The work of today's contender, Elizabeth Clark Libert, is intimate, complex and unsettling. One could argue that the subject that Libert chose for this photographic study would, if done as well and as thoughtfully, elicit this range of emotions from any viewer. This subject is Libert herself, her family, and their dynamic with one another within a culture that scrutinizes much of what her camera catches on display: privilege, wealth, status, and the staples and trappings of such. To riff off of Tolstoy, everyone's family is materialistic and miserly both in their own ways.

Jeff, the Libert-y, 2010 by Elizabeth Clark Libert

My feelings and attitudes about class and societal divisions are probably as rife with internal conflict as anyone else: while there are always those who have more than I do, my mind reasons as it covets, and realizes there are always scores upon scores more with so much less. And that knowledge does not usually comfort, but rather produces a kind of complicit and composed guilt. What Libert shows us in her series Libert & Company is that it is possible to have much, much much more than most people can reasonably expect or imagine having, and then to remain acutely conscious of the economic disparity between yourself and the world-at-large while wanting to make something from it that attempts to understand status from the inside-out.

Liz and Mardee, 2010 Palm Beach by Elizabeth Clark Libert

Private yachts, jets, expensive works of art, seemingly endlessly flowing champagne, furs and other evident accessories of the pedigreed and powerful are laid bare for the viewer to see in Libert's photographs, but their tone and manner of, well, just thereness, belies that these things are not there to gawk at, or to throw in face of the collective economic dis-ease that we've been experiencing as a culture for the past two years. These things just are. These habits and the possessions of this family are just what passes for normal; they are not there to apologize.

That said, arriving at this through the making of the family biography isn't without its caveats. In her artist's statement Libert writes:

I've been hesitant to share photographs that evidence the wealthy background that I grew up in, especially given the current state of the economy, fearful that the images of myself and loved ones would be sure to elicit negative reactions from viewers. The study explores the conflicted, often painful for me, emotions of guilt, pride, love, hate, disgust, envy, lust, loathing and entitlement. "Libert & Company" is both a family and self-portrait that opens and reveals these conflicted feelings. It is a purposeful journey for me at a stage in my life where I am pushing to understand my layered feelings and which my art helps to uncover and expose.

My sense of these photographs is that while the art of the self-portrait itself is an elusive, often self-slapping undertaking, trying to understand the self through the filter of the familial whole, thus creating a metaphorical "family portrait" in the most cannily psychoanalytical sense, is a much more dense and complicated undertaking. I find myself riveted in the images from this series that are available to view in its entirety on Libert's website, and I'm not alone: Libert & Company has been lauded by no less than Photo District News and the most recent New York Photo Festival in early May.

In addition to the images from this body of work shown on Libert's website, a self-published Blurb book of the series is also available.

Le Brouillard, 2009 by Alexander Shahmiri

I think for many artists, creating a dialogue about the individual's purpose or function in society is an important aspect to why his or her art exists. Art is created to reveal something to the artist, an individual, but also to be viewed by many and express a viewpoint, inspiration or a particular narrative that exists in the world. This can manifest in many forms: thought provoking performance, an intensely moving painting, or in the case of today's contender, Alexander Shahmiri, as beautifully soft and grey portraits that capture the energy, freedom and sadness of youth.

Alexander writes about his work:

I believe in capturing not just the characteristics of an individual, but also capturing the atmosphere around them. There is so much beauty in the earth that there is no reason to make the person the main focus. I also believe in anonymity within my photos, because I want people to be able to imagine themselves in the photo. By concealing a face in the photo the person can begin to imagine themselves in the atmosphere. I want to create images that will last, and make people think ever so slightly as to why the photo was taken the way it was, and to remind people of how lucky we are to be here.

Aside from being subtle, and full of a slow but persistent energy, Alexander's work simply moved me. I've always felt that creating a sense of anonymity in portraits makes the work more accessible. It creates a forum for the viewer to project and engage while absorbing the information and making the experience their own. Here, the fading light and dense fog makes me yearn for what lies beyond the scene at-hand, as well as making me incredibly self-aware of taking the time to observe my environment.

Untitled, 2009 by Alexander Shahmiri

Shahmiri's images allow people to impart themselves into the shoes of the people photographed and the emotions of wanderlust and exploration that run through the portraits. Based on the experience that viewing these provoked in me, I'd say they have exact effect that Alexander is striving for: to remind people of how lucky we are to be here.

You can view more of Alexander's work on his website

2431 by Todd Hido

A few weeks ago, we at JBP had the distinct pleasure of releasing a luscious new edition on 20x200 by photographer Todd Hido: #4124 from the series House Hunting. If you're any kind of photography aficionado, there's a very good chance you knew of Todd's work far before this edition release, which is part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, Guggenheim, SF MoMA and LACMA. Todd has also published four stunning and hard-to-come-by books: House Hunting, Outskirts, Roaming and Between the Two, with a fifth book, A Road Divided, forthcoming this year from Nazraeli Press. All of this—and of course working with Todd and his images themselves—made us ineffably excited to share this photograph with all of our collectors.

As Jen wrote about Todd and his photographs:

He was one of the first people who showed me the path of "art for everyone." In part, because my first experience with his work was meeting him at a book signing. The signed copy of Roaming that I got that day was my first experience of an "art book" that had deep resonance for me. It is personal and universal and democratic all at once. But it was the interaction with him at the gallery that opened the door for me--the universality of the experience and emotion that the work depicted, combined with the democracy of having access to such an evolved body of art work because it was presented in the form of a book.

Like a lot of great artists, like, say, Raymond Carver, Todd's making something beautiful, deep and moving out of the mundane--taking our every day and creating moments that feel so nostalgic and familiar, but are uniquely his own.

#4124 from the series House Hunting by Todd Hido

So, it is with great pleasure that I announce the addition of Todd to our already-outstanding panel, lending his astute eye as both artist and educator to reviewing the work submitted by all of you contenders. Join us in welcoming him, and take some time this long weekend to send us your best work!

South Powerhouse, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 2010 by Joshua Dudley Greer

A few weeks ago we posted "A Word About the Judging Process" by HHS! Panelist Darius Himes. Having reviewed many entries to the competition over several years, he gave this piece of advice about what he looks for in a successful entry, "Give me 5 strong paragraphs all from the same story and I will start to get a sense of your craft and coherent artistic vision." Granted, this is the opinion of just one of our diverse group of panelists, but Darius' words have been jumbling around in my head since I read them.

Sometimes when I see a series of photos, I'm left grasping for more information; some writing to elucidate or underpin the work. But before I had even read the attached historical background, I feel like I knew the story behind Point Pleasant, a series by contender Joshua Dudley Greer.

I've never been to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, but looking at these photos, how could you not grasp the dried-up and deep rooted contamination? The images wordlessly tell me the story of this place.

Dead Deer, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 2010, by Joshua Dudley Greer

About the history of Point Pleasant, Joshua writes:

The West Virginia Ordnance Works (WVOW) was an explosives manufacturing facility constructed during World War II just outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Occupying 8,000 acres along the Ohio River, the WVOW was built specifically for the production and storage of trinitrotoluene (TNT). The site was officially declared surplus and closed in 1945, when much of the land was deeded to the state of West Virginia for the creation of the McClintic State Wildlife Management Area. In the early 1980's, EPA and state investigations revealed that the groundwater, soil and surface water of this area were heavily contaminated with TNT, trinitrobenzene, dinitrotoluene, arsenic, lead, beryllium and asbestos. The site was placed on the EPA's National Priority List in 1983 and extensive cleanup efforts began in 1991. While a large portion of the original facility has been remediated, many of the toxic and explosive contaminants were simply buried on site. The landscape that remains is a haunting place of beauty, mystery and violence.

Beyond the history, there are stories that I can draw from this landscape. One is a kind of ominous prediction: nothing can live here and maybe nothing ever will again. Gnarled tree branches reclaim a storage bunker. The ruins of a building are juxtaposed with the carcass of a deer. The elements of nature that have managed to survive are like zombies.

TNT Storage Igloo N7-E, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, 2010 by Joshua Dudley Greer

My favorite progression in the series is a Becher-esque documentation of the "igloos" which were once used to store TNT and are now being subsumed by the landscape. On Joshua's website, you can click through bunkers photographed at the same angle and scale to witness different states of regress. Eventually the bunkers will become indistinguishable from the surrounding trees, but the regrown landscape is not lush, it's foreboding.

It's the photographs, not the text that give me me this feeling. But that was just one reason that I was reminded of what Darius wrote. Another is that, though Joshua's entry consisted of just images from Point Pleasant, I found many interesting yet unrelated (or only semi-related) bodies of work on Joshua's website. To create such a tight edit of a large series and to pick just one body of work out of many is no small feat. You can visit Joshua's website to view the Point Pleasant series in full and explore Joshua's other work.

Caroline J. Hancox allows herself a wide variety of tools in order to hit exactly the right note of dream-like, chroma-intense ephemerality that characterizes this body of work. Sometimes shooting with a Holga (which renders a soft vignette-effect on the frame's edges and an overall lack of crispness), sometimes with a Polaroid (which yields those incomparably rich palettes) and still sometimes with a high-end medium-format camera (which gives you big, fat and detailed negatives to work with), I have an image in my mind of Hancox choosing her tools for each photoshoot with the same intuition that a seasoned cook would employ in choosing the right knife or a particular cooking vessel in the kitchen.

Untitled, by Caroline Hancox

Her methodology as well as her tools inherently invite chance elements into her composition and frame (after all, a Holga acts an awful lot like a a pinhole camera), and Hancock enjoys a high degree of success with her frequent interchanges of film type or camera body, tilt and angle-of-view. In her artist's statement she speaks about her choice of cameras and points-of-view as a means to evoke a "painterly, dreamy effect that renders the people like little toys" in an effort to get at the magical qualities that she deeply feels inhabits the French Alps.

