Mongolian Village, 2010 by Shawn Records

Like the recently featured contender Noah Addis, who we discovered years ago from his previous and winning submission to HHS!, Shawn Records first came into our purview when he was selected as a Hot Shot in the fall of 2005. You may also be familiar with his work from from We Love You So, the website of Spike Jonze and his film Where the Wild Things Are, where Shawn's son Max played the lead character and he documented the set during the filming of the movie.

Shawn's latest HHS! submission is comprised of personal photos that he took while on a two-week trip to China, and at first glimpse it appears as a pretty rosy view of the country: his colors are bright and cheerful, his images crisp and meticulously composed, and the scenes depicted are static and serene, ever-pleasant and—at times—rather romantic.

The rainbow—an immediately identifiable symbol of hope, prosperity and innocence—recurs three times as a motif in five submitted photographs, a move that seems intentionally uniting. Although what initially drew me to Records' photos is their apparent sunny disposition and their undeniable aesthetic appeal, closer inspection detects a hint of irony; I'm forced to acknowledge that these photos must be intended as a specific comment, and perhaps even criticism.

This leads us to the back-story to Records' project: the Chinese Government in fact sponsored his trip. Records, along with five other American photographers (who were at all times escorted by government officials), traveled to predetermined locations, which included wetlands, oil fields, a coal mine, and oil and coal museums. Their assignment was to take photographs that would be used to promote tourism in China. The photographs submitted to HHS! are ones he took in an attempt to document this (I imagine incredibly bizarre) experience. The question that most concerns me from seeing his work: how on earth does one tackle the challenge of presenting a coal mine as appealing to potential visitors to China?

Oil Museum, Daqing, 2010 by Shawn Records

Records provides a canny explanation of his submitted works in his artist's statement, and one that confirms my initial, (visual) suspicions regarding the complex, and certainly to some extent critical intentions of these photographs:

There's a Chinese saying, zuijing guantian, "like looking at the sky from the bottom of a well." These photographs were made from the bottom of that well. Ultimately, this work is wrapped up in the complexity of global economics and its web of politics, propaganda, environmental whitewashing, and good-old romanticism. But in the end, my limited knowledge and opportunity show just a sliver of this sky. I'm not sure what I can say, conclusively, other than people all over the world really, really want to be happy; and advertising, whether it's created by Western corporations or Eastern governments, uses that. We want to believe that everything's going to be alright. We want to believe that there's something special at the end of that rainbow.

Record's experience of China calls to my mind a book that I read more than a decade ago: Red China Blues, by Chinese-Canadian journalist Jan Wong. The book is a very honest, and often self-deprecating account of her experience moving to Beijing in 1972 (having grown up in Montreal, and not speaking the language) to study at Beijing University, and then going on to actively participate in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Although the political circumstances, and involvement of Records and Wong with the Chinese government are certainly vastly different, I draw a link between the experience of two outsiders attempting to navigate, and becoming intimately acquainted with ideas and goals of an unfamiliar and reputedly very complex administration.

Ultimately, Records' submission represents a thoroughly intriguing meditation on the nature of advertising, on cultural pride, on propaganda, and on how we choose to view and represent the world that surrounds us. More of his work (although not from this series) can be seen on his website.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.'—Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

For five years, James Luckett lived in Tokyo: trying alternately to adjust to the city, to adjust his own expectations of himself, and, ultimately, to create for himself something of the experience of living so outside and somewhat alienated from that self. In the beginning, he thought he'd become a chef, and taught himself how to create elaborate Japanese meals. Then he came to the realization that he'd hit a wall unless he made a major investment in mastering the language, and that at his core, while being a more than competent cook, that he was no prodigy. So in his last year in Tokyo, he returned to what he knew, teaching himself something again this time, but something he had already known but discarded: the act of seeing photographically.

#27, from the series Suginami, by James Luckett

#05, from the series Suginami, by James Luckett

Everyday then, for an hour or a few hours a day, he'd take long walks with his camera and his dog throughout Tokyo's wards, or, ku, which is just another way to say that he wandered through the vast interconnected maze of backyards, alleys and sidewalks that make up the city's neighborhoods. From his artist's statement:

Houses and apartments there are sited tightly together; narrow streets and even narrower paths wind in around themselves in a maze of walls, fences, gates and plants that carefully delimit private space from public. In, around and through the margins of this place I walked hours every day. Suginami is an exploration of the ways this landscape layers into the edges of a frame, the transformation of light inside the dark box of the camera, and the space of discovery between the viewfinder and the eye.

I think of two things about these photos when I look at and consider the images that make up Suginami: the first is of Luckett as the quintessential flâneur, someone who, in Charles Baudelaire's words, is, "a gentleman stroller of city streets," someone who, though a detached observer, plays a key role in understanding and portraying the city, a kind of "botanist of the sidewalk." The second is rather related to the first, but maybe a bit more spiritually leaning: still the sidewalk walker or stroller, but more in line with one that participates in walking meditations (which in Buddhist literature, one is instructed to, "Notice the beauty of your surroundings, both externally and internally. Smile with every cell in your body"), which is what I believe these walks eventually became.

#11, from the series Suginami, by James Luckett

The images on view in Suginami are at odds with my imagined vision of a bustling, crowded and intense city. It's as if on these walks the city has become a ghost, a place of emptying-out. The light seems bright, midday in character, and the neighborhood homes and apartments are silent, except for the occasional cat. The intimate yet detached view speaks of someone that is familiar with where they are and what they are looking at, but true to both concepts of flâneur and walking meditations, they are somewhat lonely as well—liminal and solitary. I bet when Luckett happened upon that feline shown above, both were equally startled. Deluze and Guattari describe the act of the flâneur's walks (and specifically in reference to the walks that Virigina Woolfe's Mrs. Dalloway took) as a "haecceity," defined simply as a "thisness", the essence or particularity of a thing itself. They finish off with an observation I find entirely appropriate to Suginami, saying, "...A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome."

The images in Luckett's portfolio for this HHS! entry period are part of a larger and carefully edited sequence that James created for Suginami to exist in book form. You can view the entire series here. When taken as a whole, there's a sense of not only a quiet walking through, but a working through, going on as well. I'm uncertain whether he knew it or not at the time, but this would be the last year of James' life in Tokyo. So lastly, the photographs serve in a personal function: they are a farewell to the dissimilar familiar that had made up that epoch of Luckett's experiences there, and they are simultaneously a prodigal return to self, as these images mark his return and commitment to the practice of photography, which has since been ongoing.

Luckett is currently having an exhibition of Suginami at Ann Miller Gallery at Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio. The photographs will be on view from August 23—September 24th, an artist's lecture and reception will be Wednesday, September 8th at 5 p.m. More images and an accumulation of Luckett's writings and interests can be found on his website. The book Suginami can be viewed and purchased here, through Blurb's bookstore.

A drawing exercise that I've remembered for years consisted of choosing a palette of two colors that you would normally always avoid in the pastels box, and then making a composition of that day's still life. A large part of foundational visual studies is learning effectively to distrust what you think you hate, as well as what you think you love. I found that in being forced into the problem of using colors that I disliked, I made different kinds of decisions than I normally would, and that I was less attached to the outcome. And then surprised that I enjoyed the final result more than many other daily exercises when I was not color-restricted.

While Montreal-based Nik Mirus might not hate the color pink, he's certainly made an interesting decision in allowing the color to become a sort of character or entity in his recent series Subconscious Pink. Taking inspiration from surreal influences and impressions, his images revel in vaguely unsettling, meta-archetypal associations: an elevator pad that appears to be dripping (or weeping?) pink puddles in its edges; a layer of grassy earth peeled back to reveal a too-merry pink descent into something else; a dark room filled with a desk where a pink portfolio binder is prominently and assiduously placed.

Underneath, from the series Subconscious Pink by Nik Mirus

Untitled, from the series Subconscious Pink by Nik Mirus

In his artist's statement, Mirus explains that:

Very rarely do I find myself with a camera, hunting, searching and capturing the events and things around me. Rather, I prefer to use the camera as a tool with which to build a moment, create a narrative or evoke a feeling...The results of such an approach are photographs that often share an atmosphere with cinema and blur the line between fiction and reality. In the series, Subconscious Pink, ambiguous pink elements within the frame are used as means to represent the internal forces that drive and motivate our behavior. Our fears, desires and ambitions are an integral part of who we are. Lurking with in us, just beneath the surface, they're always present. This series has been a way for me to try and understand some of these ideas, who I am and what motivates me.

A trend has been developing for the past several years in editorial and fashion photography of creating images that seem like the viewer has just walked in on a moment in someone else's life, and/or is getting a privileged, fly-on-the-wall experience into something that they should not otherwise be privy to: an attractive couple in the midst of an argument on a couch might serve as an advertisement for designer jeans; a quick, one-frame still of a woman leaving her abode distraught and in a hurry might be the mental fodder for a haughty and distraught new fragrance on the market. Narratives with only a middle, where you are left to fill in the beginning and end are a compelling way to give viewers a moment, or to sell them something. Similar strands of this thinking has been in the artistic arsenal of fine art photographers for decades (think Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson). Where Subconscious Pink succeeds the most is in the middle moments where Mirus concocts a scenario of a place both of our imagining and one we think we've seen before: in a dream, a Salvador Dalí painting, or a David Lynch film. Very rarely is there someone in the frame, and if there is, there is still room enough to insert ourselves into the space of the narrative.

Untitled, from the series Subconscious Pink by Nik Mirus

This body of work is a relatively new one for Mirus. Begun last fall, he introduced it on his blog by saying:

When ever I try to explain these pictures/ideas to inquisitive minds I always find myself sounding kind of vague, hazy and stoned. "Yeah man...I'm really into like...hot pink...these pictures with pink elements...odd, out of place pink. You know..."

It's really allowed me to veer off into a variety of different directions and do things that I don't normally do.

I'll be interested to see where his subconscious takes a picture next.

The entire series Subconscious Pink, as well as several other bodies of work, can be seen on Nik Mirus' website. Mirus also maintains a blog.

I first learned of the work of Noah Addis after the HHS! panel selected him as a Hot Shot in the Winter of 2006. He had submitted a series of abstract images dealing with issues of mass-consumption and technology, photographing the hazy clouds of light and amorphous energy that surround our modern day tools and the places so many of us go perpetually consume: shopping malls, factories and airports.

Untitled #1 (from Future Cities: Lima), 2010 by Noah Addis

In the time since then, Noah's traveled the world as a photojournalist and documentary photographer. His work has taken him to Africa and Iraq, into homes during times of tragedy, and on the news trail of scandals and terrorist attacks. His current project, Future Cities, which is informed by his documentary background, is a series of quiet portraits and macro and micro views of squatters in major cities around the world. They are studious ruminations on how people survive in these transformative spaces, and how cities have failed to adapt to their own rate of growth.

Of the project, he writes:

By photographing contemporary city dwellers as well as the built environment in which they live, I hope to gain a greater understanding of the issues facing these cities as they continue to evolve and grow....My current project, Future Cities, focuses on squatter communities and informal settlements within the world's major cities. According to United Nations estimates there are more than a billion squatters living today--one out of every six people on earth. This number is expected to double to two billion by 2030. And by the middle of the century there will be three billion squatters.

Untitled #2 (from Future Cities: Lima), 2010 by Noah Addis

Untitled #5 (from Future Cities: Lima), 2010 by Noah Addis

Addis photographs the multitudes who often go unseen by visitors or tourists, their shacks and homes built of the materials often discarded by others, far from the city center.The homes, and the makeshift spaces used for recreation, cooking, dining and sleeping are deeply entrenched into the existing environment. In Lima, this is the backdrop of arid mountains; in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the favelas Addis documents exist more evidently within city bounds. Plywood homes are squeezed between the giant rocks of a mountain, and propped up by piles of tires and rocks, each moved there one by one.

On his website, Noah writes more extensively about Future Cities, noting there are more than 400 urban areas in the world with over a million inhabitants—and many of them have failed to acknowledge the need for, and implement, the infrastructure to support their growing populations. Industrial jobs have moved out of cities and the influx of migrants who arrive in these places every day are faced with few options, than to sleep where they can with the little they have. As a result, migrants who initially headed to cities in search for brighter futures, end up in crowded, crime-ridden and impoverished communities, making just enough in low-wage just to survive. Their futures are uncertain and the homes that were once a transitional solution necessarily evolve into places of greater permanence.

You can see more images from Future Cities on Noah's website.

If I ever want to know what Chilean sea bass tastes like, I'll have to do it on the sly, without my significant other's knowledge and dine with someone that doesn't know about the Monterrey Seafood Watch guides. The part of me that's curious to experience all things, though, will generally lose out to the part that doesn't want to add to the world's woes. And who wants to be the person that ate the last Chilean sea bass?

Turbot (Psetta Maxima), from the series One Fish Two Fish by Mark Dimov

In his project One Fish Two Fish, contender Mark Dimov hopes to create a conversation about the fish that we see at the supermarket and on our restaurants' specials list. From his artist's statement:

Created in response to the April 2007 National Geographic special report, "Saving The Sea's Bounty" regarding the global fish crisis, these images of commonly consumed fish are individually photographed in silhouette. The resulting photographs punctuate the colors and textures of the animal's contours while disguising 90% of its central details. I believe this obscurity sparks curiosity and I hope to evoke a sense of beauty for these creatures in addition to open up a dialogue about sustainable fishing practices.

Shot with back-lighting, the contoured forms of these creatures are often shown with mouths agape or with splendidly illuminated displaying gills. This provokes me into a state of idealized projection concerning the nobility, grace of the creatures, and also solicits a general empathy with what is potentially my dinner's right to exist and not become, for example, an IUCN red-list species of Great Concern.

The son of a painter, Dimov's treatment of his subjects for this project creates strong associations for me of another artist that traffics in silhouetted forms and negative space, the painter Donald Sultan:

Apples and eggs 2000 by Donald Sultan

Black Flowers September 26 by Donald Sultan

Golden Tilefish (Lopholatilus Chamaeleonticeps), from the series One Fish Two Fish by Mark Dimov

In focusing upon form instead of centralized detail, and in creating compositions that force the minimalist treatment of those forms into our consideration, both Sultan and Dimov create something that is both beautiful to regard and effectively raises their most artistic concerns and problems to the front of our consciousness. How does negative space and silhouettes transform our understanding of subject and context? How much of context is content? What kind of content is there when you remove or obfuscate the context? How does this treatment effect how we look at, consider and/or care about what we are being shown?

There are over 50 species of sea creatures depicted in One Fish Two Fish, which can be viewed in its entirety on his website.

The world of well-conceived collage (or assemblage) has long been of interest to me. The act of dismantling, disordering, cutting out, displacing and out of this creating new order holds a certain clever appeal; familiar objects or faces assume and assert new meaning when taken out of familiar context, re-informed with changed meaning when the canvas shifts under knife and glue.

Laurie Blakeslee, who was originally trained as a painter, continues in the tradition of subversion of meaning through her photo-based collage work in the body of work Styled Life. Recalling catalogs and fashion magazines of her childhood, Blakeslee alters and re-photographs these excerpted images "...with the intention of interrogating the original purpose these images present—the myth that consumer goods hold the promise of happiness, self-worth and most importantly, social status."

Charm Curl, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

All Combed Cotton, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

While the history of contemporary art records the names of famous male artists as the most well known practitioners of collage (Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell come to mind), the usually intimate small size and introspective nature of the process make it ripe for the double-entendres and Feminist critique that occur when a woman is wielding the cutters and storyboarding the montage. While Hannah Höch created famous political satires in the Dadaist tradition, and Bauhaus artist Marianne Brandt would specifically address the evils of fascism through hers, it is the work of relatively unknown Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue whose tone and output most closely aligns with what Blakeslee is working with today.

Untitled, from Toshiko Okanoue's Drop of Dreams by Nazraeli Press

As a young, unmarried woman living through the reconstruction period in postwar Japan, Okanoue began making photo collages. From Nazraeli press:

She cut out the photographs that - in her own words -"fit my dreams" and arranged them on black flocked paper. "Those scraps of my fantasies turned into strangely interesting things," she said, "things I would not have thought of. Emboldened and delighted by the results, I made one collage after another."

Much like Okanoue's investigations with the same form (and some of the same types of original period materials), Blakeslee uses glamorized and idealized representations of the feminine to call out inherent contradictions within what is projected and expected of women and their role in traditional society versus what that same woman's experience and fantasies of that life might actually be. In Charm Curl (the first image above), the perfect ringlet curls on a daughter's head mimic both the tighter, more controlled hairstyle of her mother (pictured in background) as well as the long curled tail of the colorful horse in foreground, itself a popular icon of what passes for the acceptable girlhood extracurricular. In B. Rayon Romaine (pictured below), a typical catalog shot of a post-war era housewife wearing clothes both feminine and proper is interrupted by a superimposed loud, red feather, intimating something that is both burlesque and meant to be hidden from sight.

B. Rayon Romaine, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

As a large swath of America is currently obsessed with the stylings and fast-changing cultural mores depicted in Mad Men, it seems a ripe time for Blakelee to push this visual investigation further, weaving a more complex theme and methodology in the wake of her montages.

More from the ongoing series Styled Life can be seen at Blakeslee's website, as well as other bodies of work.

Untitled, from El Salvador, by Lauren Lancaster

If you've never listened to 9 Beet Stretch by sound artist Leif Inge, which slows down Beethoven's 9th Symphony to 24 full hours, I suggest you start now. It's the perfect accompaniment to these photos by contender Lauren Lancaster, in which time  s l o w s    t o    a      c   r   a   w   l.

Time isn't standing still, but it's stretched out to infinity—where moments that Lauren describes as "fragile, surreal, and normal," become scintillating. The photographer herself is conspicuously absent—the subjects make eye-contact only with each other, and seem not to notice the presence of a camera. The resulting images are cinematic and microcosmic.

A woman's scarf is caught in mid-swirl...
Untitled, April 2010, from Kabul, Afghanistan, by Lauren Lancaster

...a fallen child is hoisted from the floor...
Untitled, from Kabul, Afghanistan, by Lauren Lancaster

...and the sound of a can opening echoes in slow motion:
Untitled, from Westfjords, by Lauren Lancaster

I'm tempted to think that in her past life, Lauren was a fly on the wall, but—truth being stranger than fiction—she was actually a shipwreck archaeologist. Lauren started out studying History and Archaeology, then pursued a master's degree in Shipwreck Archaeology at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in Texas, and even worked on excavations in Kenya, Turkey, the United States and Bulgaria.

Then she switched gears, and in 2005 graduated from the ICP's program in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism. Since then she's been traveling around the word taking photos in places like Iceland, Russia, Africa, Afghanistan and El Salvador.

"I am fascinated with the way a story develops when you build it backwards, piece by piece," writes Lauren. I'm looking forward to watching these wordless stories develop as new images are created.

Lauren is currently based in Dubai, where she is working on completing the series she entered to Hey, Hot Shot! You can see more work on her website.

The concept of liminality is a seductive and slippery one in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy. Known largely as a term describing a psychological state, its origins were actually from the field of anthropology, and are related to rite-of-passage rituals of a three-part structure consisting of: 1) separation; 2) a liminal or in-between period; and 3) reassimilation. The OED describes liminality specifically as, "Of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process," and as the author of the site liminality.org writes, liminality is a state of being "betwixt and between." Not necessarily outside the social or a given mode or environment but not from within it either, liminal is the state of existing in between states/modes-of-being/environments. It is to be in but not of; it is literally the in-between space.

UK-based photographer Nick Rochowski visually investigates what he takes to be the liminal places through a study of constructed landscapes and boundary areas in dark forests and woodlands, both literal and imagined.

Untitled, from the series Liminal Points: The Woods by Nick Rochowski

Untitled, from the series Liminal Points: The Woods by Nick Rochowski

Nick's photos in this series are all situated at a time that is not-quite night and not-quite day, the air and light themselves taking on that betwixt-and-between time and coloring. Pardoxically, where an image may seem to have been taken at the darkest of hours, a slice of light—is it moonlight? is it supernatural?—will it illuminate a path of blue wildflowers against the inky stumps and trunks of trees? In several images from this body of work, an arc of undulating currents weaves its way into the middle ground, conjuring up associations of spirits, the unknown or of raw energy itself hovering in the ether. Rochowski's imaginings of what and where these boundary spaces are reflect back on his definition of these liminal spaces, as well as on the viewer's own childhood conceits of such places.

