It's official: Hey, Hot Shot! now has a bookstore!
Earlier this month, we announced a partnership with forward-thinking Blurb Books, when they offered to sweeten the HHS! 2010 prize pot with $1,000 book credits for every Hot Shot selected during this competition period. Each Hot Shot will have the start-up funds to begin work on a book of their choosing, and one of the new Hot Shots will be selected from among the five chosen by Ms. Jen Bekman to work personally with a professional photo book editor Darius Himes, and TBD designer, and get a first-rate education in creating a first-rate work of book art.
Benicia/Martinez, CA by Daniel Cheek
In the interim of the past couple of weeks, we've been hard work creating a way to get the word out about some great books that are already out there from Hot Shots past and present. Whenever you're in the mood for some new visual material, or just curious to see what some of our favorite photographers are up to, take a virtual walk through our bookstore and see what strikes your fancy:
Untitled, from the book One More Night by Ben Roberts
Putting a book together can be a daunting task for many photographers, as it calls upon many skills that are not immediately apparent to someone gamely, for the first time, thinking, "Hey, maybe I"ll make a book." Being a strong self-editor (or knowing someone that you trust has this skill to advise you), having a good eye for design and page layout, having the capacity to cogently express what your book project is and be compelling with your images as well as, perhaps, the written word—these are but a smattering of the tools necessary to transform a body of work from the gallery wall to a beautiful object in readers' hands.
Facing pages from the book Seeing Things by Leah Benetti
And what's so great about a book, anyway? Why not just stick to the tried and true gallery show? Artist books are the new—old—way to disseminate your vision widely and provide access to work that others may not have due to geographical distance, cost and inclination of getting to a particular venue, or a infinite number of other reasons that make it difficult to see something in a given time frame in a given city. What's more, the act of sitting with a book is a completely different experience than that of viewing work at a gallery, and its benefits as an intimate, one-on-one between the photographer and reader should not be underestimated. One can return to a book after a first viewing, contemplate it in an undisturbed reverie and repeatedly digest it without much onus on the book collector or reader except the inclination to pick it back up. And not least of all, it's a very good exercise to put yourself through the task of translating a body of work into a different medium.
Our virtual bookstore is just a start of where we are taking this publishing train, and there are already more than 30 titles from our gallery of Hot Shots. We're looking forward to adding more in the coming months, and seeing what our artists are working on putting out next.
We're aware that a number of contenders from this entry period also have Blurb books out there in the ether...are you one of them? Provide a link to your title here in the comments. We'd love to see and share what you're doing!