Untitled, by Caroline Hancox

When an artist is able to bend her tools in such a way that she is able to invoke other mediums (here I concur with Hancox that her images are definitely painterly), or when she is able to subvert the given medium's strengths by paying attention to their opposites (as she does with her use of selective blurring and tilt-shift), that artist has assembled the right mix of ingredients to create something that can have me lingering for a long moment transfixed in its presence.

You can view Caroline's entire body of this work at her website, as well as read about other projects she's working on at her blog.

Steps by Thomas Prior

Welcome back to the HHS! Week in Review, a handy roundup all the best photo links from the past week.

+ This paset week we released 20x200 editions of two photographs by Thomas Prior, whose work we first discovered when he entered last year's HHS! competition. These editions are a new favorite around our office.

+ Oh noooo...the C-prints are fading!! Collectors of photographs printed in the 1990's—such as those by Andreas Gursky—are advised to keep their unstable prints out of strong light or risk erasure. Considering that a Gursky print sold for $3.3 million at Sotheby's in 2007, collectors will definitely want to heed this advice.

+ We just posted an exhaustive review of upcoming photo deadlines including: Daylight/CDS competition, Present Tense at PCNW, Aperture Portfolio Prize, Blurb's Photo Book Now, and 1000 Words' workshop in Morocco. There is literally something for everyone, so go read up and don't miss out.

+ A fond farewell to Nymphoto, one of our favorite photo blogs, who announced what may be a permanent hiatus on Friday. We've spent many hours perusing the sidebar of conversations. You will be missed!

+ Last week, we got a mention from @ElizaGregory who tweeted "@heyhotshot Your ratio of time spent on application to potential benefit to applicant is awesome." We're flattered! But it's true, we're really honored by each entry to HHS! and we love spending time reviewing the work. Have you seen the write-ups of our latest contenders? Stacia Prosser, Jo Ann Walters, Sheri Manson, Janet Taylor, Kevin C. Moore

+ It's Nina Berman's turn at the Whitney on May 28th! You're invited to My Turn, "a unique night of dialogue and interaction" that promises to bring the war home.

+ After a brief blip, Joe's NYC photoblog (by Joseph Holmes, for the unacquainted) is back.

+ Gregory Krum's solo show ...Practice... recently opened at Jen Bekman Gallery and we've got install shots up on the blog. Don't miss this great review on the NYT's T Magazine Blog. The show remains on view till Saturday, June 27th.

+ Rachel Sussman speaks about The Oldest Living Things in the World at GEL 2010.

+ Raul Gutierrez linked to this great edit of photos of Saturn on The Big Picture.

+ Kevin Cherry's Mull it Over interviews contender Greg E. Jones

+ Eirik Johnson's show Sawdust Mountain at the Aperture Gallery in NY is an ArtForum critic's pick. Aperture has also made a podcast of Eirik discussing the series available online, which you can listen to right here.

See anything we missed? Let us know on Facebook or on Twitter @heyhotshot.

40.800913,-76.343147, 2009 by Stacia Prosser

Today's contender, Stacia Prosser, wrote poignantly about the history of a Pennsylvania town where she photographed her most recent body of work:

In 1962, a no-longer used underground mine shaft caught fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, a city of about 1,100 residents that was once booming with coal industry. In May of that year, a group of sanitation workers were burning trash at a garbage heap a short distance from the town and enkindled an open coal seam beneath the debris. For twenty years, firefighters exhausted their efforts in controlling the fire, but the United States government decided that the most cost-effective plan was to evacuate the residents. Now, solely four houses remain where a city once was; pieces of concrete housing foundations and front steps that lead to nowhere are the only reminders that anything else was ever there. These quiet, peaceful landscapes are portraits of a remarkable town stripped of its livelihood and left to burn. They are portraits of human disappearance: empty streets are freckled with driveways that lead only to trees where houses once stood. They are photographs of the lonely landscape's journey to recovery after its inhabitants unintentionally destroyed it and left it behind. They are photographs are taken by one who is mourning with the landscape.

What is initially striking to me about Stacia's work is the physical presentation of the actual images. Her series, portraying a broken landscape burnt away, presents itself through photographs that have also been partially destroyed with rough, unfinished edges. It's as if the same fire that torched the landscape also found its way to the negatives to eat away all traces of the once vibrant community. Stacia's work also reveals a powerful narrative within each image, slowly unfolding a single moment of tragedy in history by capturing elements of the story left behind in the environment.

40.801311,-76.342374, 2009 by Stacia Prosser

Poignant stories can be written into the landscape, and several recent industrial accidents that have had a profound impact on the environment have been well-documented by photographers. Since the explosion of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20th, photojournalists have been capturing the ominously spreading slick, that has now reached the Louisiana shore. Though the explosion itself is a great tragedy, perhaps the greater tragedy is in the prolonged unknown consequences of the spewing oil; it's impact on jobs, the fishing industry, marine life and water quality. In the images, one sees elements of a distressing beauty—multicolor streaks of oil swirl through ocean waters, birds flocking over slicks, the sun glistening over shiny water. One can only gape, out of both awe and fear, of the transformation taking place before our eyes and wonder what this landscape's road to recovery will be.

So it's like this: You've got this great body of images that you've already submitted to this year's competition of Hey, Hot Shot! The summer is stretching wide and open before you, and you're looking forward to creating more work, organizing and refining existing work, and seeing how and in what ways you can stretch your skills, powers of observation, craft and comfort zones. Maybe you are interested in creating or finishing up a book, or you are open to the possibility of committing to a workshop this summer in a far-off place and at the feet of a roundly recognized photographic master. Or you simply want as many people of influence and reach to see the images and concepts that you've been so conscientiously and laboriously putting together.

We're here to help you out! Below is a list of a full range of possibilities for getting your work out there, seen, consolidated or newly made. Jeffrey Teuton, Associate Director of Jen Bekman Gallery also offered up some tips last week on Portfolio Review Dos and Don'ts, many of which are also helpful when thinking about how to present a competition submission.

We recently wrote about this inaugural international competition that is a joint venture between Daylight Magazine and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, but since then the competition deadline has been extended through June 1st (8pm, EST), so we're mentioning it again on the off-chance that you haven't submitted your work to this truly stellar roster of jurors:

Vince Aletti, writer/critic, the New Yorker magazine;
Darius Himes, editor/curator, Radius Books (who also happens to be on the HHS! panel)
Julie Saul, gallery owner/director, Julie Saul Gallery;
Alec Soth, photographer;
Hank Willis Thomas, photographer;
Jamie Wellford, international photo editor, Newsweek;
Taj Forer (20x200 artist) and Michael Itkoff, editors, Daylight Magazine
Alexa Dilworth, publishing director, CDS
Courtney Reid-Eaton, exhibitions director, CDS

This is the first year of the competition, and there are two award categories: a Project Prize and a Work-In-Process Prize. Prizes include exhibition exposure, print and online exposure, and every entrant will receive the time and consideration of the above esteemed panel of jurors (which is no small thing in and of itself). Entries are received online, and you can read the full guidelines or begin the submission process here.

Present Tense: 15th Annual Photography Competition Exhibition, presented by the Gallery Photographic Center Northwest.

A prestigious annual juried show in the Pacific Northwest (our own Ms. Jen Bekman was last year's juror), this competition revolves around a single theme and a single juror. This year's topic concerns the changing state of the medium of photography today.

The exhibition title, Present Tense, refers to state of the medium today. In recent times, we have heard intense debate about the direction of photography: questions about the future of the medium, fears surrounding the decrease in magazine production and funding for content, the threat of potential extinction of the physical book, cynical commentaries that originality is a thing of the past...now is the time for photographers to take stock of their work and their vision, to take risks, rather than play it safe. We are calling out to you to inspire the medium! Show us your perspective and vision of these changing times.

This year's juror and curator is Denise Wolff, a book editor for Aperture. Entries are to be received on CD only, the fee is $75 and the deadline is June 12, 2010. Winners will receive cash prizes, Blurb gift certificates and participation in an August show at PCNW curated by Denise Wolff. Full details and submission guidelines here.

Speaking of our friends at Aperture, the annual Aperture Portfolio Prize is underway. This competition sees work of stellar quality from all over the world, and the prizes and efforts on behalf of Aperture are generous and far-reaching. Immediate awards are cash and exposure on Aperture's website for an entire year. Beyond the portfolio prize, judges will consider submissions for any and all Aperture publications and exhibitions. They are specifically looking for fresh work that has not been widely seen in major exhibition or publication venues and their ultimate mission is to identify trendsetting work that deserves to be seen by a wider audience. Submitted work must have been completed in the past five years. Entrants must be current subscribers to Aperture magazine (there is an option to subscribe along with the entry process) and the entry fee is $25. Submission are received online only and the deadline is July 14, 2010. Full guidelines and submission details can be reviewed here.

(One of last year's runners-ups for the Aperture Portfolio Prize was also a 2009 Hot Shot, Alejandro Cartagena.)

Passionate about books? We've got something for you, too. Blurb, a print-on-demand publication service, is holding its annual Photography Book Now competition. There are three entry categories: Fine Art, Portfolio and Editorial. You can submit work electronically or via a hard copy book for a submission fee of $35; entrants are allowed to submit to more than one category (each submission requires a separate fee).

Awards include a Grand Prize of $25,000, camera and equipment packages, expenses paid participation in portfolio reviews, expenses paid for photographic workshops, as well as exposure on the Blurb website. The deadline for receipt of submissions is July 15, 2010. This year's juror is none other than co-founder and editor of Radius Books and friend to JBP, Darius Himes. Read more and submit your entries at the Blurb Photography Book Now competition website.