Untitled, from the series Liminal Points: The Woods by Nick Rochowski

Taking his inspiration from cinematography and traditional landscape photography, Rochowski writes that his aim with this series is to address:

...the relationship between thoughts, the senses and the environment [that] are manifested in vivid isolated scenes. Each location has a story ingrained that has been passed down through historical fact, village myth and family tales. Although these are the personal experiences of nature, solitude and youth resonates in all people.

I find Nick's images to be psychologically rich spaces that I am invited to enter alone, as if happening upon these clearings and vistas without quarter or concern. These are not necessarily the places where bad things will happen, but they might be the sort where anything on a weirdness scale of 1-10 just might.

You can see all of the images in this series, as well as other related bodies of work, on Nick's website.

Liz Kuball just might be the long-distance runner throughout the history of our Hey, Hot Shot! competition. We first saw her work in the Summer 2007 HHS! entry period, wherein she claimed an honorable mention; she then cast her lot with us again in the Fall 2007 entry period, then once again during the 2009 First Edition competition period (where she merited another Honorable Mention). In the interim between her HHS! entries, she's remained extraordinarily productive, appearing in Fraction magazine, as well my recent favorite zine, Get Off My Lawn; she's been in two group shows at Jen Bekman Gallery, released two editions on 20x200 (just goes to show you that good things come to those who are contenders!). Here in the last week of this year's only HHS! competition period, we were delighted to see Liz's entry come through our upload tool. Her images are from her ongoing series California Vernacular.

Untitled (Hollywood Hills), from the series California Vernacular by Liz Kuball

Untitled (Santa Barbara), from the series California Vernacular by Liz Kuball

Kuball's work from this series is a great example of my favorite kind of extended portraiture: that of place and space. Sometimes this portrait might have people in it, but more often it's an ongoing narrative told on different days, perhaps with different voices. But what's consistent is the open-ended wonder and allowance to let place speak for and by itself.

California Vernacular shows you how California itself is astonished by light and color; how the incongruous and whimsical can become personal totems and how danger can lurch out at you from unexpected corners (the first photo shown above is a truly great animal photo in a pantheon of great animal images; Daido Moriyama's Stray Dog comes to mind as a point of comparison with Kuball's pit bull). I also am drawn to the veracity of what it is that Kuball is photographing here: the vernacular, the everyday, the ephemeral. Some might look at this body of work and say that what we have on view is street photography, but I would disagree with that. To my eye, Liz's work has more in common with someone like Zoe Strauss's I-95 project than the likes of a classic street photographer like Garry Winogrand. Both Kuball and Strauss have channeled place to such a degree that the panoply of human experience is brought to bear, even when (or perhaps more precisely especially when) no human face is filling the frame.

Untitled (Hollywood), from the series California Vernacular by Liz Kuball

We often cite excerpts from an artist's statement in these contender posts, but what struck me in Liz's entry was what she had to say about her education and formative experiences:

As a photographer, I'm what is considered "self-taught," but I hate that term because it minimizes (and even negates) the profound impact that other photographers and writers have had on me...it was when I quit taking classes and started reading blogs that my education as a photographer really gained momentum. I formed friendships with photographers around the world, and through many long e-mail conversations, I learned about myself, what I care about, and what I want to photograph. I read and looked at books by people I admired and people I couldn't stand, and I learned equally from both. I entered contests (including this one) before I was ready, and learned from my subsequent rejections. I took pictures--lots of pictures--and tried to understand why some of them worked and so many more of them didn't. I wrote my own blog and, through writing, figured out what I thought. And so it continues.

Liz is someone that reads, interacts and engages with the world widely, who challenges herself both by what she's drawn to and inspired by as well as by what is counter to her nature or difficult, and she puts herself out there in the best of all possible ways. She understands that the process of learning and emerging is never ending, and that cultivating a love for both is the secret to success.

"I love black and white, have no interest in manipulation and I already have all the stuff," writes contender Robert Forlini. Call it old fashioned, but Robert goes out with two solid cameras and photographs the people around him.

Lemonade Stand, Rhinebeck, NY, 2009, from Stand Alone, by Robert Forlini

Of his series Stand Alone, Robert writes:

As a photographer working alone I am always aware of people in isolation. I choose my tools for their simplicity and directness: black and white film, Leica camera, and few lenses. The location can be anywhere and everywhere. In the midst of a massive crowd or waiting for a city bus I see most people separate from the world around them. I have discovered this seclusion in the tourist on a bleak Hollywood Boulevard, the teenager mixing lemonade on a late summer night at the fair or a family moving through an historic sight together but detached by headsets. I am sensitive to an inner sadness that encapsulates their spirit. It's not difficult to track and document that pervasive loneliness but this question keeps haunting me: Why are humans who exist in an over populated and technologically connected world destined to stand alone?

Andrew Jackson's Tomb, Nashville, TN, 2009 from Stand Alone by Robert Forlini

Robert's images (and there are many, with at least thirty years of work on his website) remind me of what drew me into photography in the first place. I first held a real camera when I was about 12. Shortly after, I came across of book of Diane Arbus photographs for the first time and was taken by her narrative portraits. Though Robert's work has less of a narrative arc, each image seems to contain a story. Some series, like Stand Alone (which the two images above are from) are somber and introspective. Others, like Classic Images are more light-hearted.

Expired dog, New York City, 1983 from Classic Images, by Robert Forlini

When my father was an officer in the Army, he used to carefully watch the movements of crows in order to determine if there were spies or hidden troops in the area he was surveying. Still, to this day, he can tell if it is going to rain based on the actions and patterns of these birds. Once I told him that crows really scared me; their jet black color, their intense, marble eyes and their loud, bleating call. He told me to rethink my relationship with the animal since they once saved his life from an attack. Though humans cannot generally tell individual crows apart, crows have been shown to have the ability to visually recognize individual humans, and to transmit information about "bad" humans by squawking.

Crow & Hand, 2006 by Andre Ruesch

Using a clever play on words, photographer Andre Ruesch calls his series of images containing his feathered friends, A Murder of Crows. A murder here means the group of crows (dubbed this eerily because a group of crows is known to kill a dying family member).

Crows can be seen in almost every country in the world and are an ancient species. In fact, they have seen more incarnations and epochs of history than humans. Crows have lived among, and will consume the flesh of just about any animal. Aesop writes about the keen wit and observations skills of the crow in his fable, The Crow and the Pitcher. In the story, a crow attempts to drink water from a vase but realizes the vase neck is too slim and the water too low for its beak. Realizing the solution, and using ingenuity and determination, the crow drops pebbles, one by one, into the vessel until the water rises to the top of the pitcher. Intelligent crows to this day exhibit the same behavior. In classic Greek mythology, the crow is the observer of cheaters and teller of secrets. In Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is often associated with crows because of an old story of the foretelling of his birth. In the Bible, during the flood, before Noah released a dove from the ark in order to find land, he first released a crow.

Crows & Cat, 2007 by Andre Ruesch

According to an article published by the BBC News, crows top the avian IQ scale. Dr. Louis Lefebvre says, "People tend not to like crows, because they have this fiendish look to them and they're black and they like dead prey" But, there are many inventive and observant tactics once can learn from the crow! We all know taking the road "as the crow flies" is always the shortest and most direct way to success.

Ruesch explains:

In these photographs, crows lead viewers as co-conspirators and protagonists, where in their guidance they are both faithful and not.....Crows or ravens have lived in close proximity to people on five continents for thousands of years and intersect cultures in stories and myth around the world. They have been among our constant companions and as such remind us of who we are. They are highly intelligent and undoubtedly will continue to play on our consciousness as mysterious and beautiful agitators.

Crows & Spider, 2007 by Andre Ruesch

So as often as we find these feathered friends eerie, ominous or bothersome, they have lived amongst us humans and amongst our things for years and years, quietly crafting their own stories within a shared environment.

Quoth the raven, or crow, nevermore.

Migratory Mexican field worker's home on the edge of a frozen pea field. Imperial Valley, California., 2009 by Julia Curtin

The old adage goes: "A picture is worth a thousand words.," but in the instance of contender Julia Curtin, it's the many pictures that are combined with very telling titles to form rich stories about history and prompt questions about the legacy photos can leave. In her series Resettlement, Curtin creates models of vernacular structures used as temporary housing by migratory victims of The Great Depression. Her houses are constructed out of sampled components of the photographs from Farm Security Administration photographers, including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, whose images of displaced farm families, immigrants, sharecroppers and migrant workers have defined the visual legacy of the 30s.

Tulare County, California. Cheap auto camp housing for citrus workers, 1930s by Dorothea Lange

The structures are barely shacks, some with windows and doors and some without any defining features of house-ness other than the shape of a pitched roof. The paper models are photographed like still, inanimate objects, removed from the fields and roadsides where they would have once existed. Yet, they are rife with life, history—woven of a storied fabric.

One home, shown in side profile with a ragged side that is clamored together from various newspaper postings is titled, Migratory Mexican field worker's home on the edge of a frozen pea field. Imperial Valley, California. Through this abbreviated narrative, Curtin embodies the empty, tiny, constructed home with both ownership and place, suggesting that however diminutive, the storied lives of the people who occupied these homes were were instrumental to our history and ought to not to be forgotten.

House without windows, home of sharecropper cut-over farmers of Mississippi Bottoms, Missouri., 2009 by Julia Curtin

Several years ago I made a trip (as a photographer) to a sugar plantation called Batey Caraballo in the Dominican Republic. There, I came across the homes of Haitian and Dominican sugar cane cutters and their families, who labored in the fields for many months of the year. When I arrived it happened to be their time off, and they would sit outside their shacks, made of tin, scrap metal, and the cobbled-together packaging of various food products, whiling away the hot summer days in the dirt-filled "lawns" that separated each structure. These were homes they took comfort in, but also homes they seemed to assume were temporal—places to stay en route to a better life.

Batey Caraballo, 2006 by Youngna Park

The homes in Resettlement are fragile and temporary, existing to be photographed, a medium that enables them a legacy of their own. Curtin, through her own labored means of building a structure that exists longer due to documentation than because of its physical and structural integrity, pays homage to these homes that once were as well as the WPA photographers who first captured them.

With just 12 days left in this round of the competition, I'm feeling all nostalgic for the great work we've seen* (and continue to see!) come in. I've also been wondering how we can continue, in these last days, to showcase the breadth of submissions we receive. I've seen a lot of amazing photographs this year that are visually lush and conceptually irresistible, but today I want to celebrate the snapshot.

Kissing & Exercise, 2008 by Bruce Cunningham

"Every time I'm really down on this city, I find someone singing beautifully in the subway," tweeted my coworker Sara yesterday. Her words came to mind when I saw these photos by contender Bruce Cunningham because living in New York, I too find myself in serendipitous (and often strangely beautiful or hilarious) situations on a day-to-day basis. Bruce's photographs, like Kissing & Exercise (above), show that he does too.

Bruce writes, "I consider myself an urban prospector panning for gold." His images are neither lush nor conceptual, but like a singer in the subway when I'm feeling down, they make me smile. I'm reminded of Jason Polan, an artist who has set out to draw Every Person in New York, and comes across these nuggets of gold left and right.

Dad and son in the sculpture garden at The Museum of Modern Art, August 7, 2010 by Jason Polan

But what makes certain snapshots golden? I recently read a short essay titled After the Amateur by Ed Halter, in which he explicates the history of the snapshot and suggests that a camera doesn't just capture these moments, it creates them:

In "Diana and Nikon," [Janet] Malcolm finds it necessary to use another classification, distinct from "amateur," to describe a new trend in art photography of the 1970s. Now, she writes, a generation of photographers takes as its "starting point, model, and guide...the most inartistic (and presumably most purely photographic) form of all--the home snapshot."

The attributes previously sought by photographers--strong design, orderly composition, control over tonal values, lucidity of content, good print quality--have been stood on their heads, and the qualities now courted are formlessness, rawness, clutter, accident, and other manifestations of the camera's formidable capacity for imposing disorder on reality--for transforming, say, a serene gathering of nice-looking people in pleasant surroundings (as one had perceived it) into a chaotic mess of lamp cords, rumpled Kleenexes, ugly food, ill-fitting clothes, grotesque gestures, and vapid expressions.

Bench Sitters, 2009 by Bruce Cunningham

What I love about Malcom's explanation of a camera condensing three-dimensional space into two-dimensional chaos is that it lends credibility and intention to images which might otherwise be dismissed as amateur. I often find myself in an endless meta-cognizant loop: is this or is this not a good photo? But the magic of these photos isn't in the perfect tones, it's in the "disorder imposed on reality". What Bruce and Jason and Sara and I are all sharing is a particular kind of awareness.

Snapshots are beautiful to me because they flatten and package morsels of beauty, humor and hope for later. I'm tempted to look at Bruce's pictures and say "only in New York," but a camera can capture (or create) these golden moments for us to take everywhere.

* In fact, we've already seen images we love so much that we want to edition them. Yes, that is a hint! Get on the 20x200 newsletter today to see which contender we will be releasing an edition from on 20x200 tomorrow.

Before you ask and before I have to put you into the awkward position of guessing my age based on any wrinkles, creases, smile lines, and under eye bags, let me tell you: I am twenty three years old (younger, I know, than many of you readers may be). I do not wear sunscreen every day, admittedly sometimes I forget to wash my face before bed, and I certainly do not wear night cream. Per the glossy pages of Cosmopolitan Magazine, I should have started using wrinkle cream a few years ago at age eighteen, a mild solution when I hit my twenties, and can look forward to (god-forbid) an intensive, glycolic formula when I reach the big 3-0. One article even suggested not smiling too often or rubbing my eyes too harshly when I am tired, so I don't get any more of those creases. Sheesh. Like Benjamin Button, women today are trying to perfect the science of rapidly aging backwards, through the use of creams, makeups, serums, and miracle poultices.

Naomi from the series Popfaces by Joshua Scott

It's a cop-out but I blame the media. I am talking about magazines, tabloids, and more specifically print ads. According to Body Image and Advertising:

The average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day, and by the time she is 17 years old, she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media. Only 9% of commercials have a direct statement about beauty, but many more implicitly emphasize the importance of beauty--particularly those that target women and girls.

Contender Joshua Scott, who has photographed ads for Marc Jacobs perfumes and Exuviance purifying creams, understands the print-ad beauty industry well. He uses this experience as the departure point for his series Popfaces, where he crinkles, manipulates, deconstructs and crumples otherwise meticulously crafted magazine imagery of women's beautiful faces—at least by advertising standards—and photographs it in a new context.

Once, during the week of my sister's wedding, I was getting my makeup done by a professional makeup artist. After two hours of sitting in a chair, I commented how extraordinarily long and trying my whole day of beautification had become: 1 hour for an updo, 2 hours for makeup application, 1 hour for manicure and pedicure, 1 hour for waxing. Sure, I looked airbrushed and dewy in the wedding album that my sister would keep for a lifetime, however the whole process of getting ready for a few short photographs seemed absurd. It showed me that beauty is not unattainable—it is actually highly attainable—if you have plenty of time and money to dedicate to the hobby of perfection.

Marilyn from the series Popfaces by Joshua Scott

Social and personal commentary aside, I think the visual message of Joshua's images inspires you to pay less heed to the ephemeral and often very repetitive imagery of magazine ads run during the four-season trending cycle. Scott explains, "For the past couple years I have been shooting many cosmetics images for commercial application. After shooting so many fragrance products they began to all blend into each other one after another. They were all a liquid in a bottle. Although the bottles changed shape and the scent changed smell, visually the basic concept was becoming stale." With his images he asks us to reexamine product, presentation and the entire industry of beautification, which takes whole new shape off the printed page.

Twiggy from the series Popfaces by Joshua Scott

So go ahead, rip out a page of your favorite magazine and pucker, then rumple the weak paper. Now look at what you have done; maybe like Scott's work, you'll find these newly creased objects even more appealing.

Illness, Female, 60 years old, 2010, by Sarah Sudhoff

It's not uncommon for photographs of starving children, LOLcats, and New Yorker Cartoons to appear unpunctuated in the same glance at my Tumblr dashboard. As internet users, we are bombarded with images in a way that is hyper-stimulating, contextless, and constant. Discussions about desensitization to powerful images of war or violence come as no surprise. What does take me by surprise is when an image makes me flinch.

I hadn't even had my morning coffee when, reviewing recent entries, I came across this dark and visceral series by contender Sarah Sudhoff. The images—closeups of stains from gun shots, illness and other lingering forms of death—are abstract, but I found myself needing to look away more than once as I browsed through.

Suicide with Gun, Male, 40 years old, 2010 by Sarah Sudhoff

I'm not necessarily a believer that provoking a strong reaction necessarily makes an artwork good (it's a really tricky question), but it does reveal something unqiue about how the viewer deals with difficult images. Sarah's series, At the Hour of Our Death, tells each viewer something about their own attitudes towards death.

Sarah writes:

Death, like birth, is part of a process. However, the processes of death are often shielded from view. Today in Western society most families leave to a complete stranger the responsibility of preparing a loved one's body for its final resting place. Traditional mourning practices, which allowed for the creation of Victorian hair jewelry or other memento mori items, have fallen out of fashion. Now the stain of death is quickly removed and the scene is cleaned and normalized. As Phillipe Aries writes, "Society no longer observes a pause; the disappearance of an individual no longer affects its continuity".

From a purely visual standpoint, the images from are beautiful—and colorful.

I'm reminded of Jason Lazarus's Heinecken Studies, a series of colorful photograms made from scattering the cremated remains of Robert Heinecken over photo paper.

To be affected by Sarah's images while simultaneously questioning their authenticity is inescapable. Famous photographers like Taryn Simon seem to slip into private—or highly guarded—spaces time-and-time-again, but how does someone like Sarah access these ephemeral spaces and their undoubtedly sensitive information? In her statement, she addresses some (but not all) of these personal and technical details.

Sarah writes:

At the age of seventeen, I lost a friend to suicide. While visiting his home the day after the event, I witnessed a clean-up crew steam cleaning the carpet in his bedroom. All physical traces of the past 24 hours had vanished.

These large-scale color photographs capture and fully illuminate swatches of bedding, carpet and upholstery marked with the signs of the passing of human life. The fabrics which are first removed by a trauma scene clean up crew, are relocated to a warehouse before being incinerated. I tack each swatch to the wall and use the crew's floodlights to illuminate the scene. The images are my attempt to slow the moments before and after death to a single frame, to allow what is generally invisible to become visible, and to engage with a process from which we have become disconnected.

I believe in Sudhoff's images, just like I believe in Simon's images and Lazarus's images, but in this case it's not the story, but the sickly stained photographs themselves that I responded to. You can visit Sarah's website to view several more intense bodies of work focusing on "making visible what societal conventions render invisible."

The Slow Food movement has many fast and hard proponents, who come from far and wide. There are those born and bred on farms, who've always seen where their food comes from and eaten it from the source. There are those raised on fast food and preservative-laden microwaveable meals, who've discovered the flavors of real tomatoes, beans, peaches and plums in their later life, and embraced the lifestyle and labors of the farmers who cultivate such treasures. And, there are all of those people in between, for whom there is a great understanding of food as the fundamental source of energy and life in our communities and a means of forming community. They are people who watch in despair as sugary, plant-processed foods take over our grocery stores and who subsequently and constantly feel a great need to call attention to "real food" that sustains and nourishes us.

Scales, Abundance Co-op CSA Distribution, 2010 by Christin Boggs

This attitude towards food has gained traction in more popular media with proponents like Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver and Alice Waters, who each approach the idea of putting the Western world back on the track to better eating as equal parts education and action. We must first understand where our food is coming from, and how far it travels between field and mouth, to understand why it's so necessary to embrace a return to the land and return to the craft of producing food.

Slow & Steady, a series of images by contender Christin Boggs, documents this "movement away from mass-produced foods in a return to traditional modes of food production and preparation." Boggs visits community gardens, farms and farmers' markets in the Rochester area, where she is completing her MFA in photography, documenting the fruits of hard labor, and the lifestyle and relationships that exist in these spaces. The scenes are pastoral, but also portray a hard scrabble and unglamorous life: high fashion and clean fingernails have no place here.

