beth Dow's spring 2009 solo exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery, Ruins, which looks at how we "appropriate and approximate the romance of ruins into modern American environments." Dow remarks on falsely constructed antiquity suggesting that we sometimes place greater value in the sentiment of a place than the place itself. Seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the Midwest is perhaps as satisfying for some as seeing the real thing, even if we are aware it is not authentic.

Auer's photographs also suggest a similar anachronism and conflict with authenticity: visitors can transplant themselves to a pristine and preserved Machu Picchu and adopt the experience of the 15th Century Incas, while otherwise firmly rooted in their modern lives. To preserve a place so that it remains the same over time suggests that its quality of un-changing is what is valued, rather than its history, natural beauty, or the tremendous efforts required to preserve what was there to begin with.

Head to Jessica's website to see more work including additional mages from Re-creational Spaces.

Cardinal Head, 2008 by Joyce P. Lopez

Photography, though an art form, also serves as historical documentation. It is a tool used for the preservation of specific culture, events, and landscapes in addition to creating the beauty found in photographs. Contender Joyce P. Lopez does not use a camera to capture images. Instead, she scans three-dimensional objects lending a scientific and anthropological element to these moments.

Photographs created by scanner are stripped of a background and rid of time and place, allowing viewers to observe simply the facts and details. There are several photographers working in this fashion; my favorite recent example documents the delicious and inspirational sandwich-eating habits of a New Yorker, appropriately titled Scanwiches.

Five Boro Bistro: Ham, Turkey, Lettuce, Onions, Cheddar Cheese, On White Toast, 2010 by Jon Chonko

Joyce P. Lopez uses a scanner not only as a scientific tool but also as a political one. In her series, The Trouble with Birds, she scans birds that have died, in an attempt to reveal the effects of climate change on the natural world. She writes,

All the birds in this series are dead but beautiful biological specimens worthy of reverence, and visual contemplation. We are partially responsible for climate and environmental changes which is greatly affecting birds...For example, around their eyes, there are special tiny feathers that have a twisted rope effect. Scars and insects marks on their beaks, all are visible. These birds are warning us about our impact on the environment, and to take responsibility.

Chimney Swift Feet, 2008 by Joyce P. Lopez

You can view more of Joyce's work on her website.

You've probably seen a whole lotta slideshows in your day, but never a slideshow quite like this one. Slideluck Potshow is celebrating its fifteenth New York-based gathering of food and photography on May 15th with a slideshow projected on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge Archway. The theme of the show will be "Bridges," and held in partnership with The 2010 New York Photo Festival, which takes places from May 12-16th.

Photo from SLIDELUCK POTSHOW on flickr

SLPS XV is open for submissions through April 15th, and the entries will be curated by David Alan Harvey (of Magnum, Burn), Jae Choi (of The Collective Shift,) and W.M. Hunt (of Hasted Hunt Kraeutler). The selected artists will have the chance to present for up to 5 minutes with 15-40 images, and project their slideshow onto the archway as the sun sets. You need not be a photographer to apply, though your presentation must be image-based. Click here for details on how to apply and the presentation format.

Then, on May 15th, you can enjoy all ninety minutes of slideshow while drinking beers and nibbling on snacks made by fellow potluckers. Attendees are encouraged to bring foods made by locally sourced ingredients, so head to the farmers markets for fiddleheads, rhubarb, or some inner city honey. And if you're quick to act and are one of the first 100 people to buy tickets to the event, you'll also be able to attend a special tasting of Brooklyn Brewery's special Brewmaster's Reserve beer.

SLIDELUCK POTSHOW XV
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Brooklyn Brewery Tasting: 6 p.m.
Potluck: 7 p.m.
Slideshow: 9 p.m.
Afterparty to follow
Manhattan Bridge Archway
Brooklyn, NY 11201

For more info and to buy tickets, head to SLPS.