Last year, Hot Shot Kurt Tong took the Editorial Prize of the competition for his series People's Park. A second series by Kurt, Farewell in Labrador, also received an Honorable Mention in the same category. Both books are available to purchase on Blurb.

If you're not quite ready to submit a book-length collection of work, participating in a workshop with a gifted photographer and teacher can be a life-altering experience for many artists that can grow and mature a project. Small class-sizes, hyper-focus on creating and critiquing work, and the energy of being in a foreign surrounding while being mentored by a master of their craft makes for the kind of experience that really defies most systems of measurement. The online magazine 1000 Words is holding a workshop in Fez, Morocco this fall with Magnum photographer Antoine D'Agata. The workshop will be held from October 25th-October 31st, 2010.

1000 Words, writes:

We are looking for a diverse range of participants who understand the work of Antoine d'Agata and feel that their own work will benefit from his guidance. Each participant will be asked to examine the ultimate goal of his approach, to play an active part in his own images and to work on the texture of reality. Since images, like words, only take on meaning when brought together, the workshop will focus on finding the most relevant form for each individual stance. Working with Antoine d'Agata, participants must be ready to photograph intensively throughout the workshop and to extend the limits of their approach. They will have to confront their obsessions and contradictions as they shape a series of images conveying in real or fictional terms their private relationship with the world.

Submissions are accepted electronically only; there is no entry fee for submitting. The deadline for submissions is June 14, 2010. Twelve workshop participants will be selected from all the submissions, and the successful candidates will be notified by the end of June. Find more information on the workshop and costs at 1000 Words.

One other venue for those looking to choose photographic workshops and mentoring experiences are the TPW workshops. Centered mostly in Tuscany, but also working in several other international locations (remaining workshops for this year include India and the Mississippi Delta), these workshops gather together some great names and teachers for a week-long intensive study. 2010 workshop instructors include Ed Kashi, David Alan Harvey and J.H. Engström. For a full list of workshops, dates and prices, check out the TPW 2010 calendar.

Lastly, you have finished your submission to this year's round of HHS!, have you not? We are accepting submissions through August 22nd, 2010 to win some fabulous prizes including a $5,000 honorarium and a solo show at Jen Bekman Gallery. All contenders are also automatically considered for editions on 20x200—in fact, just last week we featured two editions by Thomas Prior, who we first discovered through his HHS! entry. We're also featuring contenders here on the blog throughout the entry period, and offering some fantastic Curator's Choice prizes each month during the competition. Sound good? Well, what are you waiting for?! Apply here!

Jo Ann Walters exemplifies the kind of hard-working artist whose work is a pleasure in which to become absorbed. For most of the past decade, Walters has been creating lyrically haunting portraits of a place and a population that, through the filter of her own personal history and connection to it, reflects back something that is echoed in countless other American cities today. Once a prosperous industrial town, Alton, Illinois has been gradually diminishing because of the changing world and the machinations of what passes for "new industry" today. In front of Walter's lens, every face and facade has a history, a story, has had a life and, as sometimes captured in her still-frame, is sometimes shown in the midst of a death.

Refinery, Granite City, Illinois from the series Dog Town by Jo Ann Walters

Mullen's Savage Yard, Alton, Illinois from the series Dog Town by Jo Ann Walters

Judging from the photographs submitted here and from her previous entries to HHS!, Walters conducts most of her photographic inquiries in the dead of winter, when the light offers up a kind of diffuse emptiness, creating a kind of primer on the canvas for which she will paint stark and poignant images of hard-fought subsistence.

Jo Ann Walter's writing also has the capacity to be as fluid and evocative as the photographs she asks us to consider. From her artist's statement:

Growing up in the second half of the twentieth century, my conceptualizations of industrial labor, like many of the girls and women I knew, were vague and ill defined. The factories were merely places along the horizon of the river, dull facades with vermiculite patterns and clusters of indistinct stars, or clouds and haze, gray with a nebular glow. Nearly everyone I knew had fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, friends and lovers who labored in these local factories, working night shifts, calculating the material and emotional expense of holiday pay and overtime, and who often drank hard and steady. These pictures taken in the dead of winter are part of a larger work. Together they comprise a quiet and stark meditation on the mineral wastes and dregs of an often unsparing, indifferent economy, as well as, an oblique meditation on men at work in a different time and place.

At other times and other places, Walters has also referred to this project as an elegy and a mourning + meditation as a testament to her father and the teems of ghostly others that lived and worked in such surroundings.

Jo Ann Walter's work is included in many collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, and the Biblioteque Nationale. A former Guggenheim fellow, she has been on the faculty at Yale, the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently the Head of the Photography Board of Study at Purchase College, The State University of New York.

Pool, 2008 by Sheri Manson

For the bulk of my childhood, I spent most summers at a beautiful summer camp in New Hampshire. (The lovely town of Wolfeboro, where the camp is located, was even once privy to a visit by Bill Murray as he filmed the classic summertime hit, What About Bob.) Over the course of the 14 years I've visited this tiny part of the world, it has, for the most part, stayed the same: the same shops line the town, the same buildings occupy the camp, and even the same exact benches outfit the dining hall. It is a second home to me, unchanging from visit to visit.

Seeing contender Sheri Manson's work reminds me of this home-away-from-home but in the way that makes my heart ache. I see laughter, joy and wild nights of Dirty Dancing in the interiors of the abandoned resort camps she photographs. The rooms are filled with the energy experienced by people with no real responsibility or care. Yet, at the same time I experience the loneliness and emptiness of memories that have long been left behind from a place once so vibrant. Sheri writes about her series:

In the years preceding WW2, many families found their summer time escape just North of New York City. With summers ablaze, and no AC in sight, refuge was found in summer camps and their accompanying lakes. Come winter, these places turned into ski resorts and catered to these same families. However, with the invention of AC and plane travel less expensive, these places soon received few visitors. As a result, these homes away from home have been left vacant and abandoned for years if not decades. The imagery resulting from this project is not only a document of these places, but also a testament to the beauty that once was and an exploration of the beauty that still remains.

Given our current economy, and the phenomena of foreclosing houses, a number of photographers have taken to documenting the places where memories have been left behind. Youngna highlighted several of these photographers making work about abandoned and emptied spaces during the last season of competition, a subject that's both depressing, yet a harsh reality for many people in the world right now. Perhaps these photographers are nostalgic for the "good ol' days" when America was deceptively strong and carefree, and see their memories in the spaces left behind.

Orange Bedroom, 2008 by Sheri Manson

While Sheri's work aligns with the theme of capturing a place, beautiful in the imagination, the lighting and setting of the images seem more hopeful than the bleak atmosphere found in much of the other recession-themed photography I've viewed. The furniture and objects appear to be purposefully placed, not forgotten or lost but rather saved for another time or occasion, just waiting to be picked up. It is this tension between the deserted and invisible past energy that interests me the most about Sheri's work.

You can see more of Sheri's images at her website.

...Practice..., an exhibition of thirty-seven photographs by Gregory Krum, opened last Friday at Jen Bekman Gallery to much ooh-ing and ahh-ing. Hop on over to Flickr to take a look at the gorgeous install photos taken by Elizabeth Leitzell, and you'll see exactly why we're so excited to be exhibiting Greg's work.

Sarah Fones of The New York Times T-Magazine Style blog, The Moment, wrote about ...Practice... yesterday, observing:

Belief is twofold in this instance, with Krum both exploring the confines of his own (in the guise of photographer) and that of others (embodied in inanimate objects left behind). The tombstone portraits, for example, are literal markers of a failed endeavor. Five interior shots evocative of Dutch still-lifes, including a tiny bedside porcelain skull (a nod to the tradition of vanitas) and a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous, examine the extent to which all manmade objects more literally communicate meaning. An orange rind might imply a sense of inevitable decay, while Ettore Sottsass's Memphis-style lamp -- not to mention Krum's own corkboard of inspirations -- impart the boundless capacity for human innovation and endurance. Finally, a series of 24 small photographs of devotional, sculpturelike offerings convey the idea of repetition and quotidian ritual, or as Krum puts it, "the daily practice." Just as the spiritually inclined are compelled to participate in these rituals, so the artist is consumed by the desire to create.

The full article and slideshow are available here.

The exhibition remains on view through Saturday, June 27th, and we invite you to swing down to 6 Spring Street to have a look, and talk to us about Greg's work.

Any urbanite who walks down most city's major thoroughfares are familiar with seeing glowing billboards with ads for Gucci bags at their bus stops, or parking lots aglow with signage for new cosmetics, fast food, storage space and movies. But, to how many of these signs do we really pay heed, to how many of these companies do we become customers, and how much of this omnipresent advertising is really worth the cost of putting up these media-driven images in the first place?

Rainsford Road, 2010 by Janet C Taylor

In an article several years ago in the New York Times, Glenn Collins reported that Times Square would be getting its first solar-powered billboard. Coming in at 35,000 lbs, the sign would be fitted with 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels, and was projected to save $12,000 - $15,000 a month in electricity bills. Imagine the savings if all the LEDs that comprise the hundreds of thousands of billboards around the world were to follow suit.

Contender Janet Taylor, who spent two decades working in computer graphics, interactive media, human computer interfaces, typography and game design, thinks a lot about words, images and signs. She lives and works in Toronto, and has embarked on the series Significant Presence to address "the ubiquity of media images in the urban environment." She photographs at night, and in black and white, which serves as one means of preventing the saturated colors of ads from reaching us. She also makes long exposures, which effectively strips the lighted signs of any identifiable words or images, making them, as Janet writes, "meaningless and yet more apparent."

Shelter, 2010 by Janet C Taylor

She photographs both city-center and on quieter, residential roads—places where we so often see advertorial images that we fail to process their existence until we're made aware of their absence. Taylor highlights what this kind of void might look like, and in doing-so, points out how much visual and physical real estate we forfeit to commodities.