Brussel Sprouts, Blue Heron Farm, 2010 by Christin Boggs

Instead, one sees the shiny treasures of devotion and energy enjoyed in the form of beautiful green leeks, loaves of bread, browned and ready for the farmers' market and beets, ready to be lifted out of a water bath. The food is only one component of a greater lifestyle; this is a family, a community, a place of like-minds and of like-principles.

Additional images from Slow & Steady are available on Christin's site, where she also features numerous other projects that ask questions about our society's relationship food.

Yuji Hamada toys with ordinary spaces by defining them through the elemental components of the photograph: light and shadow. By using a smoke machine to exacerbate the stringy, effervescent rays of natural (and only natural) light, he breaths new life into sunshine, suggesting it is alive, powerful, directed and defining. What he aims to define is the extraordinary in otherwise dismissed sites, through these two coexistent and dependent ideas: without light their cannot be shadows and shadows often define the boundaries of light.

Untitled from the series Pulsar, 2009 by Yuji Hamada

His series, Pulsar, presumably takes its name from the highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars of the same name whose beams of electromagnetic radiation can only be observed when they have rotated towards the Earth. Like these intergalactic forms, the beams of light that disperse through Hamada's images emit from a pointed source: the sun—the star at the center of it all. The sun, which here on planet Earth controls the climate, dictates seasons, and is the reason for most life, is articulated and further dispersed through the leaves and branches it has enabled to exist. It is occasionally interrupted by man-made forms—a fence, automobile or cement wall—where the light cannot pass and must find a new direction.

Untitled from the series Pulsar, 2009 by Yuji Hamada

Pulsar is grounded in one strict rule Hamada made for himself: no strobe lights or artificial lights; only natural light may be used. Using the aforementioned smoke machine and a series of filters to disperse the particles of light, Hamada captures each of these frames on a large format Linhof Master Technika camera.

Despite Hamada's rigorous, technical process, his images evoke a feeling of lightness (no pun intended) and the great serendipity photographers often feel to catch rays of sun coursing through the trees at just the right time of day. His manufactured pulsars seem like fantastical versions of the blocks we walk down each day, each a tiny capsule of magic in its transformative moment.

You can see more work from this series on Yuji's website.

I will not disclose the name of the town in which I grew up, however, I will admit that one summer the local high school had an adult education class entitled: "Making the Most of Your Road Kill." Topics within the seminar included; "How to Tell if the Meat is Fresh" and "The Secret to The Perfect 'Possum Patty." But here, here, there are some major perks to "catching" road kill. First of all, you can call yourself the ultimate go-green enthusiast, wasting no food, or spare parts. Secondly, the meat is free! There are no government issued taxes or fees for collecting roadkill. Finally, wild game is said to be very high in vitamins, drug-free, and the meat is lean with little saturated fats. Talk about healthy!

Subterfuge aside, HHS! contender Nigel Grimmer is also a roadkill enthusiast.

(Jo, Hull, 2000), September 2000 UK by Nigel Grimmer

The series, Roadkill Family Album, began in 2000 to highlight the constructed nature of a family portrait. Fooling with the iconic portrait image, each photograph in the series depicts a member of Grimmer's family, or a close friend, lying, apparently dead, by the side of a road wearing the mask of an animal. According to Grimmer, "The photographs have been taken on many holidays with friends and family. Locations include America, France, Japan, Ireland and throughout England".

Oh yeah, one of the other highlights of roadkill? It's utilitarian and universal, not just relegated to one place.

(Pasminda, Donegal, 2002), September 2002 Ireland by Nigel Grimmer

When I pass a dead animal on the side of the road, a few feelings course through my veins—namely: revulsion, sadness and curiosity. Never do I ever think of the animal as part of a family, a larger picture. Grimmer's images force me to anthropomorphize nature and to give animals personal identities. Playing on Grimmer's want to show the audience the meticulous construction of a portrait, roadkill must have interacted with a force or invention of man at one point, e.g. a deer hit by a truck, a squirrel sidelined by a sedan, a bird flying into a sliding glass door. Though it's not so pretty to think about, ultimately roadkill falls on, ahem, the road, another construction of man. Grimmer's visual, alternate realities lead me to this realization and I find myself feeling uncomfortably responsible for the death of every family member in the album.

Imagine someone from your family hit by a cadre of geese going for a Sunday drive; Grimmer probably knows what it would look like.

(Jayne, Hackney, 2007),16 April 2007 UK by Nigel Grimmer

Now, act like a good human and learn to "play dead"!

Lithuanian-born Darius Kuzmickas is a master of the pinhole camera. Remember 3rd grade science experiments dealing with the sun and optics wherein one would only need a cardboard box or a coffee can to record an image? A pinhole camera, which has no lenses and only one aperture, consists essentially of a light-tight object with a small hole in one side, so that an inverted image of outside objects is projected on the opposite side where it is then recorded on film.

camera obscura: outside in(n) 19, 2009 by Darius Kuzmickas

There are records of naturally occurring pinhole cameras as far back in history as the 4th century B.C. where Aristotole and Euclid would record and discuss the shadows left by wicker baskets, or the reverse reflection of leaf slits on trees. Chinese philosopher and theologian Mo-Ti, during the same epoch, would refer to something known as "the collecting plate" that he also observed through gaps in leaves. Of course, the human eye is another naturally occurring pinhole camera, so you have technically tried and succeeding in constructing one without even knowing it!

camera obscura: outside in(n) 29, 2009 by Darius Kuzmickas

The portfolio Kuzmickas submitted for HHS! is entitled Camera Obscura: Outside In(n) and is a technical carnival of Escher-esque images that leave the audience wondering whether a subject of the photograph is the main focus or the infinitely patterned background, and whether or not the room is impossibly constructed or highly manipulated. Kuzmickas showcases the blank, barren walls of a lonely human's living space upon which an image is reborn within a new location in soft focus. Each image features a subject flooded with the accoutrements of the outside world; a woman stamped with the pattern of an apartment complex, a man floating through a city sky.

Kuzmickas toys with our mind's eye and our perception of our own optical reality. The camera obscura technique literally means a dark, vaulted chamber. Kuzmickas images are a play on this wording and feature emotionally dark, small chambers both in the image, and outside the image for the camera obscura capture.

camera obscura: outside in(n) 55, 2009 by Darius Kuzmickas

Perhaps M.C. Escher said it best when he asked, "Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?"

It used to be a trend in the medium of photography that some practicing artists, dissatisfied with the static, frozen-in-time image would abandon the single-frame format camera for the moving pictures kind; essentially making a trade for the fourth dimension— that of time.

These days it would seem that a trade has been made again, but the trade is not of the either/or variety. It's a trade up for more skill sets. No longer does it seem that one has to identify or confine oneself to one set criteria of artistic representation or media. Photographers can begat filmmakers which can begat performance work which can begat installation ad infinitum. It's as if there is only one artistic medium anymore, and its name is versatility.

Untitled, from the series In the Fulcrum of Our Dreams by Teo Ormond-Skeaping

Today's contender, Teo Ormond-Skeaping is one such practioner, working in photography, video and installation within the same project concept. His current body of work, In the Fulcrum of Our Dreams, reflects the sensibilities of one that likes to traffic in dreams, archetypes and the shadow-sides of reality. Colors are muted yet singularly and selectively intense at the same time; some moments are blurred and softly vignetted on the edges, others feel as if you can almost smell them. By utilizing still images, moving images and installation to evoke a rich emotional palette of experience, what I am most moved by in Fulcrum of Dreams is how many and how acutely each of my senses are engaged.

Untitled, from the series In the Fulcrum of Our Dreams by Teo Ormond-Skeaping

IN THE FULCRUM OF OUR DREAMS from teo ormond-skeaping on Vimeo.

In Ormond-Skeaping's multi-layered canvas the more bewildering aspects of dreamscape are invoked: sensations of symbolic import paired with faces that may have no relevance in daily life but in dream logic summon up powerful archetypal associations, creating wave of skin-prickling wave of weird emotional resonance. Is the figure below a harrowing relation? A stranger in decline? Someone with menacing and supernatural powers? A reflection of super ego?

Untitled, from the series In the Fulcrum of Our Dreams by Teo Ormond-Skeaping

The open-ended, free-association and stream-of-consciousness that runs thickly throughout this work brings to my mind the work of Bill Viola, who works masterfully at themes which combine spirit, rites of passage, Jungian psychology and the uncomfortable, seemingly unending spaces of dream life.

While it may seem initially intimidating to learn the language of a new medium and/or incorporate into an existing practice the threads of an entirely new one (or two or three), artists that are unafraid of the learning curve and forgiving of self-created messes and mistakes are eventually rewarded with a much larger tool chest and language set by which to communicate their visions.

The full photographic sequence, as well as video and installation portions of In the Fulcrum of Our Dreams can be experienced at Teo Ormond-Skeaping's website.

There are some artist's projects which require a little background information in order to appreciate fully. As the art-making world becomes larger and encompasses greater numbers of practitioners from increasingly varied backgrounds, intersecting cultures and geographic locations, so too grows the need to provide necessary context for work whose meaning might be completely obfuscated without it.

Jinkyun Ahn, based in Seoul, Korea, first conceived of his project En Cave while fulfilling a task of familial duty. He writes:

When I returned to Korea four years ago to begin compulsory military service, one of my first responsibilities as the eldest grandson was to visit my grandparents' burial sites as a sign of respect. Nearby their burial sites is an empty plot where my parents will also one day be buried. As I stood in front of the plot, my parents walked into my line of vision. Suddenly I realized that I would stand at that very spot at my parents' funerals some day. I could not stop the inevitable transformation of the view—from living parents to graves—nor could I turn away from the view where my parents' deaths will be evident. Like the chained slaves forced to watch illusions in Plato's cave, I am bound to observe a scene of my parents' death in the graveyard.

En Cave #15 by Jinkyun Ahn

En Cave #14 by Jinkyun Ahn

Ahn constructed his own "Cave" where this performance could be enacted and shared by himself and his parents without any actual funeral having to occur. Much like his concept of living through his parents' funeral by conducting an artful preemptive rehearsal of it, his artistic method is equally transparent, which I favor for its no-nonsense emotional pragmatism:

The view not only includes me and my parents but photographic equipment such as light stands and electric wires. The apparatus is exposed rather than hidden; my photographic process is photographed explicitly.

En Cave #17 by Jinkyun Ahn

Through his project En Cave, Ahn is reconciling the fact of his personal ties and history being inextricably bound up in the person he is trying to carve himself out to be apart from those familial ties and that culturally inscribed history. The act of reconciliation is necessary because, in the end he recognizes his to be an, "...experience of helplessness not only in creating highly conceptualized art in the early 21st century but also in performing as a son according to Confucian tradition in a Korean family."

The act of honoring and paying tribute to the ancestral dead is a rich subject that many contemporary Asian artists are visiting with an eye towards contemporary critique and commentary of culture-jamming. Ahn's work brought to my mind the recent project In Case It Rains in Heaven, by Hot Shot and 2009 Ultra Kurt Tong. Focusing upon the ritual burning of Joss paper as offerings to ancestors and the recently departed, Tong recreates the complicated narrative that exists in developing these offerings—a narrative being increasingly tailored to reflect material goods and status symbols that the dead perhaps were never able to attain. Or, goods that current cultural standards hold to be a meaningful and valuable tribute: joss-molded ipods, designer shoes, household appliances and automatic rifles.

Both Jinkyun Ahn's and Kurt Tong's work shows that even while centuries-old customs are still respected and observed, that the intersection of those traditions with other cultures and value systems is inevitable. Reflecting on these changes through art is an important and meaningful task as an artist so that one can fully understand and communicate those differences in their work.

Astoria, where Eliza Lamb has lived for the past five years, is located in the northwestern corner of Queens, New York City. A testament to the ephemeral nature of any neighborhood in NYC, Astoria was first settled by the Dutch (Nieuw-Amsterdam anyone?), then populated by the Germans in the 1800s, the Italians in the early 1900s, Greeks in the 1960s (giving Astoria the largest Greek population outside of Greece itself) and Lebanese and Moroccans in the 1970s. This proverbial melting pot, or now salad bowl, is a bric-a-brac of religious totems, symbols and beliefs. It is no wonder that Lamb was able to get such contrasting sacrosanct imagery within a 10-block radius of her home in Astoria. She is interested in the ideas of boundaries, of religion, of small shared spaces, of personal interaction, especially in New York City. She shoots almost all her images from the public space of the sidewalk and often includes protecting fences.

Marble Reflection from Astoria Series: Streetside Religion by Eliza Lamb

Lamb writes:

I shoot exclusively found objects, in natural light, on medium format film. I do not crop the images - I believe in creating the image in the camera... Sometimes people are interested to know that I was also raised a Catholic but am not currently. My great grandmother had a small 'Bathtub Mary' in her backyard growing up, that we all used to take turn praying at as young children. This is a familiar object and one that provides an odd sense of alienation but also comfort.

Playing on the intergenerational theme of one neighborhood in Queens, Lamb admits that she became interested in photography first through her grandfather who was an engineer. An engineer must apply science, math, ingenuity, creativity and some elbow grease in order to develop solutions to technical problems. How apropos then that the word engineer is derived from the Latin root ingenium, meaning "cleverness" (Oxford Concise Dictionary, 1995). Lamb applies the curiosity of engineering to the tenets of photography, often shooting an image without its person. Because of this capture of personality without a body, Lamb considers herself "a portrait photographer who doesn't shoot people."

Seahorse from Astoria Series: Streetside Religion by Eliza Lamb

The images from the Astoria Series: Streetside Religion were shot over a three-year period. Originally, Lamb would shoot alone during long walks through the neighborhood. However, she says that defensive neighbors would come out to question her intentions, their privacy, and ask her to leave.

Lamb explains:

This again presented the question to me as to why these statues were there in the first place. Were they there to share, to protect, to include or to exclude? So I started taking Maddie (Lamb's 8-year-old daughter) with me, with her little camera, and suddenly I was no longer something to be removed, trying to take something from them - instead people would come out smiling and include us. I was the same person but it was a huge shift.

Piqued your interest? Check our more here!

Yankees from Astoria Series: Streetside Religion by Eliza Lamb

Can't get enough of Queens, NYC? Check out past HHS! Contender and blog focus, Alexander Segreti, who also photographs within yards of Lamb.

The sixteenth century practice of Dutch still-life painting has long placed living objects—flora, fauna and food, primarily—alongside inanimate but significant tokens like skulls, porcelain, candles and books. Rich, velvety backgrounds, usually black, were awash with a matte natural light, and the artist's task was to paint petals most intricate and fruit most delicately nuanced to demonstrate their deft with a brush.

Oranges, 2010 by Jennifer Mason

New Zealand-based contender Jennifer Mason approaches this centuries old tradition with a modern twist, adding bold backgrounds to her compositions. In Oranges, red berries and a handful of the title-fruit are part of a vibrant palette that also incorporates aqua and yellow, recalling the bright colors popular to the 1950s. Magnolia also takes a modern twist; Jennifer has constructed and suspended a still-life mobile of branches and magnolia flower petals that appear to be floating in space. Although the objects are uncharacteristically raised-from-table, Mason maintains the even halo of light and rich color that are constant variables of the still-life style, while diverting from the accepted posture of items, front and center on the table surface.

Magnolia, 2010 by Jennifer Mason

Still Life With Fish & Orange Slices from the series Vanitas by Justine Reyes

Mason is one of a handful of photographers who have adopted this tradition of still-life painting, partaking in their own battle with form, function, position and color. Justine Reyes, in her series Vanitas, composes still-lifes that incorporate elements of family and memory, featuring photographs of relatives past and teacups and dishware that belong to unnamed family members. Both photographers walk the trickle of a line between life and death, placing symbols of life—succulent, fresh fruit—next to symbols of death: an extinguished candle, remnant fish bones, broken egg shells. In doing so, they insist that these images, while void of people, are very human portraits, comprised of the same fragile tension that exists in our life and inevitability of entering the world thereafter.

Dima, 2010, from Stunt Bikers by Luis Belmonte Diaz

Something I often find myself thinking about is the difference between a practice and a project.

A practice is a daily routine; it's showing up to do creative work...even when nothing happens; it's never leaving the house without a camera; it's writing things down in a notebook; it's posting photos (even your weaker ones) on a blog; it's literally anything you do day-to-day to move your work forward--or sometimes just take in what surrounds you.

A project is something else entirely. Visit any photographer's portfolio website (too many to pick from, but literally try any) and you will find projects in a list on the lefthand side, or front and center in a slideshow. A project is hard to define because, as we've seen throughout the competition, there are so many different ways to make work. Distinct from looking, thinking and recording day-to-day, a project means action.

Scrolling through contenders, I think about what each photographer set out to do, or what irresistible possibilities they could not ignore. For contender Luis Belmonte Diaz that possibility is knowing more about things that catch his eye by getting right up close and taking photos.

Oil, 2010, from Stunt Bikers by Luis Belmonte Diaz

Luis writes:

Passing by the Ermitage in St. Petersburg, I saw a couple of boys riding what looked like very weird motorbikes. The vision of these drivers and their machines fascinated me immediately.

I spent a few days in the square waiting for the rain to stop and photograph the drivers, their machines, as well as the asphalt, looking for the unstable equilibrium that had attracted me the first time I saw them, that same tension I also found between machines and asphalt.

The best way to view Stunt Bikers is how Luis has sequenced it on his website. Scrolling from left to right, tightly cropped shots of faces in helmets and stripped down motorbikes are punctuated by traces of burned rubber and swirls of oil. The images amplify each other and create an unconventionally close-up portrait of this sport.

A project like this can be a catalyst for something--like interaction with a random group of people. But what made me think of practice and projects in the first place is how this series is a step beyond spontaneous, but not overly conceived. In practice, one might pass by the very weird motorbikes, snap a photograph, and keep on walking. To spend days getting to know something that catches your eye seems to lie somewhere in between.

You can view more projects at Luis's website, including the full Stunt Bikers series and the similar In Transit.

I was once in a relationship with a Man of Adventure. His bookshelves were filled with what I came to refer to as Men! Who Did! Great Things! His heroes were explorers, extreme athletes and a long list of bon vivants of varying health and alcohol tolerances. In the course of our time together, I came to know the names of each of the seven summits, that the Himalayan sherpa Tenzing Norgay probably was the first to ascend Mt. Everest over Edmund Hillary (but the secret of who did what first died with them), that the arguably most grueling one-person race in the world is the Véndee Globe. While not romantic in the most traditional sense, his quite literal lust for life underscored for me what the idea of romance was in the most far-reaching sense.

Thomas Prior is also a non-traditional romantic that follows the foolish and courageous. Prior's most recent visual investigations have been photographing people engaged in recreational activities in places or circumstances that are both beautiful and dangerous. The images he has given us to consider in this edition of HHS! were all taken on Maho Beach, which is an area situated on the Caribbean Island of St. Maarten. If you're not an adrenaline junkie or in a relationship with one that might advise you on such things, what's unique about Maho Beach is that it is situated directly adjacent to an airport, and the approaching jets fly oh-so-close to the beach such that it makes for anything between a dramatic horizon line, at the very least, to a life-threatening case of jet blast at the very worst.

Untitled, July 2010 from the series Maho Beach by Thomas Prior

Untitled, July 2010 from the series Maho Beach by Thomas Prior

In images from Prior's Maho Beach, people are shown in postures of alarm, excited agitation and fear, running across the picture plane with their bodies shown at harrowing (or harried) angles, hair standing straight up on end, blasts of sand shooting vertically in a wall in front of covered faces. My immediate associations are cult b&w Japanese monster films, where entire populations are scurrying for cover while under attack from the likes of mutant villians Mothra or Godzilla. Such shenanigans are exactly the kind of canvas that Prior goes looking for in his projects. Recently featured as a PDN 30 Photographers to Watch, Jacqueline Tobin interviewed him for the accolade, writing:

The "mixture of the super dedicated people and beautiful open landscapes" drew him to these subjects, he says. "The locations are simple, yet not at all boring. They're visually incredible, but made more amazing by humans."

In many of his images, Prior seems to catch people in somewhat awkward moments. "That kind of awkwardness is what I naturally react to," he says. "I like people awkward and landscapes ordered. This style runs through all of my photos and it's how I've always made pictures."