Grandma Pipí at the age of 76 has given birth to 18 children, she´s got 64 grandchildren, and 100 great-grandchildren, 2006, by Maya Økland

Contender Maya Økland's series Stranger in Motherland is a meditation on the complexity of family and geography. Maya was born in Norway to a Norwegian/Icelandic father and Brazilian mother but she has lived mostly in Sweden. Growing up, she spent weekends and holidays with her father who, she writes, "moved around a lot." On the maternal side of her family she is one of 64 grandchildren to her Grandma Pipi (above). Every five years she has traveled to "the other side of the world" to visit this extended family in Tocantins, Brazil, and in the past several years she has begun to document them. "Photography became important to me in the sense of overcoming distance," writes Maya, but also, "recalling faces."

Aunt Cleonice and her boyfriend Willian, 2007, by Maya Økland

The portraits themselves are quietly beautiful, conveying the candid closeness of family and the geographical disconnect between distant relatives. Maya's use of unusually long, descriptive captions allow the viewer to tease out a multi-generational, cross-continental story. It brought to mind a recent post on eyecurious titled The Art of the Caption, an oft-neglected aspect of photography that Maya is acutely aware of.

Installation shot of Stranger in Motherland from New Nordic Photography at Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, 2006

When the series is installed, the narrative truly comes together. Around fifty photographs of different sizes are pinned on the wall in a formation that seems to branch out or cluster, with images scattered as if they were points on a map. In this sense, Maya seems to be dealing with documenting, cataloging, and arranging these strange yet important relationships, on an aesthetic and emotional level.

You can view more of Maya's work on her website.

Kahao Vargo, Vari, 2009 by Evi Lemberger

Photographer Evi Lemberger does several things very, very well. First, she has an uncanny sensitivity in rendering interiors as a kind of absent portrait, and then conversely in creating portraits that are capable about speaking on so much more than just the person photographed. Like someone I spent years envying in graduate school, Evi also finds or has the superhero power ability to attract beautifully lush color and natural light into every single shot.

woman, Lopukhovo, 2009 by Evi Lemberger

The body of work that she submitted is (fantastically) entitled Ein Nichtort, or: the Fairy Tale about the Galoshes of Fortune. Documentary in nature, these photographs focus upon the lives of the inhabitants of the border region called Transcarpathia, an area in the Western Ukraine. Disputed territory for the past hundred years, it has "belonged" to seven different countries in the 20th century. The residents speak Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Polish, German and other regional languages or dialects, creating barriers to efficient and effective communication. The region also faces up to 90% unemployment and Evi writes that this region tends to be "dismissed by the governments of both Ukraine and Hungary." On her website Lemberger writes of the project:

On a social scale people live peacefully together, although having sometimes 16 different nationalities and numerous religions in one city. Interaction between the different nationalities depends on the multiculturalism in each place. Sometimes it happens that people live together but have almost no connection on a social level. One odd outcome of this multiculturalism is the setting of time. Depending on the inhabitants and the size of the village, the time is set to Hungarian or Ukrainian time.

Ein Nichtort literally means a "non-place," a phrase coined by French cultural theorist and ethnographer Marc Augé. By his definition, a non-place was a location whose very state had become so transient that it could no longer be regarded as a place. Applying his theory to contemporary Parisian society, Augé found four precepts that embodied the principle of non-place, or ein nichtort:

(i) the paradoxical increase in the intensity of solitude brought about by the expansion of communications technologies; (ii) the strange recognition that the other is also an 'I'; (iii) the *non-place, the ambivalent space that has none of the familiar attributes of place - for instance, it incites no sense of belonging; (iv) the oblivion and aberration of memory.

While Lemberger's images are most certainly about real people in real spaces, they are also just as certainly about the precariousness of belonging and not belonging, about an inability to be classified and understood by an outside force or society. Seen in this context, these are not then just images of a people or culture living out of place or time, because the crux of the project is the fact that the space these people have inhabited have never had the luxury of a fixed place (understood as such), or even a fixed time (is it Ukrainian time or Hungarian time where these photographs are taken? Maybe it depends on whichever nationality the person asking the question might be). Neither are these images of people living on the margins, but rather of people living in the liminal, a no-man's land of disputed territory that no one seems very anxious to claim.