To see more work from Significant Presence, head over to Janet's website.

Howard and Kevin, March, 2009 by Kevin C. Moore

In recent years, artificial insemination—once something out of the realm of science fiction—has become an increasingly common practice. By now, a generation of so called "test tube babies" have matured into self-aware adults, and among this generation are artists exploring their identity. Contender Kevin C. Moore weaves together many different kinds of photography: scanned documents, studio portraits, images from Google and Facebook, old family photos, and Photoshop manipulation, to tell the story of the search for his own.

Kevin writes,

Since the age of seven, I have known that I only share genes with my mother, not with my father. The other half of my lineage has since been represented by a sperm donor code and a certain amount of secrecy...Following a photographic study of my immediate family, I discovered a half sister. We corresponded and together discovered the identity of our donor.

Kevin's entry represents five different approaches to the subject of his identity, but the projects are best seen in full series, or in the case of Blue Eyes Run in the Family, in book form. This is because every image in his entry has a story behind it. The diptych above, for example, shows a pixelated portrait of Kevin's biological father (left) and Kevin (right). Kevin obtained access to anonymous records about his biological father and then used a high school yearbook and signature to find his name. A search on Google Images revealed a tiny portrait of the man who he discovered is his biological father. Kevin then photographed himself in the same exact style and paired the two images. The image, Howard and Kevin, speaks about Kevin's longing to know his father, the disconnect between the two, and the technologies that have allowed them to exist apart and later find each other.

Donation, November 26, 2009 by Kevin C. Moore

Kevin has also documented his process of becoming a sperm donor himself. In some ways, his identity—and the work he built around it—has come full circle.

The decision to become a sperm donor led Kevin to create other series, such as She Has Her Father's Eyes. In these images, Kevin takes photographs of "unknown" girls and Photoshops his own eyes onto them. "In as little as 18 years from now I could be contacted by a child created from my donated sperm. Perhaps it will be a girl, my first daughter," he writes. These images in particular evoked a strong reaction for me and brought to mind the the legal and ethical gray-area of relationships between donors, parents, and children. While Kevin's work is highly personal, the emotions that it stirs and issues it brings up are increasingly universal.

You can view more work, including the full series mentioned above, at Kevin's website.

Untitled #2, March, 2009 by Kevin C. Moore

New Work #43, 2010 by contender Jordan Tate

Apply by Thursday, May 20th, To Win 2nd Curator's Choice Award from Chronicle Books
We're now two months into Hey, Hot Shot! and have been thrilled to see fantastic submissions coming in from far and wide. The deadline for our second Curator's Choice Award is this Thursday, May 20th, 2010; all photographers who enter by this date are automatically considered to win a selection of five photography titles hand-picked for HHS! by Nion McEvoy. Nion, our second guest curator, is the chairman and CEO of Chronicle (and also a HHS! panelist), and will review all entries to date and select one contender to receive the award. The selected photographer will also be featured on the blog and in our next newsletter. After this deadline, the entry fee for the competition will increase to $70, so make sure to apply by Thursday!

Last month, Darius Himes selected Phil Underdown for the first Curator's Choice Award. Check out the announcement to see all five images from Phil's entry, Darius' statement about the work, and some great advice for photographers considering entering the competition. Dalton Rooney also posted a thoughtful entry about Phil's work on his blog that is not to be missed.

Left to Right: Michael Ten Pas, Carlo Gianferro, Jordan Tate, Miti Ruangkritya, David Axelbank

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

+ Gregory Krum's solo show, ...Practice..., opened on Friday at Jen Bekman Gallery. If we can say so ourselves: it's pretty stunning, so if you're in the neighborhood, do stop by!
+ We were so pleased to release an edition by Todd Hido on 20x200 last week. There are still a few editions in the larger sizes left if you hurry over to the site. If you're bummed you missed out on the smaller prints, make sure you're signed up for the 20x200 newsletter so you get first dibs next time.
+ A few JBP'ers were out on the LES on Thursday to check out new work by Penelope Umbrico, whose show As Is is now on view at LMAKprojects.
+ Birthe Piontek, Scott Eiden and Cara Phillips are featured in The Portrait as Allegory and Graphic Intersections, a joint show at Umbrage Gallery in Brooklyn on view through June 26th.
+ The annual Review Santa Fe at CENTER starts in just a few weeks on June 3rd! The Portfolio Viewing on Friday, June 4th is free and open to the public, so if you happen to be in town, stop by to see some great work.
+ The deadline to apply to the Daylight/CDS Photo Award has been extended to June 1st.
+ Jason Lazarus wants to archive your photos that are too hard to keep.
+ Landon Nordeman and Andrew Zuckerman have been selected for publication in American Photography 26. The slideshow is sorted alphabetically by last name, so make sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom. There's lots of great work and it's definitely worth a few minutes of your day!
+ Clicking around on Dalton Rooney's site we stumbled upon Photo Reads, a Tumblr he uses to bookmark long form articles about photography. Consider it Instapapered.

*We send our Week in Review to your inbox every two weeks. Want to get it by email? Sign up here.

The ability to combine high concept with "low" materials in art is something that when done well, always turns my head. In the same sense that one's parents or grandparents knew not to waste food or clothing, I hate wasting good ideas on over-determined art materials or wasting good materials on poorly articulated ideas. The ideal combination for me is always some measure of succinct economy: an concept, notion or world-view expressed perfectly through humble or simple means.

Untitled by Jefferey Kenney

Jeffrey Kenney likes to mix the high-and-low, and delights in confusing his and your eye with what you're seeing with what seeing it evokes. Sort of like Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit:

Do you see a duck or a rabbit or some gestalt of both? Using "unconsidered" materials of "everyday consumption" Kenney cobbles together a world through his images that visually refer to something much larger and grander than the tools from which they were derived. From Kenney's artist statement:

I look for links between the materials of everyday consumption and that of architectural, natural, supernatural, and psychological phenomena. Often the photographs that I make are depictions of places or phenomena I have not experienced directly but understand and believe to exist through their mediated representation. Using the ephemera of my everyday experience I investigate my own "worldview", the limits of my experiential knowledge, and the fantasies produced by daily absorption in material culture.

It's possible that the first images mankind encountered on a daily basis was the sky above his head. The sky's changing array of sun, moon, and stars governed the patterns of daily life. This view informed the aesthetic of his created objects, daydreams, and customs and inversely these materials of human existence were projected back onto the understanding of the heavens. My work in a way works backward through the process, cultural, functional, and disregarded objects in our periphery to question the images we hold as central to the physical and metaphysical nature of the world.

Edge of the World by Jeffrey Kenney

Guessing at what cheaply and readily available ingredients make up the representations in Kenney's images shouldn't be a point of focus, but it's certainly fun. Part of the pleasure in this kind of art-making is very much like sitting in a grassy field and cloud-gazing: figuring out how this-becomes-that. Garbage bags beget solar systems, and stretched cotton and wet baking soda become an Antarctic landscape. I'd be interested in seeing how much mileage Kenney can get out of this kind of re-imagining, and how many different worlds and types of worlds he can make me think of when I look at his images.

Check out his in-progress series on his website.

Lozenge no. 56, 2010 by David Axelbank

Landscapes, or the reinterpretation of the genre of Landscape, has been something that my aesthetic palate has begun to shift on in recent years, gathering up increasingly in an appealing force for my attention and consideration. Initially coming from a documentary background, I used to hold fast to the belief that a photograph was interesting if it had interesting people in it. Now, something has turned and I find myself more drawn to images where there is no one present, or at the most perhaps, what is present is evidence of someone once having been there.

London-born photographer David Axelbank has been quietly wrestling with something similar. Spending the beginning of his career interning at Magnum and then moving on to editorial photography, the body of work he has chosen to submit to us here is a marked departure from the faces and personalities that began his professional life. The subject matter here is landscape, but ironically Axelbank was struck by the idea to make these images after seeing a retrospective of portrait painting at the Tate in 2006. The portraitist? Hans Holbein the Younger:

Allegory of Desire, oil on oak, ca. 1533-36 by Hans Holbein the Younger

What struck Axelbank about the lozenge format that Holbein made ample use of was its proclivity to involuntarily focus your attention on its interior by manipulating your sense of framing. Axelbank was interested in what effect applying this frame would have on the traditionally horizontally-oriented genre of landscape photography. From Axelbank's statement:

There is an undeniably physical effect created when a scene is viewed through a diamond or rhombus shaped frame, which causes a heightened awareness of the act of seeing. Traditional landscape imagery, whether painting or drawing, is anchored by a horizontal baseline to frame the composition. This does not truly reflect how we see - rather it is an art historical convention. Our vertical line of sight, foveal vision, intersects with the extremities of our peripheral vision, horizontal perception, to create the lozenge shape.

It is no coincidence that the most effective compositions include strong vertical and horizontal lines - trees for example, are a hugely important component of this series. Piet Mondrian explored a very similar concept with his distillation of the lines of nature in his theory of "neo-plasticism". He aimed to create a balance between the horizontal and the vertical in a series of abstract lozenge shaped canvases - which evolved from abstraction of natural forms, most notably trees.

There is something almost primordial about this new geometry. The lozenge contradicts dominant art historical practises, yet resonates as an essential compositional form.

What I find fascinating in looking at these images serially, is how my eye, which is traditionally guided up and around the photographic narrative in a still shot, is now somehow transformed to looking into and through the picture plane, as if instead of a flat two-dimensional space, I am looking instead through a window, or maybe more precisely a refined peep-hole:

Lozenge no. 57, 2010 by David Axelbank

It's as if narrative ceases to become about scanning a scene with eyes and mind, and rather more about tunneling or boring into it for detail and meaning. It's startling to me that simply changing the shape of the frame can re-orient my sense of sight so completely, but as you move through the series, you'll doubtless find yourself faced with the same heady and disorientating sensation.