Untitled, July 2010 from the series Maho Beach by Thomas Prior

A 2009 HHS! Honorable Mention, we loved Prior's work so much that we made editions of two of his images from his series Blackrock Tower (check out our recent post on the 20x200 blog on extreme weather as artistic fodder). This latest body of work, made this summer, even, is perhaps even more impressive. I can't wait to see what he turns up next (and for those savvy among you, we all might get to find out what that next is if you're on the 20x200 newsletter mailing list for next week, hint hint).

You can view all of Thomas Prior's bodies of work on his website. He also maintains a blog.

Ambiguity may be the clue: there is the material, and there am I intruding my private intent. I know the imminence of the world and experience it with full sensuality; at the same time I am involved with the projection of myself as idea. Strong tensions are inevitable, pleasurable and disturbing. Is not the esthetic optimum order with the tensions continuing? —

Aaron Siskind, Creative Camera, May 1970

Today's contender, Jaap E. Helder, has a few things in common with someone that I consider one of the great photo-art gods, Aaron Siskind. Both of them find photographic inspiration in the landscape and environments of coastal Maine, and both of them have a painterly sensibility as regards texture, marks, depth and formal composition in the frame of an image.

Franklin 9, 2010 by Jaap E. Helder

Maine 1, 1949 by Aaron Siskind

Hailing from the Netherlands and originally trained as a painter, Helder has found in his residence in Maine many echoes of a childhood past spent in a busy, industrial harbor town. His images speak to a love of color and line interrupted by the element of a time which causes decay, and in its overlap with a seen subject, completes it. From Helder's artist statement:

Living in coastal Maine, I am inspired by the raw beauty of the landscape and the Atlantic Ocean, the worn surfaces I see around me, especially the ships in the harbors with their many layers of industrial paint, scratched and marked and worn down by the elements.

Through the relationship of colors, forms, and marks, through rhythm and balance, and the physical and psychological work... I draw the viewer into an imagined landscape, into a colorful, dynamic world that hovers between the abstract and the representational.

Trenton I, 2010 by Jaap E. Helder

There is in Helder's work a large playground for sensual visual pleasure: forms interrupt forms, overlap, elements that in painting would require many built-up layers and scraping away with a palette knife here only require the passage of time and the caprices of wind and sun. Like Siskind, his is a very formal eye, and there is nothing arbitrary about what constitutes the edges of a frame, or its interior. What we are given to look at as a final photographic vision is the product of a situation where the artist has looked and looked and looked again at this same scene dozens of times. Like a painter before a blank canvas summoning up the composition hours or days before a mark is ever made, that is the process by which these images have been realized.

A complete catalog of Helder's photographs as well as paintings are nicely laid out on his website.

When I am having a nightmare, my unwelcome dreamscape usually involves familiar people and situations, where things occur in a strange logic and stream of events that never actually happened in real life, but makes acute emotional sense upon waking. For individuals to whom real and persistent trauma or abuse have occurred, I've been told that their nightmares are actually the stuff of a remembered reality: a continual re-staging of abusive power dynamics, senseless and horrible events, and a crude feeling of emptying out that is realized when the dream has ended.

4024 Locke Ave, from the series Exposure in Vivo by Selena Salfen

The work of Selena Salfen is both the stuff of art and art therapy, for the story she is compelled to tell and work through is that of a trauma suffered by three generations of her family, and by telling it and re-orienting the past, she hopes to purge its menacing hold and power on those still around to feel its grip. From her spare and haunting artist's statement:

My grandfather has been a consistently frightening figure in my family. He returned severely damaged from his nine months as a starved and violently interrogated German prisoner of war in World War II. Functioning through the remnants of his untreated traumatic experiences, he raised a family in a physically and psychologically abusive household, governed by his alcoholism and nonsensical rules. He worked as a mortician, stealing from those he embalmed and bringing a desensitized relationship with death home to his six children. This traumatic environment cultivated self-destruction and dysfunction amongst the children, leading to suicide, addiction, and many life-long struggles. The legacy of my grandfather's experience in war and resultant abuse of his family has mutated and transmitted itself through three generations. For this project, I use the camera to disrupt the pattern of silence that has guarded our family's dysfunction, while reconnecting the family and redefining their experience within my grandfather's environment.

Extracting the Gold (from the Teeth), from the series Exposure in Vivo by Selena Salfen

The Punishment Buzzcut, from the series Exposure in Vivo by Selena Salfen

Putting the Cat Down, from the series Exposure in Vivo by Selena Salfen

How does you begin healing from a bogeyman that's still around? How do you begin to tell the past so that in the re-telling, you don't actually re-live its potent and toxic emotions as well? How to let go of the past; or maybe more precisely how to lessen its effects on the present? Salfen goes on to describe the psychological underpinnings to her artistic practice for this series:

To make this body of work, I flew members of my family back from their scattered locations to the house in Missouri where my grandfather still lives. This process mimics the treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, referred to exposure in vivo, in which subjects are directed to return to the physical location of a trauma and confront their fears in order to heal. The photographs I make in these locations are reconstructions of stories from the past, as well as observations of each descendant's reimmersion into this historically traumatic location. In addition, I excavate the space, searching for evidence of past and present dysfunction amongst my grandfather's neglected animals, rotting food, and sixty years of hoarding.

The images from Selena Salfen's Exposure in Vivo project stun and confuse me, and leave me with the feeling that I have witnessed something powerful. Sifting through the series on her website, going through the narrative once, twice, several times in a hypnotic, compulsive repetition, I feel as if I have been experiencing a tilted, muted dream life of someone's waking nightmare. Would these images seem menacing without the backstory? I believe they would, if taken in their careful sequencing that Salfen demonstrates on her site. Can they bring any peace or closure or better coping to the actual family members affected and depicted in them? I sure hope so.

Images from this series are currently on view at the The Camera Club of New York, where Salfen received second place in their national photography competition, alongside 2008 Hot Shot Juliane Eirich.

Salfen's entire series Exposure in Vivo is viewable on her website.

SBD Runways, 2009 by Mary Kathleen Shafer

Contender Mary Kathleen Shafer references artist Robert Smithson in her documentation of airfields, over 100 of which she has photographed from both the ground and from up in the air. She writes of Smithson, "he identified the airport as the quintessential earthwork, a stunning example of leaving a longer mark on the land," an idea which made had a great impact on the issues of temporariness that surrounded his own work. Schafer also describes her fascination with "Le Corbusier's ideas about the drama with which the empty horizontal space of airfields meets the verticality of airport facilities and surrounding urbanity". In discussing this, her photographs start to reveal an interesting tension—that between the natural progression of the land and the impact left by man versus the drama and invisible energy of the space not occupied.

Smithson's Spiral Jetty, an meticulously crafted outdoor installation made of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth and water in 1970, was vulnerable to the forces of weather and simple unpredictability. Built in a lake that was going through a drought at the time of construction, the Jetty found itself submerged once the water rose for almost three decades until 2005. The longevity of earthworks demonstrated that they were threatened by the environment, as well as by human-generated industrialization.

Airports, like Smithson's installation, are highly calculated places that must pay heed to the environment as well as to human impact. Thinking about these images in a present day context, we can also see a certain tension being revealed in what is physically present and the drama of the invisible space. Since 2001, airports have been a point of uneasiness for both the government and citizens. Despite the impressive landscaping and coordination of machinery, airports are seen as sites of national weakness and risk, a vulnerable access point to the safety of the country. Looking at Mary Kathleen's work, we see airfields and their horizons from afar, where all appears to be peaceful and serene, a never ending web of tarmac surrounded by mountains, absent from any this unpleasantness. However, the potential for havoc can always be assumed at airports; the calm and often grandiose landscape cannot stay that way forever.

Miramar #2, 2009 by Mary Kathleen Shafer

View more of Mary Kathleen's work on her website.

Several recent contenders have also featured planes, transportation and airports in their work: Ozant Kamaci and Judith Stenneken.

What does it mean to be in a place but not of it? What are the associations and connotations of the American South if you are from there? What about if you are not? Whatever your orientation is, the deep South truly is its own zip code, and its own zip codes within zip codes if you spend enough time there or in conversation with those native to that place. Romantic decay, vast tracts of unpopulated and lonely-looking land, fierce pride and loyalty mixed with problematic politics and provincialism are but a few things that come to my mind as someone who lived for many years in Tennessee and Georgia. And then left. And then returned. And then left again.

This push-pull/pull-push relationship of place and personhood is an important element in the work of Kathleen R. Robbins, originally a native of the Mississippi Delta. Like many that inhabit rural areas with dreams of something larger than the family farm, Robbins transplanted herself away from the homestead, seeking education and opportunities in other parts of the country. In the fall of 2001, she and her brother decided to return, and both inhabited family properties that had been unoccupied for decades.

Skinning House, from the series Into the Flatland by Kathleen Robbins

Untitled, from the series Into the Flatland by Kathleen Robbins

Of the experience of re-inhabiting these spaces, Robbins writes that:

...They had begun to settle into the earth, and we felt we were doing something important by re-inhabiting them. I ate from my great-grandmother's china, drank from her crystal and slept in her bed. At dusk I rocked on the porch and watched the blackbirds descend on the canebrake planted by my great-grandfather. Living on the farm I existed in a strange continuum. My family's history and their connection to this place were markedly present in my everyday experience.

The entire Into the Flatland series has been shot over a period of five years, and explores, comments upon and documents Robbins' relationship to land, her family, to memory, shared histories and legacies. Her images are infused with a sense of both the familiar and the foreign, as seen from the filter of one who is sometimes in a place but not of it. In the full project statement on her site, she writes eloquently of negotiating this conflict:

Into the Flatfland explores familial obligation and our conflicted relationship with "home" and combines a sense of personal history with a broader visual concept of the American South. The photographs in this series... are the people I love most in a place that I am deeply connected to. I chose to leave the Delta for many of the same reasons anyone ever chooses to leave a rural area, and there will always be a certain amount of guilt associated with that choice. This is land that my family has inhabited for generations, and I am pulled to this place in a way that I am not able to fully articulate. It is not my nostalgia alone that creates this longing; it is that of my mother and my mother's mother.

Kathleen R. Robbins has been creating images her connections to the Delta for some time, and we've written about her earlier work in previous HHS! entry periods. With Into the Flatland, her vision seems strong and completely realized, and that despite her statement to the contrary, one that she has gracefully articulated.

The complete series can be viewed on her website.

For many of us city-dwellers, even though we live packed on-top-of and next-to one another like sardines, we hardly see how our neighbors live. In my own particular building, the across-the-hall neighbors are keen on audibly locking their doors, never letting us even get a peek at their curtain color or choice of wall paint. So, I fulfill my curiosities by looking into people's homes by way of blogs and projects like The Selby and design*sponge's "Sneak Peeks," keen on capturing how it is that people live. These two sites venture into the homes of creatives: musicians, museum directors, writers, fashion and graphic designers and artists of all ilks. They are the spaces of those already partial to making the kinds of aesthetic decisions that might inform a beautiful home and so we lust over their choice of bar stools, the textiles on their beds, ponder how they accumulated such beautiful mid-century teak furniture, and wish our own apartments had the same kinds of crown moldings and built-in bookcases as theirs. The homes are real, but also aspirational; we look and we covet, but know we're looking at the exception.

Apartment Kitchen with Clean Dishes, Moving Out, 2006 by Sarah Szwajkos

In her statement, contender Sarah Szwajkos quotes author John Updike: ""My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me -- to give the mundane its beautiful due." She photographs homes as well, but unlike the aforementioned projects who cultivate highly curated living spaces, Sarah is more interested in photographing personal spaces whose beauty isn't so apparent in visible objects.

She goes on to ask: "how do such everyday objects in our homes unveil the order and the disorder of modern life?" Sarah sees personal space as a Rorschach Test for inferring "basic creative urges," an open canvas for reading into someone's proclivities towards neatness or clutter, and an accumulation of tiny decisions made over time. She consciously leaves the inhabitants out of the frame, so instead we focus on what little we have to identify who they are, by observing the glint of the light and mysteries that lurk behind open cupboards and on the other side of bedroom walls. In this mundanity, we give life to the inanimate, and pause a second, to absorb the quietude of the places we call home.

Shower Stall, Scrub Brush, Two Hooks, 2008 by Sarah Szwajkos

See more of Sarah's work on personal spaces on her website, Damn Rabbit Studios.

Oh, He's My Brother, 2009 from At the Seams, by Kate Stone

One of my favorite parts of looking through Hey, Hot Shot! entries—and looking at art in genera—is that each viewing stirs up the strangest of memories and forms an untidy web of visual and conceptual associations. When I came across the work of contender Kate Stone this morning, I suddenly remembered a documentary I watched on Discovery Channel when I was eight. What drew me into the program back then was choppy footage of the Loch Ness Monster and recorded spottings of UFOs. Today it finally hit me that the what I was watching was actually a history of photo-manipulation.

It's easy to assume that photography is fact, but even before Adobe Photoshop made it dangerously effortless to alter images, tricksters were skillfully cutting and pasting away to (ostensibly) fake photographs of sea monsters, alien encounters, and all manners of the supernatural. Kate's series At the Seams employs these same lo-fi methods of manipulation to create images that pass for normal at first glance, but quickly reveal themselves to be crude, yet complex illusions.

Kate writes:

I used photographs of domestic interiors and common architecture to construct impossible, uncanny spaces that evoke a feeling of hesitant curiosity, a nervous desire to explore the room, to peek around the bend or to see what lies behind the door at the end of the hall. Our acceptance of photography as reality makes these images hard to understand, especially for those who know the original place. At first glance the rooms and buildings in these photographs appear real. Upon closer examination, however, something is clearly wrong. Doorways are misplaced and once rigid walls are twisted and torn. Distorted perspective creates incongruent angles and improbable shadows. These spaces are literally falling apart at the seams.

What's interesting about photo-manipulation is that it always carries with it the question of motive—why, and for whom was this reality changed or constructed? The Loch Ness fakers were most certainly chasing money and fame, but Kate's images are in pursuit of narrative. Each image is titled with a phrase reminiscent of lyrics from a song or a line from a book but they appear to be made up entirely. At the Seams draws me irresistibly into the mind-bending constructs of perspective and narrative, but the photograph's logic is ultimately impenetrable. Once you've looked twice, it´s almost certain that you'll look again, and again, and again.

Debbie Downstairs, 2009 from At the Seams by Kate Stone

Kate's fascination with questioning authority and altering truth continues into her series The Pinchbeck Habitats, which cuts up and reconstructs natural history museum dioramas.

Kate writes:

The museum's air of authenticity persuades viewers to animate the scene with their imaginations, to ignore the artifice and believe what they see. The Pinchbeck Habitats, like the dioramas, combine three dimensions with two and blend the real with the constructed, creating an illusion of reality. But in these habitats the manipulation and distortion are brought to the foreground, pushing the limits of the imagination and trust of their viewers.

Untitled from The Pinchbeck Habitats by Kate Stone

Ultimately, Kate describes the motive behind her work best when she writes, "the power of photography forces the viewer to suspend disbelief for the sake of wonder." You can view more work, including full sets of work from both of the series mentioned above, at Kate's website.

Pause III, 2009 by Ozant Kamaci

Contender Ozant Kamaci photographs airplanes as they fly behind trees, collaging the natural and man-made objects into flat, striking images. It's the "juxtaposition of powerful machines, which are symbols of advancement and technology, against nature, which is widely accepted as precious and untouched" that interests him. But the images are also studies in composition and layering, and a slight inquiry into the ability of photography to "move the viewer to a new space," through these specific points-of-view which are repeated throughout the series Pause.

Untitled images from Concorde by Wolfgang Tillmans

I am reminded of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans' Concorde, a document that looks at the power—and simultaneous hope and possible destruction—that comes with a machine as powerful as plane. The concorde leaves streaks in the air, zooms past farmland, rips past trees, and pulses through the sky, tiny in relation to the world, ominous nonetheless. Tillmans warns us to be weary of what awes us; the beautiful and the grotesque can be almost indistinguishable.

Ozant's own fascination with airplanes extends to several of his bodies of work, which depict people—in awe—watching planes in a field and, on the front page of his site, a plane passing behind a cow. Throughout, he insists again and again that nature and the man-made are increasingly intertwined, and that our fascination with the roar and whoosh that comes with these once-futuristic machines that we're now dependent upon is a double-edged sword, that must be continually acknowledged.

Untitled, from Pause M, by Ozant Kamaci

You can view more of Ozant's work on his website.

In two weeks, I'll board a red-eye to Tegel airport in Berlin, Germany, a flight I hope is occupied by a restful night's sleep and a few decent movies. But, because a flight replete with such serenity has evaded me my entire life, I'm fully prepared for the onslaught of stress and exhaustion that usually comes with travel. The hassle starts with packing (What do I bring? How much can I bring without being charged that extra baggage fee? And which shoes do I wear to the airport that are easiest to get through security?) Next, I'll prepare myself for the hullaballoo of the airport: fellow anxious passengers clumsily re-packing their suitcases, long, fidgety lines navigating security, and harried travelers double checking their pockets and purses for their passports. As I sit here thinking about this impending departure, I can already feel myself tensing up.

AF 3231, 2008 by Judith Stenneken

Berlin-based contender Judith Stenneken visits airports too, but as a photographer seeking places in the status of the in-between. Her series Last Call takes a look at another Berlin airport, Tempelhof Central, during its final days in decline, and records a quietude foreign to most people's experiences in places like these. A woman with a loose ponytail looks lazily at a x-ray machine, but the security lines are empty and there's nothing to be scanned. The bathroom lights have been shut off, the plants filling the main entrance hall are yellowed and dry, and an airplane in waiting is wrapped in plastic—rather corpse-like. One knows they're looking at the eerie aftermath of a once lively party—a place at some point prized for its functionality and as an important junction for connection and innovation. It feels mournful to see it now, and to imagine what it will become in its fully closed state.

Of Tempelhof's final days, and her project, Judith writes:

Although the airport was still operating, it felt as if the building was deserted, and the only people who were there acted like extras in a movie: a man reading the newspaper and waiting for his flight, a woman from the ground crew standing behind at the check-in counter waiting for passengers to come, the cleaning lady playing with her feather duster. Nobody speaking, no announcements from the loudspeakers. It was a place where time did not seem to matter.

VG 117, 2008 by Judith Stenneken

Tempelhof, built in 1923, stood for over 80 years as one of Europe's three iconic pre-World War II airports, and was often thought to be the most advantageous of the city's airports because of its central location. The airport's closing was first proposed in 1996 in conjunction with the mayor's proposal for the expansion of another Berlin airport, and many, until it closed for good in October 2008, rallied for the location to stay open. Its 12 year decline and slow motion close lend a cinematic element, as Stenneken notes in her statement and one imagines it must been awfully eerie to have been one of the airport's last passengers, nervously wondering if the the lackluster pace was matched by lazy operations. In her documentation of this dying place, Stenneken hones in on objects once used by employees and travelers that are now abandoned, capturing an echoing ripple of quiet that extends beyonds airport walls.

Untitled by Jennifer Garza-Cuen

There's something delightfully creepy about the interiors and portraits by photographer Jennifer Garza-Cuen. The characters in her photos, while bordering on the far end of the David Lynch-ian scale of producing feelings of weird uncomfortability, are not who the portraits are actually of. The portraits are all a collective portrait of a place—a place immortalized in lyrics and film (both the moving and the still variety), that place being Reno, Nevada.

While I've never been to the desert west, or the strange man-made city of Reno, my projected mythology of what I imagine that place to be and mean is entirely satisfied in this theatrically produced series of images. Is Reno a place of heartaches and hard-sells? Is it a place where improbable things happen? Where weird is normal? Where time and space mean something different, and where people behave differently because of it? Looking at the series of images that Jennifer Garza-Cuen has submitted for consideration in this edition of HHS!, I am left with the bewildering thought: What, exactly, happens in rooms like these?