More of Evi Lemberger's work can be seen on her website.

Blogging, micro-blogging, vlogging, webinars—there are ever-increasing means and a multitude of ways that people are networking and communicating across the web these days. We'd like to turn your attention, art and tech-savvy among you, onto a new emergent trend of twitter chats, perfectly realized in a new joint venture by photographers and art bloggers (and chat moderators) Todd Walker and Harlan Erskine.

Transcripts of photoartchat with gallerist Debra Klomp Ching, March 16, 2010

Since mid-December 2009, Todd and Harlan have been sourcing guests for semi-regular moderated photoartchats, which take place entirely on Twitter. The format and time are always the same, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. EST (6 p.m. PST). There are usually two chats a month, each lasting for exactly one hour. Todd and Harlan both actively solicit the guest "chatters" as well as guide the evening's discussion; the quick format is fairly low-pressure for the guests, and really and truly only commits them to one hour of their time. Working artists, bloggers, collectors and anyone with interest is welcome to ask questions and participate in an extended (but at the same time micro!—as in 140 characters) topic of conversation. Past guests have included Radius Books editor (and HHS! panelist) Darius Himes, Fraction Magazine founder David Bram, gallerist Debra Klomp Ching of KLOMPCHING Gallery and most recently the editors of The Photography Post. Given the varied and impressive roster of invited guests, there's a wealth of information provided in a relatively informal and relaxed format—and it's available to anyone and everyone at any level of interest in photography and the arts.

Transcript of photoartchat with editors of The Photography Post, March 23, 2010

The next photoartchat is scheduled for Tuesday, April 13th. That night you'll get to tweet-meet Art Fag City's Paddy Johnson in, who'll be on hand to field questions about everything under the art-loving sun. So, get your questions ready! The easiest way to be notified about the times and guests for upcoming photoartchats is to follow the founders, Todd Walker (@ocularoctupus) and Harlan Erskine (@HarlanErskine), on Twitter.

Todd also recommends using the TweetChat client to more easily follow the posts, although you can also find them easily on Twitter by simply searching for the hashtag, #photoartchat. A complete transcript of each chat's discussion is available the day following the chat at What the Hashtag? #photoartchat (just scroll down the page and click on the tab for "transcript"—you can fill in a specific date or give a range of dates to view the entire archives of photoartchats).

Aunt Jan photographs Gran, Mom, and Harvey, 2008 by Carrie Chalmers

Photographing the invisible—what is missing from space—is to have the viewer project his or her own assumptions and ideals upon that emptiness. In the case of contender Carrie Chalmers, that projection is intended to be a person or people missing, either through death, distance or time. The missing people are Carrie's relatives who have passed away in the15 or more years since the original photographs—from which these images are re-created—were taken. Although highly personal, these images are accessible to us because Carrie represents the universal idea that one day we too will lose those that we love and only be left with the memories and ideals that we hold of those people.

Carrie writes about her work:

I am interested in human relationships and the uncomfortable balance between connection and vulnerability....I [can't] help seeing the rest of my family there in the space with me, mostly in the form of photographs I had taken years earlier.

It is the uncomfortable balance that she strives for that interests me the most. In viewing her photographs, each of us is reliving a version of her memories, bringing us all back to a place of vulnerability. To imagine a lost loved one is to relive pain and sadness but at the same time, recall excitement, joy and the positive experiences that shaped us.

Deck, 1991 by Carrie Chalmers

Looking at Carrie's work I was reminded of a New Yorker essay written by Toni Morrison titled Strangers. In the essay she experiences the loss of a stranger—a woman she met once only briefly—but feels anger and a sense of devastation as though it were a woman she had been close to her whole life. In the essay Morrison writes:

To understand that I was longing for and missing some aspect of myself, and that there are no strangers...For the stranger is not foreign, she is random, not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known--although unacknowledged--selves that summons a ripple of alarm.