David Axelbank's entire series of Lozenge landscapes can be viewed at his website and his professional site with other bodies and genres of work can be seen here.

Over the last several years, as globalization has continued to spread to the far reaches of the world, we've received some truly scary, fascinating, and beautiful international entries documenting these changes. Thailand-based contender Miti Ruangkritya has turned his lens on Siem Reap, one of Cambodia's fastest growing cities, to share views of impending homogeneity and commodification. Instead of documenting the rapid change at the center of the city, his series On the Edge looks at the outskirts of Siem Reap, revealing a place caught between two worlds.

Untitled, from On the Edge, 2009 by Miti Ruangkritya

Miti's work is quiet, focusing on the relation of individuals to the landscape. In the places he photographs, there is something surreal in the air. Though the scenes aren't necessarily happy, there is a kind of rundown magic on the edge of extinction. These moments between inhabitants and landscape are a last hurrah.

Untitled, from On the Edge, 2009 by Miti Ruangkritya

Miti's other work also deals with this kind of globalizing change in Thailand. Amulet World is a sweeping forty-two photography survey of the amulet industry—a fad at the intersection of Buddhism and consumerism. Much like the crucifixes that adorn necklaces and walls in the Western world, amulets have integrated themselves as essential aspects of piousness. The amulet trade is growing so fast that, at the time of Miti's writing, it was a $500 million business—just within Thailand. The images trace amulets from production to retail to usage both as spiritual tokens and manufactured commodities.

Spread from Amulet World by Miti Ruangkritya

Currently, Miti is working out of Thailand as a freelance photographer to support his personal projects. You can view more of his work at his website and his flickr.

Why do we look at what we look at, and what does the act of looking entail? Can we look without truly digesting what we're seeing? And if we are making an image of what we see, is it mediated by the object-making tool? These are questions contender Jordan Tate asks in the series New Work, a collection of images where "the photograph functions not as an object, but as a conceptually transparent representation of a reproduced reality rather than an object loaded with historical and functional contexts."

New Work #43, 2010 by Jordan Tate

The works, including images of other images, captures of computer and television screens, and visual puns of faces within other objects of faces, suggests that seeing (the act) and what we're looking are not simply the sum of 1 + 1 (the looker and what's being looked at), but poses a new question unto itself: what is the relationship between the two parties? In the act of looking at a medium in which other objects are projected—we are not seeing the object, but the screen or device which contains it, whether this is an iPhone, iPad or television. Our relationship to said objects is then a relationship to the representation—and in our age of ever-increasing technological dependency (and growth), Jordan might suggest that our "experience" with what we see is also an increasingly mediated one.

New Work #2, 2009 by Jordan Tate

Tate also manipulates the images, adding glare, flare, filters and pixelation, thus distressing the existing image into one that is conscientiously "digital" or man-made. In doing so, the work critiques and examines the idea of an image-itself and their intangible boundaries.

See more from the series New Work on Jordan's website.

So you've entered, or are preparing to enter, HHS! 2010. You've already gone through the laborious and yet self-edifying process of culling your work down to a discrete set of strong, stand-alone images, and you've penned a thoughtful and engaging artist's statement. Now that you've crossed that off your to-do list, why stop there? Get as much artistic mileage from this as possible! Who's to say that whatever you're thinking and making might not resonate on a wide-scale with a variety of different audiences?

This Saturday, May 15th, is the deadline for the inaugural Daylight Magazine/Center for Documentary Studies Photo Award. All of the entries are submitted electronically, so you've still got plenty of time to enter.

Daylight Magazine is the result of the work of the Daylight Community Arts Foundation, which works with established and early-career artists, scholars and journalists to showcase contemporary photography and to share stories from underrepresented communities.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke has long been a staple in the photography community, promoting collaborative and in-depth documentary work for decades. From the CDS website:

CDS promotes documentary work that cultivates progressive change by amplifying voices, advancing human dignity, engendering respect among individuals, breaking down barriers to understanding, and illuminating social injustices. CDS conducts its work for local, regional, national, and international audiences.

This is the first year of the international competition, and there are two award categories: A Project Prize and a Work-In-Process Prize. The roster of jurors are exactly the sort of people that you'd want to take a good look at your work:

Vince Aletti, writer/critic, the New Yorker magazine;
Darius Himes, editor/curator, Radius Books (who also happens to be on the HHS! panel)
Julie Saul, gallery owner/director, Julie Saul Gallery;
Alec Soth, photographer;
Hank Willis Thomas, photographer;
Jamie Wellford, international photo editor, Newsweek;
Taj Forer and Michael Itkoff, editors, Daylight Magazine
Alexa Dilworth, publishing director, CDS
Courtney Reid-Eaton, exhibitions director, CDS

PROJECT PRIZE
For an extended documentary project or fine art series. Edit photographs with care as the project photographs will be judged on the coherence of the work as a whole. The full panel of jurors will choose one First Prize Winner. Each Guest Juror will also select one photographer to receive a Juror's Pick Prize and write a short statement about why he or she choose the work.

The First Prize Winner will receive a solo exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies, a multimedia Daylight podcast, a feature in CDS's newsmagazine Document, presentation in Daylight and CDS online galleries, and $1,000 for exhibition-related expenses.

Juror's Pick Winners will be part of a group exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies and featured in Daylight and CDS online galleries. Ten Honorable Mentions will be named on Daylight and CDS websites.

To enter, submit: 20 images, a one-page artist's statement, and CV. $60
Deadline to enter: May 15, 2010, 8 P.M. (EST)

WORK-IN-PROCESS PRIZE
For a documentary or fine art essay/work-in-progress from a single body of images, the full panel of jurors will choose one First Prize Winner. Each Guest Juror will also select one photographer to receive a Juror's Pick Prize and write a short statement about why he or she choose the work.

The First Prize Winner will be featured in print in Daylight Magazine and CDS's news magazine Document, as well as in Daylight and CDS' online galleries and be part of a group exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Juror's Pick Winners will be part of a group exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies and also be in Daylight and CDS' online galleries.

To enter, submit: 5 images, a one-page artist's statement, and CV. $30.
Deadline to enter: May 15, 2010, 8 P.M. (EST)

Download the full submission guidelines here and start applying right here!

It's true: there are a jaw-dropping number of photography-related events going on in New York City during the next week. But, we must remind you of one on the forefront of our minds: Gregory Krum's debut solo exhibition, ...Practice..., opens up at Jen Bekman Gallery this Friday, May 14th, with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8 p.m. This show is especially near and dear to us since Greg first came our way through Hey, Hot Shot! and exhibited his work in the Summer 2007 showcase. At the time, he wrote this of his collection of images: "Photographs that explore territories or concepts of control, organization, and security, states of sensitive, deep affection, inference, isolation, complexity, importance, insecurity, vulnerability, bliss, abyss, jouissance--in direct relationship to comfort and rational things, dualism, and our tendency to understand."

With his new exhibition of thirty-seven photographs, Greg has expanded upon these emotions, states and relationships, tugging at the elements that make up our surroundings and how we come to believe in art and the world around us.

Sand No. 98, 2006/2010 by Gregory Krum

From the press release:

Titled after Gerhard Richter's book The Daily Practice of Painting, ...Practice... embraces Richter's convictions about art and art making. In a series of carefully grouped photographs, Krum explores the ways in which truth is derived simply by virtue of belief.

Photographs of tombstones, images of dust and sand, and a pair of enigmatic photos of flowers taken with the artist's Blackberry hang alongside one another. Together they depict the ruminations of investigations, both elemental and expansive, and the search for the tangible entities that define the beliefs through which we find meaning in life and art.

Five still-lifes, evocative of Dutch interiors, illustrate more literally how objects often become vessels of life's meaning. Finally, twenty-four small photographs - pinned in a grid to the wall by the artist - depict devotional offerings in varying states of decay. The repetition of these sculptural objects mimics the daily rituals that become symbols of belief. The artist's daily compulsion to create is rooted in the same faith that inspires the spiritual to practice these rituals.

Krum embraces a variety of photographic tools to document objects, environments and offerings that all bear meaning depending on who the beholder and the observer are. The display of the exhibition also pays heed to these varying media; the works engage a range of formality, including a number of works hung salon-style.

Untitled (Mantle), 2010 by Gregory Krum

In addition to the opening reception on Friday, Jeffrey Teuton will also be speaking about Krum's work on Sunday, at the tail end of a Lower East Side Gallery Walk from 2 to 5 p.m. JBP's Philae Knight will be guiding a group to seven stops, starting at Invisible-Exports and ending up at JBG. There are still a few spots available, so to join the walk and hear Jeffrey's talk, RSVP to info@jenbekman.com by Saturday, May 15th.

...Practice...
Thirty-seven photographs by Gregory Krum
Jen Bekman Gallery
6 Spring Street, New York, NY
Opening Reception: May 14th, 6 - 8 p.m.
On view through June 27, 2010

See you Friday, and hopefully Sunday too!

One of the most memorable and chilling critiques I ever witnessed was with a fellow graduate student showing a new body of work he was embarking on, photographing people living on society's margins in a local transient motel. He was dropping by the motel a couple times a week, focusing his new newly acquired Hassleblad in portrait attempts of the people who were inhabitants of the motel. Influenced by recent exposure to the work of Jim Goldberg, my colleague was trying to make work that was relevant and edgy, but his initial forays felt more like stark reportage and were severely lacking in the quality of empathy. After taking a few moments to review the images on the wall before him, our professor (who had spent the greater part of his career photographing disenfranchised populations) took a breath and said something I'll never forget. "I want you to go back to that motel and make the crudest, most exploitative image of this place and the people in it that you can imagine. Then I want you to take a good hard look at it and never make an image like it again."