Untitled by Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Untitled by Jennifer Garza-Cuen

I'm uncertain whether the accompanying artist statement elucidates the answer to this question, or maybe, elaborates more on the sense of trippy displacement that these images evoke. Garza-Cuen's stream-of-conscious explication certainly adds to the je ne sais quois-ness of the project:

By staging my narrative in a real place I can reveal the unreal qualities of the everyday. History is stretched out in front of us and Reno is the stage for an anti-epic, an opera of futility, a specific in the generality of life. I use heavy light, large landscapes interspersed with characters and props taken from mythology and life, layers that physically slow down the reading of the photograph. I tread the line between the staged and the real. My characters appear and disappear, swallowed by the landscapes. The interiors that surround them take on their lost personality. Reno becomes the central character. Repetition, rhythm, place, symbols, all leads us through a story that takes us nowhere. It is the rehearsal of a performance that never takes place, a rehearsal of a life that culminates not in the performance but in the insignificant day-to-day wanderings and confusion more emblematic of actual lived life. Reno is my metaphor for life. In Reno, life is the gamble we all lose, but play anyway. Reno is every time, every place, everyman.

The daughter of, "an ex-bullfighter and a defrocked minister," and a current MFA candidate at the Rhode Island School of Design, Jennifer Garza-Cuen's work has been shown both in the states and abroad, and her participation in the NadaDada show in Reno, Nevada might be the most mindfully apt venue for this body of work.

Super Fund, 2009 by Remy Steiner

When I first moved to New York two years ago, I both lived and worked in my favorite borough: Brooklyn. Everyday, I would bike between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, passing over the 3rd street bridge over the Gowanus Canal. The smell emanating from the canal was horrible, and on most days, broken glass and garbage crunched beneath my tires. Though it wasn't the prettiest route to take, it was the easiest path, and I tried to find solace in the fact that after a few blocks of cringing, I would once again ride past lovely brownstones and tree-lined streets. Though I'm not particularly nostalgic for these rides, when I look at the work of today's contender, Remy Steiner, I look back on those early morning rides with fondness. Born in Vienna, raised in Northern California, and now living in New York, I think Remy brings a sense of wonder and fresh pair of eyes to a city that seems to be downright overwhelming on some days. The photos, taken on the fly, capture private moments of things we see everyday that are easy to overlook.

Gowanus, 2009 by Remy Steiner

Through the use of her iPhone Remy has photographed all of these place and writes that she "invites her viewers to reclaim a slice of time they lost, to experience the story and to see the world as picturesque". This new genre of cameraphone point and shoot photography is an interesting one to consider because it replaces the traditional pointing and shooting done on film of Walker Evans' era. Though images from a cameraphone are usually low quality and not reproducible in a large format, they can capture many unseen moments and be virally shared over the internet. For Remy, it appears that this mode of sharing, and the quick feedback loop that comes with it, allows her to communicate with her viewers. This insta-connection provides her with valuable commentary about the photos themselves, and represents a young life in love with a city, excited to share it with whomever will look. She ends her statement by writing, Posting her captured images on Facebook, what started out as a love letter to her adopted city evolved into something else: a public invitation for friends and acquaintances alike to share in and comment on ideas she had been kicking around her whole life.

To view more of Remy's work visit her website.

Related: See the work of contender Catherine Vermeland, who also makes images using the camera on her phone.

Untitled, 2010 by Chuck Koosmann

I have had awful, dismal eyesight since I was seven years old. For this reason, the images from Chuck Koosmann's submission seem very familiar to me: his blurry, impressionistic and rather painterly photographs from a series titled Almost Real... resemble quite precisely my own bewildering, vulnerable visual experience of the world on the (very, very, very rare) occasions that I find myself without a visual aid.

This association is obviously very specific to me (and potentially, I suppose, to the other, unlucky, near-blind folks out there). An individual response to these images is, in part, Koosmann's intention in this series. He writes of his work:

Recently, I have been working to find new ways to make images that are less objective, less literal, images that open themselves to interpretation, imagination and memory, where the viewer plays a role in creating what is to be known.

However, there is more to these photographs. While they do remain open to such personal readings, they simultaneously hint at something that both specifically concerns Koosmann himself, and to which virtually anyone can relate: the limitations, the incompleteness and the inaccuracy of memory. Koosmann continues in his statement:

As I get older I'm finding that memory is not a constant. It is a process, an exercise, an ever-changing creation and re-creation of what we think we know. I am not at a place where memory is a problem now, but as I age I can imagine that it may become an issue. This project helps me to see how those who struggle with memory may feel and cope, and what it may mean to me.

The viewer is not given much concrete visual information to work with in Almost Real...;we are left with no option but to project, to infer and to flesh these pictures out ourselves. I feel like I can—with some degree of confidence—guess at what these out-of-focus and often-gorgeous images depict: one seems to be the bottom edge of a set of blinds against a hardwood floor, (or maybe the slats of the railing surrounding a deck) while another hints at a domestic interior at dusk. The images are just barely representational, although Koosmann's three photographs with human figures are slightly easier to make out: one is almost definitely a seated female nude; one shows several figures against a shoreline in gray, gloomy weather, and the final is of a man in a suit, outdoors on a sunny day. His hand is at his neck; it looks as though he could be loosening his tie at the end of a long workday.

Untitled, 2010 by Chuck Koosmann

Still, I will never be certain if my interpretations are correct. This lack of clarity is enforced by the fact that each photo is "untitled," and while this is certainly not unusual in art, in this case such vagueness seems intentional, and very much in keeping with Koosmann's project.

Attempting to interpret and define these images is in this way akin to the act of remembering, and resembles trying to spontaneously picture the face of someone you haven't seen in some time. The works in this series turn the traditional idea of the photograph as a record or an aid for recollection on its head, acting as a visual equivalent to memory. The picture is full of blurry edges and fuzzy details, ultimately becoming a a hazy outline of something that we can never be quite sure of.

As viewers, we grasp at clues as to what and whom these photographs represent, just as we grasp to recall events, people, or feelings we've encountered or experienced, which escape us almost as quickly as they appear. In both, there is a distinct, inescapable component of invention. Koosmann's images are hugely evocative and at the same time quite frustrating: they can inspire very personal associations and emotions, while simultaneously mirroring and highlighting just how subjective, how unreliable, how mercurial our memories in fact are.

More of Koosmann's work (although no images from the Almost Real... series) can be viewed on his website.

What I most appreciate about the work of today's contender, Taylor R. Glenn, is his ability to visually communicate a subversion of a popularly held and regularly reinforced set of cultural stereotypes about what it means to be a factory worker in China today. As recently as this week I was listening to an NPR story about a writer living in Beijing that was hired, just on the basis of his being male and white, to pose as a quality control expert touring a factory—lending the aura of Western credibility to the factory and its practices to unassuming outsiders— in exchange for $1000 a week. This story, along with an endless stream concerning product recalls, poisoned petfood, and even tales of entire villages of enslaved children working in brick factories, is what passes for cover stories about the contemporary industrial age in China.

Invited to photograph a family-run artificial flower making factory in Huidong, Taylor Glenn was treated to an entirely different narrative, remarkable in its serene normalcy and culture of fairness and dignity.

Flowers and Workers I, November 2009 from the series Far Chang by Taylor R. Glenn

A self-taught photographer hailing from Jackson, WY, Glenn writes:

This family-owned company, like many Chinese businesses, exports their products to Western markets. So many of the goods we purchase today are manufactured in China but we rarely give thought to how these products are made and the individuals who are responsible. The story of this factory and its people is very positive which is a departure from the largely negative associations the West implies upon Chinese producers. The facility is clean and the workers are treated well. The Miao family, who operates this business do so with integrity and compassion. This is an important story that is not being told in mainstream media. These images should encourage a more well rounded dialogue about our relationship with China and its people who manufacture many of the goods we buy.

Untitled, November 2009 from the series Far Chang by Taylor R. Glenn

The entire series gives a holistic sense of place and what people's working lives are like: there are expected long shots of rows of workers assembling plastic flower arrangements, but there are also many quiet portraits that are unique for their apparent lack of agenda, and other notable moments like a scene of a break room containing old school upright arcade games, where presumably the monotony of dealing in fake flowers can be replaced with the relative pleasure of spacing out a virtual, electronic world.

Glenn's project, Far Chang, by virtue of its open-ended and non-exploitative view of factory workers in China, recalled for me the work of another remarkable body of work on the same subject, Cao Fei's video piece Whose Utopia, filmed in a lightbulb factory in the Pearl River Delta. Conceived over a six month stay in the factory, Cao Fei relays the imagined dreams for a better future and livelihood of the people who work and live at the factory. What is similar to me about Glenn's work and Cao Fei's is that the tone of each is neither pitying or cloying; they both seem to impart something of what it means and feels to inhabit these spaces without relying on cheap sentimentalism or playing on our already well-played upon cultural (in)sensitivities. The focus is on Individuals instead of a collective cultural projection, and on content that is personal in place of that which is culturally premeditated. In my view, having that view widened and subverted from what I thought I knew is always a good thing.

To view the entire series as well as other bodies of Taylor Glenn's work, visit his website.

Untitled, from Continental Drift: Iceland/California by Marion Belanger

Buckminster Fuller, the architect, inventor and futurist, frequently coined his own words. He referred to our planet as "Spaceship Earth" and he invented new terms for upstairs and downstairs:

The words "down" and "up", according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words "in" and "out" should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object's relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. "I suggest to audiences that they say, "I'm going 'outstairs' and 'instairs.'" At first that sounds strange to them; They all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real "reality."

While his terminology may sound reminiscent of a certain theme park attraction, I believe that in rethinking his vocabulary Bucky was onto something: a more authentic connection with the place we call home.

It was the appearance of a Geodesic-like dome, but also the idea of understanding the world through redefinition, that brought Bucky to mind when I saw the work of contender (and previous HHS! Honorable Mention) Marion Belanger. For Marion's series Continental Drift she traveled along fault lines in the earth photographing the locations above, then brought together photographs of Iceland and California, pairing their slowly shifting landscapes. At some point we all learned about fault lines from a textbook, but they tell us nothing about what these most active places actually feel like.

The images of Iceland are sweeping and dramatic. Marion writes:

In Iceland, the North American Plate is moving westward, creating new crust as magma pushes up from the mantle. Geologically, this place marks a divergent boundary, characterized by splitting earth, steaming hot water and a young lava landscape almost devoid of trees. The land is unstable and raw.

Rift #26 (Heimaey Houses), 2007, from Continental Drift: Iceland/California by Marion Belanger

Fault #1 (Displaced Fence), 2008, from Continental Drift: Iceland/California by Marion Belanger

The California landscape, though still on a fault-line, is dramatically different:

In California, the Pacific plate is sliding north relative to the North American plate, which means that eventually, in many millions of years, Los Angeles will be where San Francisco is now. While this transformative plate boundary is characterized by earthquake activity, it lacks the spectacular drama of a divergent boundary such as what is found in Iceland...The monotone housing developments built on top of the fault seem to deny the existence of the unstable earth below the surface.

What's so exciting about the project (aside from the beauty of the photos themselves) is the spirit of exploration and learning things for yourself which the work embodies. Marion's images reveal the lesser-seen facets of this scientific story, and convey things I once learned in school in a richer way than any textbook could dream of. Looking at these photos, I begin to feel reality.

You can view more work on Marion's website.

Untitled, from the series Mum by Nancy A. Newberry

For eighteen brief months at one of the most impressionable of impressionable ages, I lived in North Texas. I moved there with my family when I was 13, and spent most of junior high school there. Fraught as that age is with confusion, insecurity and boundless wonder, longing and mystery, I remember quite vividly the pretty, preening girls of my Dallas/Ft. Worth suburb, and wanting and trying very much to fit in.

One particular adolescent detail came careening fast into my adult consciousness when I first saw the work of contender Nancy A. Newberry. Like one would imagine, football is big in Texas, and what is equally a rite of passage repeated through junior and then high school is homecoming. Many of us are familiar with the codified ritual of the formal dress, dance, and choosing of a homecoming queen and king, as has been immortalized from all ends of the spectrum in John Hughes' and Stephen King's films. There's a Texan home-spun accent to the whole thing that's just a little bit different, and a whole lot, um, shiny. It's the Homecoming Mum.

Untitled, from the series Mum by Nancy A. Newberry

From her artist's statement:

MUM is centered around a gift-giving ritual virtually unknown outside of Texas, the Homecoming Mum. Exchanged between friends the Mum is an elaborate corsage decorated to indicate the wearer's interests, social standing, and allegiances to loved ones. Homecoming mums are proudly worn for all activities on Homecoming Friday, and then immortalized as trophies on bedroom walls all over Texas. Each year the collection grows with a more elaborate Mum, marking progress and personal history. As both adornment and insignia, the Mum offers its wearer the opportunity to promote self-image, while identifying their status as an integral member of their particular community. At a time when many American high schoolers seem actively disengaged from the world around them, the Homecoming Mum constitutes a unique act of cultural immersion, and specific brand of folk art.

Newberry goes on to say that the impetus for this project came when, recovering in her childhood home from an injury, she came across these exact mum mementos from her high school days, and wrote that she was, "..immediately confronted by the ritual trappings of collective history," with the discovery.

Reminiscent to me of the compositionally taut (and not say psychologically fraught) images from Sally Mann's body of work At Twelve, or even Lauren Greenfield's long study of Girl Culture, these strange portraits that Nancy Newberry gives to us in Mum skillfully evoke many of these same themes that I never seem to grow tired of looking at: visual descriptions of what it is like to be yearning towards a very defined social status, obsession with body image, a waxing appreciation of a dawning and powerful sexuality and maybe most striking—the deep desire to create distinctions of individuality while adhering to a tightly controlled, ritualized and recognized social code of sameness.

Plus, Homecoming Mums are just morbidly fascinating. Like an exploded Christmas ornament, the Mums can grow to defy all expectations of mum-ness, appearing to dwarf the wearer's features, or even conceal one's basic features.

Untitled, from the series Mum by Nancy A. Newberry

Newberry's entire Mum series can be viewed on her website. An exhibition this fall at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston will show images from this project.

We all do it. That is: peer inside other people's windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the storied lives that may be hiding inside. My own stolen glances are guided by a visual hunt for elaborate chandeliers, gorgeous floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases, or the hope that I'll happen to see a Van Gogh or Picasso hanging on a living room wall from where I'm standing on the sidewalk. From there I make up intricate tales about the people who live in these mysterious homes, imagining from whom they inherited their belongings and how they must spend their days.

Window of Split Devotion, 2009 by Ben Golik

In many cases, however, it's what's on and in the window—flower boxes, statuettes, lacy curtains, crosses, signs, stickers or flags, that are telling of who the people who live inside. Relics are collected, then placed—sometimes delicately and other times haphazardly—on sills, offering tiny hints of personal proclivities and other subconscious habits. These are the geometric frames that contender Ben Golik documents for his project Other People's Windows as he walks around a succinct grid of streets in the London suburbs, offering interpretive interjections and loose analysis of the residents he imagines live behind these windows with the titles he attaches to each image.

A map to navigate Other People's Windows

On Church Lane, there is the Window of Quiet Contemplation, Window of Unkempt Promises and the Window of Forgotten Childhood. Turn a corner onto Station Road and you'll find the Window of Misplaced Affection, Window of Tangled Emotions, and Window of Romantic Ideals. Golik presents his windows street by street, navigable on a map, so one can visually follow the path he may have taken on foot as he observed, captured and annotated each of his stops.

Golik writes of his project:

Some windows are carefully stage-managed, filled with consciously chosen cues. Other less considered arrangements can be even more revealing. Some build barriers against the world outside. Others engage with passers-by, telling a story - fact or fiction - about the people living there. Whether contrived or carefree, each of these windows says something about its owners. The observant passer-by might catch a moment of self-expression. For some, the sill is an outdoor mantelpiece on which to celebrate prized possessions. For others, it's a place to discard the unwanted; objects unworthy of display inside that will ironically garner more attention outside.

Window of Fleeting Glances, 2010 by Ben Golik

If Golik knows, or speculates further about these windows, their contents, and the homes they're attached to, he restrains himself from sharing this information in the presentation of his images. He instead saves his more extemporaneous observations for the blog attached to the project, where he writes snippets like, "A WWF sticker. An RSPB sticker. The pretty lace swans. The people behind this window clearly love animals. Plants... not so much. I almost called this the Window of the Lapsed Environmentalist." Ben invites one to look at—and into—these images as though nobody is home, and even if they are, to take joy in not knowing what lays beyond their choice of window decor.

You can see additional images from Other People's Windows on the project website as well as more from Ben's portfolio.

Successful work abounds in the storied narratives of prodigal photographers. Following the kinds of life-changing crossroads or traumas that beset all of us from time to time, some compelling imagery can and has been made by artists retreating into their geographic/psycho-biographies for release, reprieve and answers. Often at the threshold of these adult moments, we realize, even if we're not willing to concede that we know very much, that at least we know where we came from. And in instances where we have renounced the past, a return to what and where we were at one time can provide important clues about which direction to go next.

Untitled, from the series Off Route by Gary G. Breece

Photographer Gary G. Breece had reason to have this dialog with himself, which ultimately led to Off Route, the body of work he's submitted for this round of HHS!. From his artist statement:

Five years ago, after experiencing numerous endings and unexpected losses, I found myself off track and at a psychic crossroads of sorts. Feeling directionless, I became drawn to, but at the same time reluctant, to revisit my Southern rural roots. I eventually decided to get a place on the coast of North Carolina and began spending bits of time there, taking rides on my '76 Moto Guzzi motorcycle, through the meandering back roads, allowing myself to just see what I'd see. These rides acted as a form of therapy for me. And the more I took these little journeys, the more I fell in love with the beauty of these out-of-the-way places. So I sought them out more, connecting with the landscape and locals, immersing myself in a place that I'd left years before and was now seeing with new perspective. I consider many of the color photographs from this series to be self-portraits...each image depicts landscapes or subjects that are themselves perhaps off route, just as I was during that time.

Untitled, from the series Off Route by Gary G. Breece

Untitled, from the series Off Route by Gary G. Breece

Untitled, from the series Off Route by Gary G. Breece

I highly recommend taking a moment to view the Off Route series in its entirety on Gary's website. Seen as a complete body of work, the images offer a sense of private revelation and a glimpse at experiences that are infused with contradictory sensations of alienation mixed with a near meditative transcendence. It is well worth the viewing time. Breece's eyes see both the beauty and sadness in encroaching nature, barren vistas and broken-down motels. And, he steals strange, private moments off the side of the road that are generously given back to an audience of strangers.

I love my dog and he loves me. When I'm bored he's ready to play, when I'm tired he's there to snuggle, and when I'm feeling stressed he comes running over to lick my face. I know it's kind of silly, but I sometimes wonder what our relationship would be like if he could talk. I think he loves me, at least. Since we can't communicate through language, our bond—as simple and wonderful as it is—is based almost entirely on inference and projection.

It's this gap of understanding between pet and owner (as well as the widespread phenomenon of household pets, in general) that fascinates contender Alex Arzt.

Debbie and Peanut, Chico, CA 2009, by Alex Arzt

Alex's series Human-Animal documents household pets and the people who love them a little too much.

Alex writes:

I continually wondered how adaptable the human home is for other species, whether that species lives in its own bedroom or in a cage in the backyard. The animals in these pictures often occupy the home space as fixtures much like the trinkets and framed pictures that display the animal lover's identity. Various objects, including empty grocery store food packets, tchotchkes, stuffed animals, animal clothes, car decals, drawings, memorialized gravesites and photographs identify the human owners as animal-lovers, even when the object of their affection is not captured in the frame. As many of my photographs make clear, some human identities are carved through the creation of a familiar human-pet dynamic involving both affection and dominance, captivity and care. My photographs record this man-made symbiosis as it occurs in and around the American home.

Another series, Ailurophilia (another word for "cat fancier") more narrowly investigates obsessive pet owners of the feline persuasion. The photographs are hilarious (especially as a full series), but I'll let them speak for themselves:

Untitled from Ailurophilia by Alex Arzt

Untitled from Ailurophilia by Alex Arzt

Untitled from Ailurophilia by Alex Arzt

All I have to say is that aside from taking fine photographs, It takes someone pretty brave to venture into a cat convention. You can see more work at Alex's website.

