Eric, Big Bend, 2010 from Roadkill Family Album, by Nigel Grimmer

Happy Monday greetings! While many of you may be trickling along at a hot and humid summer pace, we're busily racing to the finish of the 2010 Hey, Hot Shot! competition, which closes for entries in just 13 days on Sunday, August 22nd at 8 p.m. (EST). That's right: if you've been holding out to the very end, the clock is ticking on your chance to get your work in front of this outstanding panel and win our grand prize.*

We're extremely pleased to announce that Tod Lippy, HHS! panelist and Editor-in-Chief of Esopus magazine, has selected Nigel Grimmer to receive the 4th Curator's Choice Award, a lifetime subscription to Esopus magazine. If it was us who won, we'd be off to our mailboxes right-this-second to wait for our inaugural issue. We'd like to extend our thanks to Tod for judging this round of Curator's Choice and hearty congratulations to Nigel!

Guest Curator Tod Lippy writes of Nigel's Hey, Hot Shot! entry:
Family members of artists are no strangers to sacrifice. We're all familiar with stories about long-suffering spouses and children who are forced to give up any semblance of a stable life (or, in extreme cases, life itself) in the name of art. And more than a few parents have found themselves--warts and all--used as "material" in work by their children (think François Truffaut's 400 Blows, or John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle, or--moving into the world of photography--Larry Sultan's Pictures from Home).

At first glance, Nigel Grimmer's Family Roadkill series takes this notion of familial sacrifice to a literal extreme. For the series, which he began working on in 2000, Grimmer photographs the seemingly lifeless bodies of his parents, siblings, and other relatives crumpled along the sides of roads around the world. There is a twist, however: each "victim" is asked to don a joke-shop animal mask before Grimmer snaps the photo.

There's a lot going on in this work. Grimmer forces us to think more critically about the artificiality of the family photo album, which is, after all, a compendium of unnatural poses and frozen expressions. He plays off human beings' identification with and sympathy for animals--even cartoonish versions of them--while making us rethink our relationship to the flattened corpses of those we barely notice (except to swerve around). These striking photos--grim, yet wry; melancholic, yet hilarious--also offer a refreshingly nuanced take on Oedipal dynamics and family power structures.

Most interesting to me, though, is the way Grimmer successfully subverts this longstanding notion of familial sacrifice. By obscuring his subjects' faces, he affords them discretion, even anonymity. By using cartoon masks, he leavens what could be a ponderous, morose "statement" with pathos and wit. In essence, he has taken a process that can often be one-sided and exploitative and turned it into what feels like a true collaboration. (It's impossible not to imagine this incredibly game--no pun intended--family having a blast working together on this project.)

I looked at a lot of terrific work while judging, but nothing else captured my attention--and rewarded my continued scrutiny--the way Grimmer's remarkable photographs do.

Mum, Fritton, 2000 from Roadkill Family Album by Nigel Grimmer

Jo, Hull, 2000 from Roadkill Family Album by Nigel Grimmer

Pasminda, Donegal, 2002 from Roadkill Family Album by Nigel Grimmer

Jayne, Hackney, 2007 from Roadkill Family Album by Nigel Grimmer

Nigel Grimmer's Statement:
Friends and family members have entered my imagery through the continual reworking of the family album format. The traditional family album images are shaped by strict but generally unacknowledged conventions that form a series of fixed narratives. My Roadkill Family Album is produced during family vacations, but here the constructed nature of snapshot photography is emphasised. Each photograph in the series depicts a member of my family or a close friend lying, apparently dead, by the side of a road wearing the mask of an animal. Although the sitter's identity is obscured, the image still fulfils the role of memento of the trip for both photographer and subject. Despite being explicitly staged events, these images conjure up feelings of abandonment and sorrow. The animals seem to have given up the will to live, but the underlying human presence creates an ominous tension. I am interested in the use of my photographic practice as a social tool; I involve as many people in my projects as possible. I also try to utilise low-tech methods of art production and encourage the gallery visitor to reproduce my methodology in order to record their own experiences, particularly people unable to mirror the traditional family album images. Gallery-based workshops accompanying my exhibitions often allow others to join in my art practice; I include other people's photographs, based on my photographic practice, on my website. This is the tenth year of the Roadkill Family Album project.

Tod also selected a few Honorable Mentions whose work stood out to him from amongst the entries: Jinkyun Ahn, Yuji Hamada, Sarah Malakoff, Nancy Newberry and Janet Taylor. Congratulations to all five of these photographers!