I'm reminded of this incident because happily the photographs of Italian contender Carlo Gianferro could very easily descend into the lowest-common denominator of sensationalistic clap-trap photography, but rises above it instead revealing some of the most surprising and dignified images of Roma people that I have ever seen.

Gypsy Girl, from the series Roma/Gypsy Interiors by Carlo Gianferro

Gianferro began his work on photographing Roma communities in 2004, and the images in this body of work are compiled in a book on vernacular architecture entitled Gypsy Architecture. The images were made in Romania and Moldava and depict the inhabitants and homes of successful and wealthy members of Roma (more popularly known as Gypsy) society. Long popularized as either thieving con-men, or romanticized as wild, passionate artists and artisans, these images instead show a slice of Roma culture that describes instead a proud, settled and perhaps landed gentry of Gypsies.

David Nemeth, reviewing Gianferro's images in a review for The Professional Geographer, reports on the subversion of cultural expectations and stereotypes:

Gypsy Architecture provides a vicarious whirlwind tour offering ample evidence that yes, some of the wealthiest Gypsies in Eastern Europe, at a specific time and place of their own choosing, appear to have settled into their own comfort zones, surrounded by their own architectural constructions.

The unusual story presented here, highlighting the splendiferous material rewards of Roma accomplishment in Eastern Europe, will come as a surprise to many non-Gypsies, including some scholars and authors who have built their careers, reputations and political platforms by telling sadder stories.

The Dollar Room, from the series Roma/Gypsy Interiors by Carlo Gianferro

The portraits shown in Gypsy Architecture are colorful, humorous, dignified, and eye-popping. While it may be true that it's easier to make a non-exploitative image of people who are clearly not suffering, I am struck that Gianferro's images of these Roma and their homes manage to be so well-constructed and well seen, and I am delighted by the subversion of even my own expectation of what an image of a Gypsy should look like.

More images from this project and others that Carlo Gianferro has made can be seen on his website.

Now in its third year, the New York Photo Festival is making good on its claim to become North America's premiere annual photo festival. The (nearly) week-long event includes exhibitions, artist and industry talks, portfolio reviews (including with JBG's Jeffrey Teuton) and lots of opportunity for networking and schmoozing with like-minded photo peeps.

While there are photo festivals a-plenty across the pond (Rencontres d'Arles, Europäischer Monat der Fotografie Berlin, Brighton Photo Biennial, Mois de la Photo, to name but a few [.pdf]), the U.S. has not quite had anything that draws the kind of international presence or buzz of the existing heavy-weight gatherings across the globe. NYPH is well on its way to changing all of that. From their press release:

With its unique scope and focus, the festival appeals to all people involved in image-making and collecting: professional photographers and artists, arts editors, scholars, curators, collectors, as well as everyone with an appreciation for what is undoubtedly the most popular fine arts medium.

In addition to the curated pavilions, the festival offers visitors an extensive range of activities that generate dialogue and buzz among all communities of photo professionals, amateurs, students, and aficionados of art and culture, including: seminars, slide shows, book signings, photographic workshops, live performances and events, and a gallery row. The festival will also be documented online in a regularly updated and engaging online social media environment.

Once you're in New York (if you're not already), access to the festival is cost-friendly: day passes are $15 ($10/student) and a 4-day festival pass is $45.00 ($30/student). This year the event begins this Wednesday, May 12th and runs through Sunday, May 16th. If you're able to make it, there are a couple note-worthy happenings we'd like to make mention of:

And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum 2, 2009 by Justin James King

Justin James King will be featured in the exhibition New Visionaries 2009, shown the entire duration of the festival in the Tobacco Warehouse. In addition to being a Second Edition 2009 Hot Shot, Justin also won last year's NYPH award for best personal work in a photographic series. The entire New Visionaries 2009 exhibition will showcase the works of all of the New York Photo Awards 2009 Winners and Honorable Mentions. Photographers on display alongside Justin James King will include:

Felix Hug, Thomas Lekfeldt, Jason Carrier, Espen Rasmussen, Matthieu Paley, Bruno Levy, Gianni Cipriano, Jackie Dewe Mathews, Mike Whelan, Anna Moller, Arslan Sukan, Elliot Ross, J Bennett Fitts, Kai-Uwe Gundlach, Lauren Greenfield, Adam Hinton, John Clang, Nadav Kander, Ernesto Bazan, Doug DuBois, Michal Chelbin, Andy Spyra, Andrea Star Reese, Ed Ou, Mark Fernandes, Tyler Brown, Natan Dvir, Elliott Wilcox, Tammy Mercure, Ivonne Thein, Patrik Budenz, Kristoffer Axen and Adam Lau.

To see all of the satellite exhibitions for NYPH 2010, please visit the site's satellite exhibition page.

One other event we'd like to highlight will be the Aperture Foundation's workshop/artist discussions Emerging Artist Support Systems (in two parts: Part I on Thursday, May 13th and Part II on Friday, May 14th). Thursday's talk will focus on artist's support systems as they relate to three practicing artists' careers: Justin Reyes, Hank Willis Thomas and Brian Ulrich. Part II will focus on the importance of securing funds, fellowships and reviews, and will be mediated by Amy Elkins, Ariel Shanberg and Amy Yenkin. Aperture will also feature artists' talks during the weekend of NYPH as well. All of the Aperture events will be held at the St. Anne's Warehouse.

Infinitely cheaper than airfare and hotel costs at one of the European festivals (even with the recent drop in the euro), get in on the beginning of one of the fastest growing and exciting photo events in North America. As with the big portfolio reviews and juried shows, these kinds of events are among the best places to get out, be seen, and talk to others doing what you want to be doing.

New York Photo Festival 2010
May 12-16, 2010
DUMBO, Brooklyn

Complete map to all events and exhibitions.

Bedside (Anonymous), 2010 by Gregory Krum

Welcome back to the HHS! Week in Review. Every Monday, as an interlude between our bi-weekly Newsletter, we briefly roundup our the posts, links, and events from here and around the photo world. Here we go!

• Last Friday, 20x200 revealed this week's luminous photo edition by playing a game of twitter hangman. Some clever people guessed: T_DD H_D_ -- and they were right! Subscribers get the first grab, just sayin'.
• The NY Photo Festival opens this Thursday and there's a great lineup of exhibitions, lectures and events during the four-day event. Also, while you're in DUMBO, be sure to catch The Portrait As Allegory and Graphic Intersections at Umbrage Gallery, featuring works by Birthe Piontek, Cara Phillips and Scott Eiden.
• The photographer at work while the artist is present. A look at Marco Anelli's photographic documentation of Marina Abramović's ongoing performance at the MoMA.
• Darius Himes awards photographer Phil Underdown the first HHS! Curator's Choice Prize.
• All contenders who apply by May 20th are eligible for the second Curator's Choice Prize, a selection of five photography titles from Chronicle Books, selected by CEO of Chronicle, Nion McEvoy. Read all the details and get those entries in!
• A solo-show of work by Juliane Eirich opened on Saturday at Gallery Schuster Miami
• Joerg Colberg has posted his recap of Hyeres 2010. The only differences between the fashion crowd and photography crowd, he writes, is higher heels and bigger posses. (Also, note the work of Carlo Van de Roer hiding sneakily in the background of the second to last photo).
• Have you read our latest contender post? Michael Ten Pas's work is funny in a way that is neither irony nor LOLcats.
• Last but not least: Gregory Krum's ...Practice..., featuring thirty-seven photographs, opens at Jen Bekman Gallery this Friday, May 14th, from 6 - 8 p.m.

See anything we missed? Let us know on Twitter @heyhotshot.

It's often said that there are some things that you can't be taught, and in the realm of photography I've always thought that humor was one of those things you either have or you don't. I'm not speaking about pithy irony. I'm not talking about LOLcats. Rather, I'm speaking about the kind of photographer that, already steeped in the habit of noticing the everyday, has the further ability to see or create visual jokes with what they see, or can let the viewer follow them along in a game of visual association.

Untitled from Normal Town/Normal View by Michael ten Pas

Untitled from Normal Town/Normal View by Michael ten Pas

An interior view with a ceiling that's missing reveals to the viewer the outside-that's-on-the-inside. A cut-out image of a wolf that is then carefully placed and nearly perfectly camouflaged by similarly hued (and busy) wallpaper. Photographer Michael ten Pas likes reflecting such things that are in the world back to us and asking, "Is this really business as usual?"

From his artist's statement:

The world reveals irony and absurdity; it contains mystery and humor and is full of ambiguity and illusion. The world is playing a friendly joke on me, and I want to return it in kind. Looking at the world humorously is a way to engage with it...We relegate the mundane places to the status of non-place. Their banality and our transient encounters with them make them insignificant, yet their physical presence is undeniable in our landscape. They are all around but we don't know what to make of them, or we choose to make nothing of them. This paradoxical relationship allows me to coax comedy and mystery out of the everyday. My photographs are about my encounters with the humor and conundrums of everyday life in the world's overlooked, ordinary places. While making these photographs, I explore and connect with my immediate surroundings by taking a closer look. A closer look asks, "Is the situation actually normal?"

Michael ten Pas' body of work Normal Town/Normal View shares strains with a favorite photographer's project of mine: Kenneth Josephson's Images Within Images. A student first of Minor White and then Harry Callahan, Josephson's photographs for this series were such visual/mental tricks that art critics were compelled to label these images conceptual. For me, the stand-out image in the series is this one:

Polapan, 1973, from Images Within Images by Kenneth Josephson

I love that Josephson managed to produce something as erotically charged to my eyes by using a fully clothed model, all the while invoking the likes of Gustave Courbet's incendiary L'Origine du monde.