Long before there were cameras as we know them today, or film or a photographic print, there was the camera obscura. Literally from the Latin, "room" and "darkened," camera obscuras were first put into wide use as a tool for perfecting perspective in Renaissance painting. Utilizing a large boxlike space (or sometimes an entire darkened room itself), an image of what is outside the box is projected onto an opposing wall via a carefully placed pinhole that would then admit light into the space, projecting an upside-down view of what the focal length of aperture size allowed. It is said that Vermeer used a camera obscura, as did Johannes Kepler, who coined the phrase and brought a portable tent camera with him while he surveyed for astronomical observations.

Originally trained as an architect, contender Johnathan Wong has used the camera obscura to transform Las Vegas hotel rooms in an attempt to, "to disclose subtle and invisible details about a place or object unavailable to the naked eye" in his series Unseen Las Vegas.

Paris, Las Vegas 2009 from Unseen Las Vegas by Johnathan Wong

In his starkly contrasted black-and-white images that recall Bill Brandt's inky blacks, a room otherwise under cover of night is blasted with an odd inverted light from the view outside the windows. A busy city and jagged architecture invade an otherwise serene sleeping space, creating the illusion that a city is falling upon you while you sleep. Even though there are no humans physically present in these photos, when viewing them I automatically cast myself into dream space where I imagine myself laying on the beds in these rooms experiencing the upside-down reality of the outside world coming in.

Circus Circus 2010 from Unseen Las Vegas by Johnathan Wong

Wong's images and disconcerting architectural reveries recalls the work of another photographer (who was also not originally trained as a photographer, but as a sculptor) working in the same vein. Vera Lutter has been creating negative images created with a camera obscura that is literally a 1:1 size of the room she is in, and has trained the tiny pinhole to relay super-sized images of cityscapes, industrial sites, airport hangers and most recently—the city of Venice.

Zeppelin Friedrichshafer I, August 10-13,1999 by Vera Lutter

Campo Santa Sofia, Venice, XXIII, December 17, 2007 by Vera Lutter

Of the process of working over long periods of time (many of her exposures are made over multiple days; one exposure took three-and-a-half months), she has said:

I never know what is going to happen. My way of working is very hands-off. I install the apparatus of observation, the camera, and then endure the process of observation and record whatever happens. The work is essentially about the passage of time, not about ideas of representation.

The first time I created a camera obscura, after I had realized how long I had to sit in there to adjust my eyes to the darkness, to see the projection, which is about 20 or 30 minutes—I thought I'd seen God. When I saw the first projection, it was an epiphany. It was probably one of the most overwhelming moments of my life.

Whether the Vegas Strip or the Veneto, whether shown as a positive or as a negative, both Wong and Lutter's images succeed in showing us images that themselves become documents of time, and show us far more than we could ever see looking at the same view right-side up.

You can view the entire Unseen Las Vegas series at Johnathan's website.

In the past week, I have just signed and dated nearly a ream of paper in the closing documents for my first home. As is also customary in such transactions, I also handed over the largest cashier's check I've ever personally had withdrawn from my bank account, to fulfill my end of the closing settlement costs. So it is with a finely honed sense of chagrin that I encounter the images of Monia Lippi, who has been documenting what might be one of the last vestiges of a homesteading movement in the lower forty-eight today.

Untitled, July 2008 from series Floating Winona by Monia Lippi

The Latsch Island Boathouse Community on the Mississippi River in Minnesota is home to just under 100 floating domiciles, of which a quarter of the residents live in year round. The community's lineage spans 100 years, and the inhabitants have endured unappealing epithets such as "river rats" and "boat people" throughout dark periods during the 1970s and 80s when loud parties and drugs were the norm. In the past two decades, however, The Winona Boathouse Association has become a legal entity and the inhabitants have been granted the right to live and remain in their community on the river.

Untitled, July 2008 from series Floating Winona by Monia Lippi

In the process of documenting the residents of this determined, outlying area that exists proudly beyond more conventional suburban spaces, Lippia has been struck by the inventiveness, resourcefulness and mindfulness of those that live year round in seasons both harsh and calm (in differing ways; in the summer there is the threat of flooding, and in the winter that of frozen ice) on these banks of the Mississippi. In her statement, Monia writes that:

The fighting past and the captivating natural beauty gave me reasons to persist in this project and return many more times. I appreciated the life philosophy of the island inhabitants, an example of an American style of freedom and dreams that doesn't happen everywhere. These floating houses are rooted in American self-sufficiency and historical ecological models, with a lineage to Thoreau's construction of his own house from recycled wood. They exist outside the usual economic systems dictated by commercial real estate interests, a turning away from suburban developments toward communal lifestyles.

In this entry period for HHS! in 2010 we've seen a fair amount of work dealing with people's private domestic spaces, or shared living arrangements when embarking on a new life, or their conceptions of a shifting or encroaching suburbia. Now we have Monia's voice to reflect and inform upon this theme, images of a subset of individuals that prefer to live truly off-the-grid, beholdin' only to nature and one another for support, sustenance and mercy.

See the entire series as shot in both the summer and winter on Monia Lippi's website.

drive, 2008 by Katherine March Driscoll

Each one of Katherine March Driscoll's photographs is presented as a diptych; each comes with a partner, a sort of fraternal twin. In all of her submitted works, one exceedingly similar image follows another, both seeming to depict the same scene, only a few minutes (or even seconds) apart.

These sets of images establish a sense of narrative; they create the feel of progression and chronology. They are not single, discrete, or "decisive" moments in time, but rather sequential details from an encounter or experience. (The most overt example of this is in stop, where we see a city traffic light, red in the first frame, change to green in the next). Each image, however, is drastically cropped and can be disorienting, since no faces or discernible locations are ever provided to ground the viewer. At first, this effect can make the work look haphazard and impromptu, but it becomes evident, when viewed in tandem that the images' orderly presentation is a reflection that the work is calculated, and their effect decidedly intentional.

stop, 2010 by Katherine March Driscoll

In each one, I sense conversations, interactions and the beginnings of compelling stories, that Driscoll chooses to abandon, leaving me both frustrated and curious to know more. Each of Driscoll's photographic pairs also bears an abrupt, rather reticent title (all are single, one-syllable words). Though they seem to describe the depicted actions: wait, drive, climb, they are also cropped and enigmatic, much like the images that they accompany.

Driscoll's series highlights both photography's ability to tell stories, to build narratives, as well as its shortcomings in this regard: we never get the full picture, there is always action excluded, existing just outside the frame, and just beyond our reach. She emphasizes both photography's narrative potential and, simultaneously, its existence as something constructed, selective and subjective, with the photographer including only what he or she wishes to present.

wait, 2010 by Katherine March Driscoll

Still, somehow, the images manage to convey a sense of intimacy. Each photo is a fragment, cropped to omit unfamiliar faces, or specific, identifiable places. Thus, we can insert our own memories and experiences onto these images. In keeping with this idea, Driscoll writes of her work:

A photograph can be enlightening and frustrating; a still representation of the kinetic life that surrounds us. Through the movement of pairs, we are provided with a more well-rounded understanding of what's pictured and granted access to these scenes. We can then enter and contribute to the depicted experiences based on the influences of our personal history.

As a New Yorker of seven years, any discussion of moving out of the city is often met with a grimace and retort, "you're moving to the suburbs?," as though a move of complete and utter resignation. Much in the way we like to disparage New Jersey based on a handful of stereotypes and (perhaps a few realities), the 'burbs have become synonymous with repetitive and too-large houses, big box stores, gas-guzzling cars, and lack of individuality. On top of that, popular culture hasn't done much to bolster the suburbs' reputation: a housewife sells drugs in the suburbs in Weeds, women-become-robots in suburban-based The Stepford Wives, neighbors reveal dark secrets and strange obsessions in Desperate Housewives and Betty Draper goes mad with boredom in the upper-class suburbs of Westchester in Mad Men.

Carpets, 2009 by Tom M. Johnson

Given this, it's easy to forget that the suburbs were part of the post-World War II American dream—that they provided respite, jobs, security and space to millions of families. Homogeneity wasn't a prevalent concern— families were trying to affordably restart life after years of being uprooted, and being in homes just outside cities seemed the sensible way to do this. And for many, it's still the best place to raise a family, attend high quality schools, and live a better quality of life than they could imagine elsewhere.

Contender Tom M. Johnson photographs Lakewood, a development outside of Los Angeles, where he grew up and has since returned to live with his own family. He writes of the town:

"The founders of Lakewood designated their suburb "Tomorrow's City Today," because it was modern and unique in its conception. Lakewood offered a utopia for the post war middle class: affordable housing, new schools and parks, good jobs in the aerospace-defense industry, and a new commercial concept, the shopping mall. Then the nineties came and suburban paradise began to fade. The aerospace-defense industry abandoned California, and what made tomorrow's city today had become yesterday. Yet Lakewood adapted to the new economic climate and endured, and its new motto, "Times Change Values Don't," accurately demonstrates that the hopes and dreams of Lakewood's citizens today are not that different from those of the folks who came to Lakewood during its genesis."

Garden Woman, 2010 by Tom M. Johnson

Tom depicts the city from his knowledge of what it once was—and is able to identify where much of the suburbs' idealism dissipated into a point of defense rather than a point of destination. He sees where facades have been altered, new neighbors have moved in, and town signs have changed to reflect a new reality. In his images, Tom expresses nostalgia for the streets he explored as a kid, and looks at the same places with his adult eyes, searching for remnants of that past while existing in a very different present. His images depict some expected scenes—low-slung homes (modest ones), four blonde-haired sisters leaning against a truck, men and women watering their yards and gardens, and teens playing around a tiny plastic pool out in the yard. However, he also captures a surprising heterogeneity that may challenge what we urbanites think, among the people who live and work in Lakewood. These people are, very likely, not thinking about themselves as part of the suburban masses, but simply living their individual lives and trying to full their own hopes and dreams.

You can see additional images from this series on Tom's website.

No!, 2010 by Alex Leme

It is always very exciting to see how an artist evolves between two bodies of work while at the same time revealing deeper questions he or she has about the world they are trying to explore. When we first saw contender Alex Leme's project Literary Ghosts in the 2009 HHS! Second Edition, not only did we fall for the subject matter (being lovers of books here at JBP), but as Sara wrote, we were intrigued that his photographs "elevate the drama of untold stories that might otherwise be considered mundane." It is here where I see the connection with Alex's new project COTTON PLANT, ARKANSAS. Alex is concerned with what is left behind in spaces—secrets, mysteries and ghosts that feed these places with haunted energy, and a legacy.

Tyler, Trace, Austin And Adam, 2009 by Alex Leme

America's industrial revolution left behind many small rural towns like Cotton Plant, Arkansas, towns that are struggling after a past cultural and industrial boom. Alex writes about the town, and series:

Despite its rich history and "promising" past, Cotton Plant has suffered the same challenges and consequences as any other small rural city in America. What once was a thriving economic and cultural center and one of the fastest growing communities in Eastern Arkansas is now littered with ghost factories, abandoned schools and the carcasses of crumbling buildings while the handful of the remaining local stores struggle to survive. The sense of purpose that once accompanied steady work has long since vanished.

Alex aims to expose a town that once had a rich history by focusing predominantly on stereotypically male-dominated spaces of industry and business. Many of the images are made where men tend to congregate: the playing field, the hunting club. Other, domestic spaces like a backyard or former home have fallen into utter disarray, suggesting there's nobody there—men or women—who care to do the upkeep. All of the figures photographed in this series are also men, often looking deflated by their work and carrying the burden of being the bastions of labor that will regenerate their town. The look on their faces is uneasy but not unpleasant. Photographed in front of buildings and schools, Leme suggests that they have stories to tell, the loss of industry is their weight to carry and finding a solution is their responsibility.

See more images from this series on Alex's site.

Dr. Wilk D.D.S., Exam Room 1, Instrument Tray, 2010 by Mark Lyon

There is nothing pleasant about the doctor's office. In fact, it seems as if the designers and architects responsible for these spaces routinely go out of their way to create dingy or sterile environments. But what if the fluorescent view from the dentist's chair wasn't of crumbling ceiling tiles, but instead a mountain vista? Somewhere along the line, somebody proposed this improvement upon the institutional aesthetic and giant photographic murals were pasted up in waiting rooms around the world.

While this ridiculous decorating trend has since fallen out of favor, institutional vistas still exist—I know this for a fact because in his series Landscapes for the People contender Mark Lyon hunts down and photographs these interiors and the laughably absurd juxtapositions that they create.

Mark writes:

These wall sized photographic murals seem to serve a psychological function, given their potentially intimidating or banal locations like dental room and laundromats. These landscape murals allow the viewer an alternate mindset to nerve racking procedures or the mundane activities of everyday life. Photographs from "Landscapes for the People" use the peculiar relationship between found images and operative items. The resulting photographs of these locations document the strange play of the functional environment and the idealized psychological landscape.

Dr. Carpenter D.M.D., Exam Room, Dental Implants, 2010 by Mark Lyon

In viewing Mark's images the eye is immediately drawn to the landscape, but it doesn't stay there for long. The feeling of serenity is replaced with a moment of confusion as the eye and the mind try to reconcile the appearance of electrical outlets, flat-screen televisions, and other non-descript objects of industrial design within the frame. The entire image is flattened into a kind of surreal, hilarious collage of the ideal and the decidedly less-than-ideal.

Previously, Mark was one of the runners-up for the 2009 Aperture Portfolio Prize (along with Alejandro Cartagena) and his work is also being exhibited alongside Hot Shots Curtis Mann and Cara Phillips in American ReConstruction, on view through June 12th at Winkleman Gallery. You can see more work at Mark's website.

p.s. Aperture is accepting 2010 Portfolio Prize submissions through July 14th!

Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty contends that in order to make an evocative portrait of someone, it could be more compelling to make a portrait that makes references to that subject, without the actual subject ever having to make an appearance. Her submission to HHS! consists of a portrait series that is conceptually about her grandmother, who passed away in 2007. None of the images, however, include any direct picture of her.

Abbie, 2007 by Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty

From her artist's statement:

There are no actual images of my grandmother in the series, instead the portraits are comprised of 3 generations of her female descendants. This decision was very much intentional. A single photograph shows a person at an exact time and place, and though it may seem to imply a lifetime, there are few specific details of that lifetime offered. Rather, drawing on the Renaissance tradition of portraiture, my strategy was to subtly suggest aspects of her person through the inclusion of her clothing, glasses, personal items, and most importantly, a part of the human legacy she left behind. My intention was to acknowledge how incomplete any portrait must be, and at the same time invite the viewer to engage with the work across multiple levels of meaning.

Kirk-Gushowaty's series and her thinking through on what it means to make a portrait is reminiscent to me of a pivotal moment in reading Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, where Barthes provides an intimately contextualized argument on the experience of looking at photographs while all the while contemplating an image of his recently deceased mother. Throughout the slim but densely thoughtful volume, Barthes describes this childhood photograph of his mother in great detail, but the conceptual hook of all the thinking guiding him through this writing is that ultimately he will never show you, the reader, this photograph of her. It is, he writes, an image "that is not meant for you." Relative to Barthes, in Kirk-Gushowaty's series is a notion that a true portrait of a person goes far beyond summoning up their physical likeness; it is also about the relationships of those who both knew you and and those who will come to know you through the recollection of those same individuals. A portrait is ultimately one person's subjective memory of you, collected and disseminated through coincident and contradictory memories of all the others that realize a connection as well.

Megan, 2007 by Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty

The entirety of this series, as well as several other bodies of Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty's work, can be viewed on her website.

Toy House by Andrew D. Musson

If you have ever had to pull up stakes and start over somewhere completely new, then you might share the same kind of temporary sight that Andrew D. Musson displays in his body of work New, Familiar. Having displaced himself from a southern city to "the" city in New York, the first three months were a period of sublime displacement, where senses are overstimulated, a gaze is directed in uncommon and uncommoner places, and where the process of taking things in never seems to cease. It's a fleeting jolt of a way to experience and mediate new existence in a new place, and scenes stay startling and new to your eye for an indeterminate but finite amount of time.

Communal Coat Rack by Andrew D. Musson

Roof with a View by Andrew D. Musson

Whether it's a keyhole view of a bedroom while walking through the neighborhood, or in succinctly encapsulating the experience of shared space among strangers in a shot of the apartment coat rack, or just getting used to the notion of the roof vista as experienced by nearly every new yorker in the summer, Musson's vision is snappy, eager and amused. Settling in quickly with an internship with Ryan McGinley's studio, and assisting for Luis Sanchis under Thomas Prior, it would appear that Musson's future is busy, bright and surrounded with charismatic compatriots, and fellow lovers of a world that's film-based.

See the full portfolio of images from New, Familiar on Musson's site, or get a better sense of his sensibility by tooling around his tumblr site centris, which focuses on showcasing the work of many early career photographers.

Basketball Board, 2010 by Kendall L. McMinimy

The photographs of contender Kendall McMinimy depict symbols—vestiges of summer. However, he encounters them in the dead of winter: a driveway basketball hoop, a motel swimming pool, a row of deck chairs, a jungle-gym—snow-covered, static, abandoned and deprived of their usual and intended respective functions.

A cool palette, relentlessly chilly setting, and feeling of profound isolation unites these photos, and stands in sharp contrast with the warm, sweaty, thoroughly communal usual use of these items or locations—an evening basketball game in the driveway on a July evening, or a cool lemonade (or beer!) with friends on a poolside lounge chair in the sweltering heat.

In McMinimy's work, everyday objects are rendered useless by the shift of seasons, becoming almost wholly aesthetic. Recognizable items now teeter on the verge of abstraction, almost pure patterns against a snowy backdrop. This feature of McMinimy's photographs, as well as their meticulous composition and strong graphic quality calls to my mind the work of 20x200 artist James Deavin, whose cropped, linear photographs of uninhabited and almost unrecognizable athletics venues convey—for me—a very similar feeling.

A complete, utter absence of human life is pervasive, inescapable and overwhelming. There are no people, no footprints—literally nothing to indicate that anyone still inhabits this landscape. The scenes take on an almost post-apocalyptic feel, filled with remnants of human life, interrupted.

Motel Pool, 2010 by Kendall L. McMinimy

McMinimy conceives of the series as an open meditation on the nature of winter, and our relationship with the season. He sees the pieces as subject to the various interpretations, impressions and associations of a vast and varied audience; there is no one, specific, intended meaning. He states of his work:

These images are intended to draw the viewer into the snowy isolation - to feel the effect of a long winter, and to place a high value on what summer will bring. However chilling the landscape, some viewers will see hope in the vestiges of summer. Others may feel the jeer of summer relics left out by insensitive procrastinators, caught off-guard by an early onslaught. Some may see garish summer monuments demanding our unseasonable attention, tainting the pristine landscape...My course through the snow and ice became my passage through inertia, isolation and confinement I had previously succumbed to in winter. In finding this path, I also found a glimpse of the true character of the region: that winter's fury strengthens resolve and winter's stillness affords introspection.

My immediate, gut reaction to this series is that its images are lonely and mournful. And yet upon further consideration, in creeps a glimmer of hope, some potential for positivity: In McMinimy's compositions, things that are traditionally almost aggressively mundane—things that are intended specifically and exclusively for use, and as a result so often just fade into the background—are transformed into objects that inspire deep reflection, and ones that might now be seen as beautiful.

You can see more work from this series, Summer Eclipsed, on his website.

In Gregory Krum's exhibition ...Practice..., currently on view at JBG, there are two images—one of a peony and the other of a Cherifa tree—created with the camera on Greg's Blackberry. Their sharpness is muted, and a light emanates from mysterious source, creating a halo around the plants' branches. In print, the two works' slight muddiness is observed as painterly, evoking the qualities of Dutch still lifes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While the tradition of still-lives, combining intricate flora and fauna alongside other temporal and significant objects (the vanitas) was originally a means to show one's deft as a painter, Greg borrows the textural and effulgent qualities of the paintings and creates them with his very modern device.

left: Peony (Blackberry), 2010 by Gregory Krum; right: Flower still life with Guelder roses, Columbine, 1671 by Dirck de Bray

Having observed Greg's work, when I came across Catherine (Cate) Vermeland's HHS! submission, entirely created with her Blackberry, it brought to mind inquiries about the tools we choose to use, and how this affects the subjects we're photographing. Many cameras are utilized because of the aesthetics they create, like the saturated, unpredictable hues of the Holga, and the apparent in-camera vignetting in some Yashicas. But, the hallmark of phone cameras has been their inconsistency, poor ability to capture in low light, low-resolution, and lack of contrast and color saturation. So, why choose this as a means of making images?