I see this within Carrie's work. Her loved ones are strangers to us, unknowable. However, we can project our own ideals and aspects of ourselves onto these images, claiming ownership over the experience of looking. It is as though photographing empty space is the same as looking at the original photograph with her grandparents in it—those memories are still etched in her mind, and she enables them to find a way into ours as well. It is in considering these strangers and incorporating their images into our own minds, reforming our own memories that causes the "ripple of alarm" that Morrison writes about. One experiences a resurgence of feelings that had been pushed aside or nearly forgotten.

Comings and Goings, a multifaceted project by Spring 2007 Hot Shot Casey Orr, takes many different forms. First, it is a project comprised of three distinct groups of images: birds, migrant women, and prison inmates and their families. Second, it is an exhibition that was on view on the walls, both inside and outside, of Her Majesty's Prison in Leeds in 2009. Third, it is a forthcoming book to be published this summer in collaboration with Leeds City Museums, where Orr is currently the artist-in-residence.

Untitled by Casey Orr

In whichever context you view Comings and Goings, Orr makes a point about beings trapped in alien environments and how communication helps bridge barriers and connect one to the community. Birds also serve an underlying linguistic theme; as Orr writes, "Birds are linked through semantics to the other series in the work. Women are birds, prisoners are known as jail birds, and people—like birds—migrate and nest."

The inmates Orr photographed at the Leeds' prison were allowed to sit with their families during a specially arranged visit for a studio portrait that allowed cuddling, intimacy and space away from their jail cells. Each prisoner subsequently received a print of the family photograph to be hung in their cells, and the images were displayed on the prison's public-facing walls. Martin Wainwright of The Guardian wrote of the project last year, stating:

The prisoners will not see the wall - taking them outside in handcuffs and under guard was reckoned demeaning and impractical - but they have a scaled-down version now brightening up the visiting room...These are already firming up family ties, and the exhibition, entitled Comings and Goings, makes a point about that, which everyone involved echoes. Armley's inmates and their families are part of the local community too.

The act of being documented with their families in and of itself reiterates that family is not limited by physical barriers, and the public exhibition offers the prisoners hope that they can be viewed as individuals who are part of a larger network.

To see more work by Casey, hop on over to her portfolio.

Tokyo #2 by Sean J. Sprague

Pacific Distance is Sean J. Sprague's 3 years-in-the-making photographic investigation into, "treating documentary and travel subject matter in a constructed visual sensibility and style," stemming from, "thoughts of how in the anticipation of viewing a new subject, an individual constructs a view of a place even before visiting." In the images submitted to HHS!, Sean shows us glimpses of this constructed documentary mode in South Korea, China and Japan.

While the style and tone of these images evokes editorial photography (and Sprague has had his fair share of editorial assignments), what is striking to me about these photos is that if there is any intent or agenda here, it's to show us in a non-hyped up manner commonplace and quiet moments in the lives of people who live in large cities on the other side of the world.

Sean writes in his statement that through this project he is also interested in the photographic depiction of "the Other," which can be and is a pretty loaded critical term. When I think about the more canonized treatments of "the Other" that have occurred from a Westerner's eyes looking at people living in Asian metropolises, the temptation to exoticize and/or eroticize cultural differences in image-making is one that is seldom resisted (think Nan Goldin's Tokyo Love, or the early work of William Klein). What is rare and interesting in what Sean has submitted is that we are looking at singularly quiet and banal moments in the lives of these city dwellers: a man checking his cell phone in the relative calm of an underground garage and a businessman on his lunch break squinting his eyes against a too-bright sun as he attempts a little light reading.

Tokyo #1 by Sean J. Sprague

I once had a photographer instructor lamenting that there was no one out there that was making an artistic project of American life as it really is lived and experienced in all its glorious mundanity today. Who is documenting our mega malls, our food courts, our crippling consumer-driven contemporary economic reality? Since that time we have answers in images from great artists like Brian Ulrich and Zoe Strauss. Perhaps if he kept at it, Sean Sprague could do something similar by way of subverting our Westernized expectations of what kinds of images can be made of people living in places like Busan, Beijing and Tokyo.

For a more complete look at Sean's work, take a look at his portfolio on his website.