Where Polapan, 1973 is certainly edgy stuff, Michael ten Pas' work instead speaks to a playfully aware sensibility, one that is interested in us not only stopping to smell the roses, so to speak, but also in having us look for the joke in our everyday as well.

To see more of Michael's work, head over to his website.

If you're in New York, American ReConstruction, a group show including photographers Matthew Albanese, Jowhara AlSaud, Jeremy Kost, Mark Lyon, Curtis Mann and Cara Phillips, opens tonight at Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea. The exhibition "features artists who construct photography-based work through an array of pre- and post-printing considerations or processes."

Foldings (guided tour, Golan Heights), 2010 by Curtis Mann

Curtis Mann will be showing new works titled Foldings, which resemble the ink blotches of Rorschach tests. However, he has created these graphic reinterpretations by applying bleach to images printed off of Flickr and folding the paper in half.

Untitled Ultraviolet #60, 2010, by Cara Phillips

Images from Cara Phillips' series Ultraviolet Beauties, which are captured using the same method that plastic surgeons use to expose flaws in their patients skin, will be on view alongside works from her Singular Beauty series of cosmetic surgeon offices.

On Saturday, June 5th, Cara will also set up her UV studio at the gallery and offer collectors the opportunity to commission an Ultraviolet portrait. For cost and scheduling information, and to reserve your spot, you can email info@winkleman.com.

You can view a full set of images and read more about the exhibition at the gallery's website, and, of course, check it out in person tonight!

American ReConstruction

May 7 - June 12, 2010
Opening Reception, Friday, May 7, 2010

Winkleman Gallery
621 West 27th Street (NEW LOCATION)
New York, NY 10001

By now it would seem everyone with a pulse has heard about the historic and marathon performance piece that Marina Abramović is currently enduring/undergoing/exhibiting at MoMA, aptly titled, The Artist is Present. In an audio piece for the exhibition, Abramović explains that the title for the show is derived from the habit of many show or exhibition cards stating somewhere prominently that at the opening reception, "The artist will be present." In her two-and-a-half-month long piece, she goes on to say, "We go a step further...I will be present with you for the entire time of the exhibition." And present she has been—every single day that the Museum of Modern Art is open from March 14, 2010 through May 31, 2010. When the exhibit closes after Memorial Day, Marina Abramović will have "been present" for 42,990 minutes (or 716 hours and 30 minutes).

Installation view of The Artist is Present, © Scott Rudd for MoMA

The conceit of the piece is astonishingly simple: there are two chairs, a table between them. Marina sits in one, the other is open for anyone to join her for as long as they wish. There can be no speaking or touching. You are to sit across from her, and she from you, and the two of you are then "present" to one another; consciously sharing one another's space while being entirely conscious of each other in that space. Emblematic of many performance pieces, the "audience" is a necessary component of the piece, and the performance could not exist without audience participation. Often described as a "staring contest" (the New York Times rightly honed in on the fact that "strangers staring at each other in the eye [is] one of the final taboos of modern New York"), the experience of sitting across from Marina has been described eloquently and at length by the likes of Irish novelist Colm Tóibín and earnest and honest anonymous people on metafilter.

With all the press that MoMA and Marina have been getting about The Artist Is Present, there's an aspect of this show that has been comparatively under-reported: photographer Marco Anelli has been documenting every single person that sits across from Marina through the duration of the piece. For every one of the over 42,000 minutes Marina is performing, Anelli is at work making certain that he's produced a faithful document of the sitter and their experience. Posted on MoMA's Flickr set for the exhibition, each sitter is labeled with the day during the performance, their number in that day's sitting sequence, and the duration of their stay with Marina. While he's not sitting and engaging the artist directly, the fact of his meta-performance, which is posted to the Flickr stream daily, is a compelling testament to the power of the gaze and of one's connection to the Other.

Marco Anelli photographing sitters at The Artist Is Present, © Joseph O. Holmes

Sometimes the sitters are famous themselves; sometimes they are fellow performers making their own performance piece out of their experience; many times they cry. Some sit all day; some come back again and again. Marco's camera captures them all, every single one, every single time.

Day 4, Portrait 23, 9 minutes, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, Photo by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović

Day 10, Portrait 1, 52 minutes, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, Photo by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović

Day 20, Portrait 20, 20 minutes, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, Photo by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović

Whether or not one has been able to sit across from Marina, regardless of whether one has even been able to stand on the sidelines of the second-floor atrium and watch the performance, the documentation of it—be it the live feed or through Anelli's photographs—has been fascinating and addictive for those who have. On the face of it, the question begs to be answered, What Is So Interesting About These People? Face after face, day after day—the same lighting, the same ratio of face-to-frame. Maybe MoMA never intended or could anticipate that these photographs, a flickr stream set, would generate such a devoted following or enthusiasm from virtual on-lookers.

My sense is that there are two factors at work here: one is the very unmediated and intentionally non-conceptual framework of the portraits themselves. In Anelli's stream of sitters we have an exhaustive rendering of a defined subset of people that face after face, day after day, amounts to a project that's a 1:1 scale representation of this performance piece. Akin in this regard to August Sander's socialist revolutionary work People of the 20th Century, what we are seeing is a large-scale classificatory photographic project, adhering to a broadly applied structure or set of rules, that ultimately renders to us, the end-viewer, something very real and un-performed that we are clearly experiencing an emotional response and/or connection to. This is where the second factor comes in: while the portraits are generally un-posed objects themselves, it is the performance that Marina is engaging in with each sitter that successfully renders every individual into a bared vulnerable state that is then captured by Anelli's camera.

In a really great interview with Laurie Anderson in Bomb magazine from 2003, Anderson asks Abramović a question that forms the crux of her orientation to the performance currently on view"

Anderson: How do you see the audience?

Abramović: It's such an important question, because the relation to the audience is the essence of performance. In my case, the need to be completely open and vulnerable, to give everything I can, 100 percent, is extremely strong. Every single person in the audience is important. I don't have this kind of feeling in real life, but in performance I have this enormous love, this heart that literally hurts me with how much I love them. In the last performance, when I lived for 12 days, totally exposed, in the Sean Kelly Gallery, almost nothing happened. But just being there, with this openness--there is just skin and bones; there's nothing else but being there for them. I was there to be projected on. The whole thing has to be almost an invisible exchange. You asked what the connection was like in that performance. I really looked at the people in the gallery. To me the eyes are a door for something else, and whatever is happening in their lives, I pick it up. You can't imagine how much I cried in that piece. This sadness comes because they project their own sadness onto me and I reflect it back. And I cry out in the saddest way, so they are free. People would come like drunks—instead of a shot of vodka they came to have a shot of this connection with the eyes. They came in the morning; at quarter to nine they were there waiting, in business suits. The gallery would open at nine, and they would come in, look at me for 20 minutes and go away. A lot of them told me later that they are not even connected to art. I was thinking that people usually don't look at them in this intimate way, so maybe they just needed to be looked at in that way before going to work.

These minutes or hours or an entire day of engaging with and contemplating a complete stranger has been transformative, transcendent and terrifying for the sitters. Paddy Johnson gets that it's an emotional stand-off. Jerry Saltz concedes that, "There's something powerful and uncanny and pure about an unbroken gaze." Colm Tóibín got it when he wrote that the experience, "...was serious, too serious maybe, too intimate, too searching. It was either, I felt, what I should do all the time, or what I should never do." It is this unsettling is-ness that nearly every sitter is reduced to, and what comes across in this stream of images that Anelli has produced. A rare and wonderful thing to see something so obvious and unguarded shown to our normally guarded selves in seeming endless repetition of what I can only surmise to be a kind of vulnerable hope.

Marina Abramović in The Artist is Present will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art until May 31, 2010.

All of the photographs that Marco Anelli is making of the sitters in the performance piece can be viewed on the MoMA Flickr stream.

We are pleased to announce that the first Hey, Hot Shot! Curator's Choice Award, chosen by founding editor of Radius Books and HHS! panelist Darius Himes, goes to Phil Underdown. Phil will receive a gift bag of three exquisite books published by Radius, including Transfigurations by Michael Lundgren, The Spirit & The Flesh by Debbie Fleming Caffery and Domestic Vacations by Julie Blackmon. "Thank you to all the photographers that submitted work. There was an amazing range of talent and it was a joy going through it all," writes Darius.

Our Curator's Choice Award for May will be chosen by Chronicle Books publisher and HHS! panelist Nion McEvoy. All work submitted by the 20th of May will be personally reviewed by Nion whose pick will be featured on the site and recieve a gift bag of five books published by Chronicle.

Without further ado, we present all five images from Phil Underdown's HHS! submission accompanied by words by Darius Himes about his selection. After the break are Darius's notes on the judging process—wise words of advice for those thinking about entering the competition—and Phil's artist statement.

The Trapper's Lament 4506_1, October 2008, by Phil Underdown

Guest Curator Darius Himes on The Trapper's Lament by Phil Underdown
Using the visual language of a Shore or Struth, Underdown presents the viewer with a record of his tramping through the gentle woods of upstate New York with his view camera and film holders by his side. Dense undergrowth, meandering creeks and a carpet of browned and decaying autumn leaves are stoically pictured in exquisite detail, the trademark of a large format camera. I can almost picture him in his wellies and khaki pants, red-checked flannel shirt loosely tucked in and a spot meter draped around his lightly bearded neck. But there is murder and betrayal lurking in the bucolic settings of Mr. Underdown's photographs. All is not what it seems.

Take, for instance, the dead snapping turtle sprawled on the muddy banks in the first image, or more damning still, the bloated and floating adult beaver spied through the yet-to-bloom branches of riparian foliage. Who's to say that Mr. Underdown himself didn't hunt these innocent creatures down merely for the sake of photographing them? Perhaps they are the trophies of a very sick game of photographer and prey.