Novermber 25, 2009 by Cate Vermeland

Cate writes:

"One of the aesthetic challenges photographers face is to match the appropriate technology to the content of their work. For the past eight months, I have been using my BlackBerry cell phone's camera to make note of those heightened moments. I believe the everyday, modest qualities of the cell phone camera can communicate perfectly this quotidian world. With it, I am able to immediately respond to the portal that alerts me to this subtle, yet modest, beauty."

For her, it is the perfect tool, exactly because it is a multi-functional everyday object happens to have the capacity to capture pictures. One isn't expecting the Blackberry to produce something beautiful, so what is remarkable is when it does, and that it can. She photographs the mundane in what she calls Cate Vermeland's Guide to the Everyday, quoting John Burnside in her statement, who once said, "I want the here and now, the divine quotidian, the subtler beauty of the unremarkable."

October 6, 2009 by Cate Vermeland

By photographing a bus, sink, bikes, coffee mug and wicker chairs, each muddy because of the limited means of this sure-to-become-obsolescent technology, yet all alarmingly familiar and accessible, Vermeland asks questions about whether beauty is within the object, in the photograph, or a function of the tools we use.

Yesterday morning I read a review on Design Observer of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial: Why Design Now? The exhibition, filled with exciting renderings and prototypes, is charged with "presenting the most innovative designs at the center of contemporary culture." What the author points out, however, is that while these "innovations" may look great as concepts, they may not be so dazzling in real life.

Masdar Development designed by Foster + Partners

One example is a carbon neutral and zero waste planned city imagined for the outskirts of Abu Dhabi by architects Foster + Partners. When the ground is broken on this development, an entirely premeditated metropolis will rise from the desert. On one hand the unity of this vision presents new opportunities for efficiency and sustainability. On the other, this place is effectively a void—and potentially a vacuum—of authentic local character.

Carport, Tokyo, 2009, from Open Secrets: Photographs of Japan by Alan Thomas

I had forgotten all about the article until I came across the work of contender Alan Thomas, who has been documenting the "secret" urban landscape of Japan. Tokyo is one of the largest and most iconic cities in the world, so Alan's clean and quiet photographs seem like a strange portrayal of this place, but it's a different side of Japan that he seeks to capture. Outside the hustle and bustle of the central districts, Alan endearingly photographs "the spaces between planned projects."

He writes:

It is in these narrow confines that people and businesses perform the countless small-scale improvisations that give Japanese cities their character. These minor spaces are at once public and oddly intimate, and easily missed—the open secrets of urban Japan.

In his statement, Alan quotes architect Fumihiko Maki, who writes that, "compared with New York, Tokyo is a disorderly, relaxed city, whose architectural framework offers few constraints. That is precisely why the formation of territory in Tokyo is either very delicate and personal or extremely abstract in nature." The pictures from Open Secrets depict both of these territories, but what they all have in common is something that a planned project could never possess: character.

Hiroshima, 2004, from Open Secrets: Photographs of Japan by Alan Thomas

While many photographers are documenting urbanization and suburbanization, what's refreshing about Alan's work is that it is a celebration of the unique, quiet spaces that remain. In her review of the Triennial, Browning concludes that, "Masdar...actually does a disservice in making adaptation look beautiful." While the renderings may look slick, it's photographers like Alan who demonstrate what true character looks like: urban pockets of light and shadow—treasures unto themselves.

You can view more work, including the full Open Secrets series, on Alan's website.

Cardinals, 2010 by Paul A. Nelson

It is bird breeding season where I live. In fact, in the Southern Tier of central New York State, spring came nearly six weeks early, so some birds are actually on their second nesting attempt. This spring the birds have come closer to my viewing accessibility than ever before: two nests were made in some vines outside my kitchen window, vines that have been steadily growing more dense in the past few years. A rotund and entirely serviceable cardinal's nest sits a couple feet below a much larger and more ovoid-shaped robin's nest. The nests were built astonishingly quickly, and very soon thereafter the females began incubating their eggs, encompassed and encamped in the vines and their little houses built with sticks.

Watching them these past weeks has been a great pleasure, as I have never been able to observe birds for so long and so closely as I have these brooding females.

Paul A. Nelson, a Minneapolis-based photographer, knows something about watching birds as well. Entranced with the images and drawings by pioneer ornithologists James Audubon and Roger Tory Peterson, Nelson began brainstorming on how he could render something of the fleeting and finely detailed spirit of both the birds and the original drawings with photography. Choosing to focus his first photographic studies on songbirds, Nelson writes about some of his initial thoughts on the project:

Birds are hard to get close to. You don't often get to a chance to see them close up; they move so quickly and jittery that it's easy to miss out on their natural beauty, subtle colors, fineness of feathers, and the grace of their movement.

White-throated Sparrows, 2010 by Paul A. Nelson

Cognizant of the fact that what he wanted to be able to show in this body of work was something more artful than what one might encounter in a field guide, Nelson used his advertising and technical background to concoct a portable studio where he could release hand-held banded birds in precise intervals in front of a waiting, multiple-frames-per-second digital camera. He's even posted a video of the process on his blog:

One of Nelson's first desires in this project was to be able photographically capture birds in flight without the clutter of a natural background, so that the avian creature could occupy not only most of the frame, but also our attendant powers of concentration and imagination as well. Indeed, the high-powered pop of the studio flash and the speed of today's modern shutters (and the care and attention paid to bird handling), these images depict the surprise, grace and infinitely changing quick movements of these ubiquitous natural companions from whom we cannot always get a good visual fix. I especially enjoy seeing the mid-air leaps that the legs of the cardinal couple create as they are momentarily fixed and frozen by the flash, as well as the beautiful, torpedoed contortions that the sparrows make as they ready their tiny bodies to propel them outwards beyond the reach of Nelson, his studio, and ourselves. I will follow Nelson's continued studies as he embarks on making much more of this work this summer.

To see more of Paul A. Nelson's professional work, visit his website. He also maintains a blog.

Related: read Jen's newsletters about Andrew Zuckerman's hi-fi bird-capturing techniques over at 20x200.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rebel Monkey, Niger, 2007, by Candace Feit

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

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

Bombay Birds, November 2009, by Candace Feit

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

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

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

Colter, 2008 by William Hundley

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

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

Dandelion Clothesline, Santiago, Chile by William Lamson

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

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

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

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

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

Untitled from The Book of Dreams, 2008 by Sarah Fuller

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

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

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

Untitled from Rich and Poor, 1985 by Jim Goldberg

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

From Magnum's profile on Goldberg's book:

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

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

Untitled from The Book of Dreams, 2008 by Sarah Fuller

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

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

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

Untitled by Francine Fleischer

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

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

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

Untitled by Francine Fleischer

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

Confections (adorned) #10, 2010 by Amy Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confections #65, 2010 by Amy Stevens

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

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

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

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

Alexander writes:

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

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

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

As Alexander puts it:

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

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

Untitled by Garry Hubbs

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

Untitled by Gary Hubbs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burger King, 2004 by Matt Siber

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

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

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

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

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

Highland Park 5.19.09, 2009 by Gregory E. Jones

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

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

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

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

Torso, 2009 by Camila Pombo

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

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

Father's Shoes, 2009 by Camila Pombo

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

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

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

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

Taxi by Vivian Chen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laundry by Vivian Chen

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

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

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

View more of Chen's work at her website.

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

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

Tim writes:

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

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

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

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

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

Bullfight (Madrid), May 2008 by Bryan Solarski

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

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

Tuscany, May 2008 by Bryan Solarski

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

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

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

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

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

Linda by Maciek Jasik

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

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

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

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

Joshua, May 2009 by Maciek Jasik

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

Untitled from One Hour Portrait by Kyungwoo Chun

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

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

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

Machu Picchu, Peru, 2007 by Jessica Auer

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

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

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

Leaning Tower by Beth Dow

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

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

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

Cardinal Head, 2008 by Joyce P. Lopez

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

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

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

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

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

Chimney Swift Feet, 2008 by Joyce P. Lopez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kahao Vargo, Vari, 2009 by Evi Lemberger

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

woman, Lopukhovo, 2009 by Evi Lemberger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie writes about her work:

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

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

Deck, 1991 by Carrie Chalmers

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

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

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

Tokyo #2 by Sean J. Sprague

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

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

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

Tokyo #1 by Sean J. Sprague

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

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

Untitled #1, from Exurbia, by Ryan Boatright

Photographer, research scientist and Hey, Hot Shot! contender Ryan Boatright divides his work into several categories, two of which are: Photographs and Photo Graphs. The difference between these two bodies of work is more than just semantics, it represents two different approaches to "evaluating photography's ability to measure experience."

First, the Photographs. After living in the same familiar neighborhood for 21 years, Boatright's parents moved to a bland, sprawling development. Referencing Bernd and Hilla Becher's cataloguing of industrial and architectural structures, Boatright photographed the suburban roofs of his new neighborhood peeking out from the bottom of each frame.

Boatright writes:

A vast, gray sky surrounds the emptiness of these structures. Builders construct homes of similar design for occupants who in turn conform to neighborhood codes and restrictions. The photographs describe the formal commonality of design that homogenizes mainstream American culture.

These straightforward, sparse images of places and things exemplify his straight photographic style. However, as I explored his work further, the Exurbia project began to take its place in a broader investigation of family, memory and the medium of photography.

Grain Elevators by Bernd and Hilla Becher

At the other end of the spectrum are Boatright's Photo Graphs, which are process-rich images derived more from graphs and charts than representational imagery. To create the piece below, Boatright recorded every angle and path that a cue ball traveled during a game of pool with his father. He used these notes to create templates for darkroom burning. Over six to eight hours, he burned and developed the game on a sheet of photo paper, resulting in a layered image whose angles ostensibly tell about the motion of gameplay between father and son.

Pool by Ryan Boatright

In this sense, Boatright's work also recalls Nikki Graziano's series Found Functions, which superimposes tidy graphs and formulas onto photographs of clouds, shadows and plants.

Untitled from Found Functions by Nikki Graziano

But are Boatright's measured and charted images truly poignant? It's a question that he seems to explore not only on a conceptual level, but in terms of tools and materials. For four years Boatright was as a research scientist at the Image Permanence Institute at RIT. His research dealt primarily with characterizing the physical aspects of photographic prints. A major project of his was developing Graphic Atlas, a public facing database "that brings sophisticated print identification and characteristic exploration tools to the general public." Different methods of printing and reproduction can be viewed from all angles under varying sources of light in a way that makes a sprawling and complicated topic remarkably clear.

It's in the space between his scientific exploration of materials and his introspective analysis of family dynamics that Boatright's work gets interesting. Boatright has since left Rochester for Paris, France where he is currently pursuing his art practice and will be exhibiting a new series of work in May.

You can see more of and read more about Boatright's work on his website. For those interested in the process and research behind the images, Boatright maintains a running blog of pages from his notebook and also has links to more of his research.

Vegas (after Toulouse-Lautrec's 'Ballet Dancers') by Ian Epstein

There are writers who become writers by way of their own favorite authors. Filmmakers, fashion gurus and artists of all stripes alike usually cite influences from their chosen medium as important formative inspiration that help catalyze their careers. So one thing that immediately strikes me when looking at HHS! contender Ian Epstein's work is that his primary influences in his photographic work are are by and large painters—wielders of canvas, pigment and brushes, instead of the normally anticipated list of contemporary photographers. Speaking on his recent reading immersion into the world of postmodern art theory, Epstein writes on how the experience has been influencing his eye:

It has also led to a kind of hallucinatory confusion about whether rust trickling down old Chicago railway overpasses is just rust or an aesthetic phenomena akin to that sought out by Clyfford Still or Gerhard Richter. It has made me wonder if, like blank canvas, there is blank photography. Mostly, though, it has led to a body of work paralyzed by fracture, discontinuity and unfinished sentences trailing off with unpunctuated question marks that I hope keep a viewer's eyes moving.

Citing David Hockney's polaroids and the painter Gerhard Richter as inspirations, I can see how both the material and mental processes of both artists figure into Epstein's makeup. But, also evident in his submissions is a real facility with the specific texture and language of color photography as well as an innate formal appreciation for line and movement, which consciously or not might betray Epstein's Chicago roots (and for the better, of course: think Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Kenneth Josephson).

In his image above Vegas (after Toulouse-Lautrec's 'Ballet Dancers'), I'm subject to several different sensory treatments at once: the finger pushing into the cold glass of the mirrored closet, the play of lights from outside the room interacting in a near intersecting grid of bright vertical strips and a sea of illuminated horizontal points, and then there's the physical space of the room receding in the mirror's view, filling up the rest of the frame with a very tangible wash of mixed fluorescent light. Perhaps it's his training in theater and performance that allows him to find these seeming "sets" among real life, or maybe it is being able to think about photography like a painter after all.

Ian Epstein's work and words can be experienced more fully on his website.

I've always held the belief that photographers who work at night are a certain kind of storyteller. They are those who enjoy experiencing the day at its edges—dawn and dusk—when sounds, sights and smells are magnified by the imagination. They are forced to be patient and wait for their eyes to adjust, to make do with the light of sidewalk lamps, the light coming a boat in the sea off in the distance, or the light emanating from the house of strangers awake at odd hours. They are those who are driven by the nervous anticipation of what might be lurking in the shadows, or the belief that something is lurking in the shadows, waiting to be discovered.

Fireflies, a series made by Gregory Crewdson over the course of two months in the mid-90s, is a perfect story of summer, told through his myriad experiences of night. Crewdson captured the flickers of the sky, the trees, the grass, and these tiny bugs' luminescence, with a process that one imagines to involve spending many hours crouched on the dew-y ground, looking out into the darkness thinking about the night itself.

Untitled, 1996 by Gregory Crewdson

Robert Adams also also pays tribute to the simultaneous beauty and uncertainty of the night in Summer Nights, Walking, a collection of 50 images (currently on view through April 17th at Matthew Marks). The nocturnal landscapes, made over the course of 6 years in Longmont, CO have a languorous and apprehensive overtone, of a man who paced slowly along the sidewalks, peering through windows and hiding amongst the shadows waiting for the beautiful to reveal itself.

Longmont, Colorado, 1980 by Robert Adams

From the press release,

Lit by the setting sun, street lamps, and moonlight, his compositions are never conventionally beautiful. They vacillate between quiet foreboding and tranquil domesticity and, as the photographer has expressed in his own writing, attempt to capture the timelessness and peace of warm summer evenings.

The expanded group of images in this exhibition is at times unsettling, conveying the menacing and occasionally hostile attitudes of suspicious onlookers the photographer encountered while walking and evoking a sense of unease that is often part of our nighttime experience.

Untitled (Pink-footed Geese, Norfolk), 2007 by Milo Newman

HHS! contender Milo Newman also photographs landscapes at twilight, or as he puts it "at the beginnings and ends of winter days." Limiting his canvases to minimal lines and shapes—of the sea, the sky, and a lone house on the horizon, his canvases take on a painterly quality driven by texture rather than object. Like Crewdson and Adams before him, Newman's night captures required long walks and confrontations with nature. His images took him along the low-lying areas of the British coastline, an area that has been threatened by violent storms enveloping the land.

Untitled (The North Sea, Norfolk), 2007 by Milo Newman

Newman writes of his work:

The photographs are meditations on the concepts of transience and fragility, shattering the illusions of permanence that we have built up around our societal and architectural endeavours. They are direct responses to these landscapes, as well as to vernacular objects found within them, speaking of the wider social and environmental themes involved in how we choose to react to the threat of anthropogenic climate change.

This strategy [of photographing at twilight] enabled me to make use of the vague, grey light that causes a de-lineation of form, melting the corporeal world, thus speaking of loss, as well as of change, and try to convey the fragile beauty of our deteriorating world.

It is no surprise that each of these photographers works in black and white, allowing the full range of grays in the film to hold onto the mysteries of the landscapes. The grays invite question of what time of day it really is, and whether those who are willing to wander and wait for night to fully blossom are privy to a much grander version of it.

Namaste, 2009 by Anne Berry

Contender Anne Berry was trained both in photography and horse science, so it seems only natural that her camera find its place in the animal world. In her series Menagerie she creates concentrated portraits of monkeys, bears, rhinos, baboons and myriad other creatures, each with the seriousness and focus of someone who has utmost respect for animals and their emotions. In her images, Berry largely de-contextualizes her animals from their environments. The viewer doesn't know if they are in a zoo or in the wild, stuffed animals imbued with life through the craft of the camera, or living animals frozen in time. Berry seems intent on having her subjects transcend their context and writes of her images,

Today people wander through urban environments disconnected from nature, dreams, and myth. Animals, because they exist both literally and in the universally understood world of metaphor and dream, form a bridge between the visible material realm and an essential reality that is not easily seen or understood.

Animals have been subjects of photography from as long as the medium has existed. Starting in 1878, Edward Muybridge carried out a series of photographic experiments, creating a set of images that deconstructed the movements of a horse. He subsequently captured dogs, monkeys, deers, and then humans, using the camera and its capacity to freeze time as his tool for analyzing form and motion.

I am also reminded of a series of diorama images in the American Museum of Natural History's Picturing the Museum collection, which documents exhibits and the preparation of exhibits back to the early 1900s. Though the backdrops to animal dioramas are largely manufactured and the animals stuffed and preserved, they are captured and presented as though in their natural habitats. Through clever staging at the hands of the museum and clever framing on the part of the photographer, it is easy to imagine that the animals are in the wild, as vital as ever.

White Heron or American Egret habitat Group from South Carolina, 1928 by H.S. Rice & Irving Dutcherfrom the collection of the American Museum of Natural History

On 20x200 this week we featured Blue-and-yellow Macaw_044 by Andrew Zuckerman, an artist who adopts digital technologies to capture rare and tropical birds. This photographic process enables the bird to appear in a "hyper-real Edenic state," as Sara Distin wrote in the newsletter, highlighting the equisite palette of the bird's coat, isolated from its natural habitat.

All of these photographers' work points out that our eyes are drawn to animals for innumerable reasons: they fascinate us, they elicit great emotion, they are beautiful to look at, they can have spiritual important, and they connect us with the natural world even when removed from it. Anne explicates on her own many reasons for photographing animals, which she documents on her blog.

In recent weeks and months, the phrase "ordinary Americans" has become President Obama's go-to moniker for people facing everyday struggles with jobs, health, finances and family. It refers to the unexceptional but ubiquitous American — the ones bogged down by car payments and mortgages, who are doing their best to get by, whether they are in Boise, Idaho or Concord, New Hampshire.

Gas Station Attendant, Boise, Idaho, 2008 by Nathan Perkel

Boise and Concord are two of the places that contender Nathan Perkel finds his wandering eye, taking a combination of formal and environmental portraits in contexts of everyday life. The family dining table and the window of gas station are familiar stages for countless moments in nearly all of our lives, and for the most part, we experience them and forget about them. But, this is where Perkel searches "for those instants when the world achieves stillness, even amidst the turbulence of life; when an environment becomes silent and placid."

Perkel's subjects, whether people, animals or objects, are nearly always centered in the frame, acknowledging him, but also keen on being themselves. He photographs people that one might call "normal," not rich, nor poor, not celebrities nor models, not the abject nor the noble, but shoots them with a democratic eye that also channels Rineke Dijkstra.

Hickey, 2009 by Nathan Perkel

Perkel's website features a number of projects from which his submission was culled, alongside his editorial and commercial commissions. Be sure to check out Just Passing Through and From Germany With Love, two of my favorites from among his works.

Spreads from Lay Flat 02: Meta

Back in January we wrote about photography journal Lay Flat taking pre-orders for their second issue Meta. Fast-forward two months and it's now available to order! The sample spreads from the website (above) look fantastic.

The issue's theme encompasses photographic works that deal with the medium of photography itself. Included is work by our own 2009 Second Edition Hot Shot Jessica Eaton and 20x200 artist Penelope Umbrico as well as an essay by HHS! panelist Lesley A. Martin.

Issue 02 was produced in an edition of just 2000, some of which are already being shipped out as pre-orders. You can visit their website to learn more about Lay Flat and order your copy.