This is actually not far from the truth. Underdown moved to a piece of property abutting the Adirondack park precisely out of a deep-seated love of natural settings. But, as he states, "Here is a landscape where our mythologies of nature and the realities of our daily lives combine in an uneasy confusion." Invaded by squads of beavers who were so industrious that they threatened the home's entire septic system, he reluctantly hired a trapper to come and remove the recalcitrant beavers. (What most city-dwellers don't know is that "trapper" is synonymous with "hunter" in that the animals are killed in the process.) Underdown, burdened by the weight of his decision, began to photograph the aftermath, standing as witness to a cause and effect scenario he put in motion. "I recycle, I drive a Prius, I give money to environmental organizations ... and I kill beavers. This is the landscape of that confusion, the trapper's lament." His images, quiet and formally elegant, inject a sense of foreboding and mystery that draws you deeper into the frame.

The Trapper's Lament 4506_2, October 2008, by Phil Underdown

The Trapper's Lament 73_2, May 2009, by Phil Underdown

The Trapper's Lament 87_9, July 2009, by Phil Underdown

The Trapper's Lament 4519_3, November 2008, by Phil Underdown

In 1963, artist Josef Albers published a work titled Interaction of Color which presented his theory that colors were governed by an internal and deceptive logic. Albers adopted what he believed to be this logic in his own work, dominated by bold colors and basic, overlapping geometric shapes, distanced at highly precise and calculated spatial proportions to one another.

Symetry, 2010 by Kyoshi Becker Mckizzie

Contender Kyoshi Becker McKizzie creates a stark, ordered environment by identifying this "internal and deceptive logic" in his external and urban surroundings. He photographs the clean facades of buildings at points of intersection and organized disruption—where doors hinge upon walls, where windows are carved into storefronts, where street signs silhouette against a building. Colored blocks, lines and shapes emerge, rendering images that are abstract about buildings that he makes anonymous. McKizzie erases the most obvious identifying factors of a building (address and signage), instead using the manmade lines of paint and fixtures to dictate the geometry of his works.

Vibrant Outside, 2010 by Kyoshi Becker Mckizzie

His bold colors and perfect right-angles remind me of the Polaroid photography of Grant Hamilton, whose "about" page reads that he is "striving to find beauty in the mundane." He approaches everyday surfaces (walls, the ground, signage, textiles) aware of how he can erase the object-ness of what he's photographing by reducing it to stripes, rings, diamonds and squares. The process flattens the intersecting surfaces into a single square plane, erasing depth and shadows, and inviting the viewer in to solve a continuing puzzle of "what is< that?" We continue to believe that what we see in the frame is a part of something else, rather than becoming something on its own, and are perhaps the best version of a viewer when we submit to the borders of these photographers' worlds being at the edge of their viewfinders.

Neopolitan No. 3 by Grant Hamilton

McKizzie also uses color and clean lines as a way to toy with scale, and to present a series of "urban" photos without the most obvious of city-like features. To see more work by Kyoshi, visit his website.

HR64#01, December 2009, by Joao Margalha

At every flea market worth it's salt you'll find boxes and boxes of old, sepia-toned photographs and the occasional bag of mystery-film. I can hardly help pausing each time to examine the sealed canisters and imagine what images might be inside. I rarely end up buying these mysterious rolls, but the thought of finding the next Vivan Maier compels me to keep looking.

Untitled, by Vivan Maier

In 2009, John Maloof acquired a large collection of between around 40,000 undeveloped negatives at an estate sale in Chicago. Starting his research with a name written on an envelope inside the box, "Vivan Maier," John began to piece together the story of the photographer. Vivan was a French nanny who photographed the streets of Chicago throughout the 50s and 60s. Though she was an extremely prolific photographer, she apparently never showed her images to anyone. Strangely enough, Vivan passed away just days before John discovered her identity and tried to seek her out, stumbling instead upon her recently printed obituary. The story itself is fascinating enough, but what is most interesting about it all is that images John began to develop proved to be far more than snapshots. Vivan's images are funny and sophisticated—a brilliant look at a world long gone.

HR64#10, December 2009, by Joao Margalha

This story&mdash:one of my absolute favorites—immediately came to mind when I saw the work of contender Joao Margalha, who has been developing cracked 1960's-era studio portraits from negatives rescued from the archives of a commercial photo studio. Whereas Vivan's work presents a free-roaming viewpoint of her time and place that irresistibly draws me back into her time, the formulaic aspects of Joao's studio portraits reveal a different side of history.

Joao writes:

What seemed to be a singular moment was after all a standardization effort derived from issues of taste and technique. We realize that these were families without fathers. These were the times of heavy migration and colonial wars in Africa.

Joao is also highly aware of photography as a medium, referencing the writing of Walter Benjamin. Joao writes that images (such as Maier's) are "capable of producing a new representation of reality," but that his cracked negatives "dissolve the aura and remind us that they are just pictures." By developing these old negatives and distributing the images on the internet, the life of the work is extended both in time and space. The portraits are newly compelling as decayed artifacts existing in the present moment. Images like these present the kind of quandary that would keep Walter Benjamin up all night at his writing desk.

Joao is also a photographer in his own right, this being just one of many bodies of work. You can explore more of his work on his website.

It's difficult to believe that there are, this very moment, an emerging entire generation of photographers that will never have used a manual camera. They will have no concept of a favorite film or one suited to a particular purpose, will have never had to wrestle with a roll of film that won't load onto the camera sprockets correctly, or suffer the indignity of doing the same in the dark with a developing reel (stainless steel or plastic?). Take this metaphor into the darkroom, the very guts of Photography 101, and there's a whole other list of things that any "traditionally" trained photographer's eyes might be bulging out at the thought of omitting from an education. Take, for example, the mixing of developer chemicals, the washing (and re-washing) of fiber-based prints, the highs and hazards of dealing with dangerous raw chemistry that, handled correctly, can yield spectacular results: gold chloride, sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid. These are the same stuffs that gave us eye-popping contact-sized prints for the nearly two centuries, as well as the stuff that used to blow up attic darkrooms by turn-of-the-century practitioners who didn't know their chemical properties well enough.

Contender John E. Cyr knows and understands this historical connection to the analog and the wet darkroom, and what he's given us to consider here is a kind photographer's photographer project (and a collection so wonderful and specific I wish I'd thought of it myself).

Emmet Gowin's Developer Tray, 2010 by John E. Cyr

Aaron Siskind's Developer Tray, 2010 by John E. Cyr

Invoking the long-standing tradition of silver-gelatin printing while speaking in the same breath of its total eclipse by the advances of digital photography, Cyr believes that his project is a "timely endeavor." From his artist's statement:

The digital advances in photography over the past ten years have been remarkable. Digital manipulation is found in most contemporary work, even within these developer tray photographs...Many photographers, printmakers, and photographers' archivists' have already discarded or thrown out their developer trays because they believed they were no longer significant or useful.

I am photographing available developer trays so that the photography community will remember specific, tangible printing tools that have been a seminal part of the photographic experience for the past hundred years. By titling each tray with its owner's name and the years in which it was used, I reference the historical significance of these objects in a minimal manner that evokes thought and introspection about what images have passed through each individual tray.

When considering these images, I can't help but be struck at how alien, foreign and anachronistic—primitive, even—these tools must seem to the emerging population of photographers that have no concept of—or use for—an old, expensive, unhealthy way of doing things. Even as I write this, I find I am still incredibly attached to and nostalgic for my memories of, and thoughts of a future in, the safety-light red glow of a darkroom. It feels sobering and dated that I still own t-shirts that are hopelessly and forever stained with fixitive, that a barn attic in upstate New York holds my sturdy workhorse 3-barrel enlarger (and has for the past 5 years), and that in the last 6 months my favorite film, which I used to create my entire graduate work, has been officially discontinued (Fuji Neopan 400, if you're interested).

Still, even if kids today don't have any affection for these artifacts (and just how and why is Aaron Siskind's tray so very clean?!), I like that Cyr calls our attention to our artistic past by invoking these tools as a kind of reliquary. Where indeed can we move towards, if we do not understand first where (and from whom) we have come from?

You can view more of John E. Cyr's work at his website.

This year our submissions have truly been representing on a global scale. We've featured photographers hailing from Poland, Canada, Taiwan, Germany, and have a queue of other contenders from at least as many other countries waiting for us to discuss here. Today we're taking a look at the photography of Uygur Yilmaz, who hails from Istanbul, Turkey.

Untitled, by Uygur Yilmaz

Yilmaz, like a few other contenders, is proferring to us images of normally familiar surroundings made foreign and uncertain to our eyes because they are taken at night. This sequence of images focuses on a commercial beach, and in the evening, completely emptied of kids, tourists and beach bums, the landscape seems lunar, the sand instead of reflecting light absorbs it, and what's left on the beach causes us to strain our gestalt mechanisms to try and make sense of what we're looking at.

Untitled, by Uygur Yilmaz

From Yilmaz's artist statement:

This work explores the human impact on land, the interaction between mind and space, utilization of nature... Yet it focuses on the tension between reality and abstract. Studying a popular beach, a crowded summer spot, in the off-season and only at night, it intends to reveal a less observed aspect of leisure culture...In this sense, no subject is altered, staged or reconstructed. But the practice of photography as a tool of defamiliarization still transforms the reality.

To my eye, there's a certain kind of poetry in the devoid landscape (appropriate since Yilmaz is also a poet), in this landcapes that depict environments that though shot in color, show a nearly monochromatic palette. There's also a languid formality to these compositions that pleases me, having the world divided up by golden means and thirds.

Uygur Yilmaz's work is in collections and has won awards in Turkey, Greece and London. His website is currently under construction.