Work from Honorable Mention Magda Biernat's series Continental Bounce is featured in the New York Times' Lens Blog today. The images center around a loose architectural framework, concentrating on interiors and exteriors captured during her travels around the world in 2007 - 2008.

Biernat observes spaces from a deliberate distance suggesting that despite being nearly always devoid of people, she's become intimate with the rooms and their dwellers beforehand. She captures the mundane objects of everyday: photographs, pillows, kitchen utensils and curtains as though a tip-toeing anthropologist, present to document but not to disturb.

The series emphasizes the universality in how we create spaces—when reduced to the most basic of elements they are comprised of walls and windows and a place to eat and sleep. Aside, we choose to personalize to create comfort, warmth and a feeling of welcome, and also to remind ourselves that the built environment is simply the framework from which to grow.

The images from Continental Bounce are also currently on view at Clic Gallery at 423 Broome Street through next Tuesday, March 2nd.

Continental Bounce
Clic Gallery
On view through March 2, 2010
423 Broome Street
New York, NY

A photograph tells a story. But contender Deron Bauman goes a step further, by taking something overheard on the shoot and making it the title caption. The results are inviting, strange, and sometimes comical. By tightly binding words and images together, the narrative aspect of the picture is reinforced. While not as extreme as a jeering episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, this approach suggests some in-built viewer commentary as well.

Words supplement the image to create a second reading, an alternative documentation for the same story, activating the invisible. We become interested in what he isn't showing us, a world beyond the edges of the photograph. Deron points, shoots, and laughs at the limits of photography, while at the same time expanding its boundaries a little further into our imagination.

My mom said I could be anything I wanted. Except a cheerleader. I wonder if Rebecca Greenfield's mom told her the same. These photos document the tryouts for NFL cheerleading teams and showcase Rebecca's obsession with artifice and beauty.

At fifteen, when I first began to photograph, I made pictures of friends emulating what I saw in the glossy magazines that I studied and devoured. Later, I became less concerned with fashion but ever more interested in gender and its construct. As a result, I have been repeatedly drawn to photographing all stripes of young women as they begin to define themselves and who they are in the world.

Rebecca's obsession with the social constructs of feminity have lead her to this arena of overt sexual exploitation. Though her photos peer behind-the-scenes into a bizarre world of constructed femininity, they remain impressively unbiased. The innocent moments of worried facial expressions, captured in-between the poised glitter and sex, give life to what was solely a mindless body. Rebecca's camera obliterates the fantasy.

There's also something unexpectedly appropriate about the American flag hanging in the background of this photo. Together the cheerleader and the flag have connected as icons. In this identifiable role, these women are no longer human, but objects to be celebrated and upheld as a common dream by our society. Looking at these photos, I can't help wondering if all girls aspire to dance provocatively on the sidelines. However, this series is ultimately not about cheerleading at all, but questioning today's culture of American femininity. It connotes the imagery and stories behind photographer Lauren Greenfield's series Girl Culture, which investigates and interprets self-esteem in American women today in order to break down the media's illusion. Rebecca leaves it to the viewer to determine what part of this American dream is real and what is a construct of imaginary and traditionally justified stereotypes.

Pong Field, 2006, by Jessica Eaton

The camera is a complex and somewhat mysterious tool that translates experience into two-dimensional imagery. For many photographers, it is simply the means to an end: photographs. For others, such as contender Jessica Eaton, the camera's unique properties and possibilities define her entire practice. Her works, which are each created in-camera onto a single piece of film, deal largely with the deconstruction of and experimentation with the medium of photography itself.

Jessica writes,

I plan my projects extensively but as experiments, a neverending series of tests. Each time I shoot the results influence the next step. I often like to leave a lot of space for accidents to happen and am most satisfied with the work when it takes on a life of it's own. I want to make photographs that surprise myself, that teach me something, that seem a little like I didn't even make them despite the effort. I want to make photographs that compel one to keep looking.

In an age where it's possible to snap thousands of digital photographs at a time with little to no cost, Jessica's intent to build up layers of slow experimentation is both heartening and visually arresting. Her dedication to the process is such that instead of filling out a bio she included extended notes on the recipe for each of her images.

Pinholes 12, 2009, by Jessica Eaton

She writes,

Pinholes 12 again uses in-camera masking, in this case the masks are made by hand, pin pricking sheets of paper into screens. Pinholes 12 is one of the first photographs where an image is visible, the previous attempts show only very abstract spots of colour in a sea of black. As I continue to shoot these works and make changes to the masks and exposures the indexical referent, the 'something' that I am photographing, resolves. Viewed as a series (they are meant to be large prints as they visually change with physical proximity) and with regard to the process of making these photographs they posture or dramatize colour photography itself. On the one hand the early colour efforts such as the Autochrome Lumière or likewise modern grain, on the other the mediums constant quest for an ever clearer or acurate image, applicable to both photography proper and digital sensors.

If the name Jessica Eaton sounds familiar to you, it may be because she is one of the thirty-six artists whose work currently graces the walls of the Mixtape exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery. Or, perhaps you're a proud owner of her 20x200 edition Filter Samples.

You can check out more of Jessica's work at her website, or stop by the gallery to check it out in person.

Direct Object #03 by Jon Sheridan

Since we've postponed the announcement of the 2009 Second Edition Hot Shots to December 18th, that gives us ample opportunity to continue blogging about the impressive contenders that have entered this round. Keep checking back here, on Flickr and on Facebook to see their work over the next few weeks.

Today we take a look at contender Jon Sheridan. Jon makes a syntactic analogy with photography in his series Direct Objects: "In language, the verb acts upon the direct object. Here, the interventions of my photography act upon the direct objects in the picture," he says. Using a "forensic" approach, Jon seeks out quotidian items found at construction sites, loading docks and smoke-break corners. These Direct Objects are lit and grounded to emphasize that favorite quality of cultural theorists, their "thingness." Here, this impermanent coffee cup emerges as a uniquely sculptural object among the hard, angular wall and electricity boxes.

We wrote about Jon's series How to Fix a Campground here on the blog during the last round of competition, and you can also see more at his website.

Fragmented Cities, Santa Catarina, 2007, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, by Alejandro Cartagena

A few days ago we posted about a project called American Palimpsests by contender Stacy Mehrfar, which documents the desolation of suburban and exurban America. South of the border, contender Alejandro Cartagena has been photographing the causes and effects of Mexico's own residential sprawl which, despite all odds, is booming in this down international economy.

As a result of government initiatives granting loans toward buying homes, more than 300,000 new houses have popped up in the areas surrounding Mexico's metropolitan Monterrey area. "Amazingly," writes Alejandro, "even in the financial and mortgage crisis being lived in most of the world, the commission just announced in June that they will position another 500,000 loans for housing in 2009."

Like many development projects, the repetitious rows of houses forsake both their natural surroundings and cultural context. Most of the houses are a kind of boxy, mass-produced approximation of mission-style architecture, a sad nod to an endangered cultural history and an eerie parallel to the pseudo-colonial McMansions that have overtaken American developments. For me, it is painful to watch these spiritless developments envelop the landscape. Alejandro, however, "does not overtly condemn these development projects." Instead he seeks to "openly engage a critically dense examination of the complicated balance existing between economically driven States and the yearning of a society for a fairer World in which to live."

The photographs evoke many conflicting thoughts and feelings about our quest throughout history to create residential utopias. Though Alejandro has tried to present an objective view of this changing landscape, the images seem to shout: be careful of what you wish for.

The entirety of Suburbia Mexicana; Fragmented Cities can be seen at Alejandro's website.

Driving At Night by Kevin Van Aelst

A quick glance at Kevin Van Aelst's photos will probably not do you much good. His subtle images bring inanimate objects to life in a far more sophisticated manner than their commercial applications would suggest. Kevin creates simple tableaux that reveal his witty disposition toward everyday things in space.

Like the surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim and her furry teacup, Kevin uses his objects to hint toward their fantastic possibilities. As Kevin puts it:

The images aim to examine the distance between the 'big picture' and the 'little things' in life—the banalities of our daily lives, and the sublime notions of identity and existence.

While some say Kevin plays with visual accuracy and our perception of truth, perhaps he is actually revealing the intrinsic natures of this minutiae. In this photographic reconsideration, these objects are simultaneously themselves as well as another object that exists within. This is why crumpled laundry can form a heart, and gummy worms can organize themselves as a genome. He makes it clear for viewers to recognize the endless possibilities of everything around us. In a way, Kevin's work points toward the dizzy philosophy of I Heart Huckabees and its existential mantra that if you look close enough you can't tell where my nose ends and space begins.

Untitled, 2009 by Thomas Jackson

Contender Thomas Jackson writes that he "got into photography late," having picked up a camera just a few years ago after working as a writer and magazine editor for over ten years. It wasn't until he had gone through phases of 35mm street photography and "Richard Misrach-style" landscapes that he came to create his own unique body of work. The photographs, which could easily be mistaken for stills from an upcoming Pixar film, blend "pyrotechnically enhanced, sci-fi inspired sculptures with everyday environments."

Approaching the enigmatic glow of an abandoned bonfire is Tom's clunky robot character who appears throughout the entire series, sometimes in surreal settings such as the forest below, and other times doing laundry or driving a wheelbarrow. The series alternates between scenes of ethereal fantasy and the day-to-day grind of domesticity until the line between the two has blurred.

Untitled, 2009 by Thomas Jackson

To me, the images have a strong sense of narrative, which undoubtedly comes from Tom's background as a writer, but also evoke surreal and eerie tones through their carefully constructed lighting. The series presents an unusually imaginative response to our desire to escape the most tedious aspects of our lives.

You can see the complete series over at Tom's portfolio.

Magnolia, Texas. April 2006 #1 by Stacy A. Mehrfar

In Stacy Arezou Mehrfar's seriesAmerican Palimpsests, the suburban project born in the postwar boom of the 1950s carries over to the twenty-first century. Photographing in twenty-eight states over the course of five years, Stacy surveyed the ambiguous terrain between wilderness and residence in contemporary society. As she recounted in an interview with Amy Stein on Amy's blog, these journeys began when American residential development was expanding at an enormous pace. Yet for all of this construction in the service of habitation, she found isolation:

Days would go by where I would hardly see a soul. Many of the suburbs were eerily silent. Cold, even when it was hot outside. Empty, even before the foreclosure crisis had begun. Traveling for days in these communities was awfully dismal and lonely.

These uncanny qualities are demonstrated in Magnolia, Texas. A newly paved patch of development bears the traces of construction vehicles, but little else. An environment in a state of suspension, the visible forest around this cul-de-sac will someday disappear, creating another neighborhood in a dead end.

Stacy also recently received an Honorable Mention in the Fine Art category in Blurb's Photography.Book.Now competition, whose lead judge is photobook evangelist and Hey, Hot Shot! panelist Darius Himes. The book she created, American Palimpsests | This Was What There Was, incorporates a second body of work created on her journeys. As mentioned earlier, for the next few weeks, Flak Photo is showcasing twenty-five top books from this year's PBN, including Stacy's.

Garage Fire and Casino, Bullhead City, Arizona by Kipp Wettstein

Photographers have long tested the artistic possibilities of the vistas, challenging terrain, and inimitable light of the American West. You can see things there that are impossible to witness in other regions. Kipp Wettstein started a photographic project around the Great Basin to explore the physical and psychic landscapes of his Mormon ancestors, but after a wandering (perhaps not unlike theirs) he settled on the subject of the Colorado River. The resulting series, For Water Will Not Do, is, as Kipp writes,

a story of a declining river, a setting of harsh beauty and thirty-four million people with no reasonable alternative. This is a search for some understanding of the historical forces that led to the extraordinary effort put forth to 'tame' a landscape. It is also an effort to record an environment in transition with a large slice of American culture inescapably in tow.

Working with a handmade, large-format camera (which he explains in fascinating detail on his site), Kipp captures such improbable and enigmatic scenes as the one in Garage Fire and Casino, Bullhead City, Arizona. Even taken at a distance from the conflagration, the picture evokes a sense of confusion and urgency that I recognized from an iconic image from the great photographer of American spaces, Jeff Brouws.

Car Fire, Interstate 40, California by Jeff Brouws

In exploring these daunting territories and landscape photography traditions, Kipp reminds us of the allusive power and real perils of the desert. There is of course more from For Water Will Not Do on Kipp's website.

World Exclusive! by Peter Bugg

In June, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Peter Bugg spent a week interning with a paparazzi photography agency in Los Angeles. Peter, who had previously worked with appropriating celebrity imagery, spent two days chasing stars across the streets of LA and three days filing through the agency's archives. His series of appropriated imagery, World Exclusive!, comes out of this weeklong experience.

About his work, Peter writes,

In order to sell more photos to magazines, the [paparazzi] spice up their images by sensationalizing them with text. Without these explanations to color the reader's interpretation of the images, the pictures quickly lose their intrigue. On the other hand, without the photographs...these texts are freed from the constraints of the images and take on a life of their own. Instead of existing as simple captions for bubble-gum pictures, the phrases become colorful, quotable, inside jokes.

Approaching the intersection of photography and conceptual art, Peter captures these caption bubbles with a flatbed Epson scanner. The graphic, text-filled circles raise questions about how we interpret imagery, and the value of photographs created for consumption. While other contenders such as Joshua Scott have attempted to extract art from a commercial photography context, Peter's series isolates the prompts which help transform relatively inert images into commercial products.

Daily Dose by Peter Bugg

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

Justin James King radically intervenes in the common spectacle of the tourist vista by removing the view itself. A lone figure stands on a promontory gazing out into the utter void. Commenting on the reflexive act of looking (and by extension, on the rich traditions of landscape photography), Justin says,

Perhaps all we see when we stand in front of the landscape are archetypes: preconceived notions and pre-experienced views....Our perception grows out of how we have seen the landscape represented and how it has been delivered to us historically and in popular culture.

By removing the sweeping natural view, Justin undercuts the entire premise of the conventional landscape, pulling off the tricky business of making a photograph about the invisible.

Earlier this year Justin was a recipient of the Arthur Griffin Legacy Award from the Griffin Museum, and winner in the Best Personal Work as Photographic Art Series category at the New York Photo Awards. There is more from And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum, as well as from other bodies of conceptual work on Justin's site.

Marvin by Beth Yarnelle Edwards

The portraits of Beth Yarnelle Edwards explore the relationships "between people, their living spaces, and their possessions." Many portrait artists strive to portray their subject's psychology through expression, gesture, and other hints of demeanor. In taking her subjects' environments as another level of rhetorical expression, Beth demonstrates the ways we all use our personal items to reinforce the stories we want to tell about ourselves.

Beth collaborates with her subjects in recognizing and enhancing these emblematic, if not quite fictive, aspects of their personal settings. She says,

I seek out intersections of the mythic and mundane. As I attempt to reveal some basic truth about my subjects, I'm attracted to the peculiar or surprising. This can take many forms, ranging from humor to visual quirkiness to a sense of universality, or even the uncanny.

There is much more environmental portraiture at Beth's website.

Sour Cherries, Hungary by Monika A. Merva

Monika Merva's Sour Cherries, Hungary portrays what is likely a minor scene in the day of a pedestrian crossing: a bunch of cherries have spilled on the street. Surely a prosaic accident, but then again you'll never know what this event comprised. If ever they were meant to be displayed, these colorful stone fruit would have created a dignified tabletop tableaux; here they are merely a small-scale slaughter. A trivial loss, but perhaps sour in more than one way.

A committed portrait artist, Monika is lately turning to more oblique ways of storytelling. Of this new direction, she says this work retains an "ingredient of the human element, but not as the focus." Centering her earlier work in people, Monika produced a years-long project in her family homeland, Hungary. The result was City of Children, an extensive document of a government-run housing program for runaways and at-risk teens. There they forge a semi-autonomous community with whom they share the key youth experiences that their absent and dysfunctional families would have otherwise witnessed.

Rabbit Ears, Hungary by Monika A. Merva, from City of Children

The sense of sorrow and hope bound up in City of Children is palpable; the qualities it shares with newer work like Sour Cherries, Hungary is in proposing stories "without a certain answer." The matter-of-factness common to each belies an ambiguous but perceptible turmoil.

For San Francisco residents, Monika's series City of Children will be on view at the mighty RayKo Photo Center at 428 Third Street. Monika will be on hand at the opening reception this Friday, November 6, from 6 to 8 p.m.; stop by to experience the eloquence of her uncertain stories and meet the artist.

Tara Misenheimer loves hair. She draws hair, she paints hair and she's even brainstormed about hair as a Hollywood hair consultant. This obsession stems from her greater love of 60s and 70s era advertisements, featuring enviable bobs, bouffants and braids. Standing somewhere in between found photography and the cut-and-paste age of graphic design, Tara takes pictures of overlapping retro magazines on a copy stand.

She writes,

My work seeks to make connections between familiar and fundamental properties of hairstyles and sensationalized commercial objects of the era, such as cars, diamonds, swimwear and fashionable trends.

Looking back at another recent contender posting about Aline Smithson, the past is similarly romanticized in Tara's work. Her casual compositions seem randomly conceived yet wholly familiar and comforting. Perhaps all these pastel-colored images of nostalgia from a bygone era provide a fleeting sense of bliss in this time of current economic confusion. These images she's chosen to include are colorful and fun-loving, reminding us of seemingly better days in the imagined history of ourselves. Kind of like a Paul Simon song.

Air Power Over Hampton Roads air show, Hampton Roads, Virginia #2 by Christopher Sims

Christopher Sims has documented people, mostly young men, engaged with the Virtual Army Experience, a traveling entertainment/recruiting station found at NASCAR events and air shows. According to its website, the Virtual Army Experience provides "participants with a virtual test drive of the United States Army." Its interface is that of a combat video game.

The Virtual Army experience homepage

The body of work Sims has created from these portraits is titled Hearts and Minds, and of it he says,

These portraits remind us of the computer and television screens through which most of us have lived the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the filters of distance and media that create for us our own virtual homeland experience. The army reveals itself to be a keen reader of American adolescent emotions and passions, and employs this understanding through a brilliantly designed and bloodless simulation of the thrill of the fight.

Regardless of your political beliefs, it's impossible to dismiss the degree that video game technology suits contemporary military recruitment needs. The quality of combat simulation must absorb the player to such a degree that the psychological job involved in actual training is already in motion. This phenomenon has also been documented by photographer and video artist Robbie Cooper, in his series Immersion. Using equipment not unlike, as he acknowledges, Errol Morris's one-way mirror/camera known as the Interrotron, Robbie presents the unnerving concentration people reveal when wrapped up in violent video games, and other screen-based fantasia (including porn). See a video sampler of Immersion at the New York Times.

This combination of estrangement from the physical world and intense engagement with the virtual makes the job of message producers—be it the military, advertisers, or pornographers —that much easier. Christopher's portfolio of Hearts and Minds, as well as his significant work from Guantanamo Bay and mock Iraqi and Afghan villages for military training, are available at Ann Stewart Fine Art.

Clothesline by Aline Smithson

It was difficult to find an image befittingly momentous for today, the the final day we are accepting entries for Hey, Hot Shot! in 2009. (If you are reading this on Tuesday, October 27, before 11:00 p.m. (EDT) you still have time to enter). The range of submissions this round has been eye-popping, and for those of us who care about the state of photographic practice in this ever-fluxing world, that range is also deeply encouraging. Judging by the cross-section of innovative, accomplished, and totally engaged contenders we've seen, the state of photography is very good indeed.

I was drawn back to an image by Aline Smithson—the Los Angeles-based photographer, educator and mind behind the excellent photography blog Lenscratch. At first look it seems to be a quiet picture. What's more, it's unapologetically nostalgic. As Aline says,

We live in a world full of technical distractions. I see my children gathered around their computers as though it's a summer campfire, faces aglow, as they peer into a world of friends and fantasy, participating in a new forms of entertainment that further remove them from the childhood that I experienced....it's because of this that I have been looking at bookshelves and untouched childhood pursuits with a new eye. With great sadness, I realize that these objects will someday be obsolete, at least in their current incarnations. And like a curator of antiquities, I see them now as beautiful objects to be admired and preserved, if only on film. I can only hope for rain, a heavy rain and maybe a power outage.

Aline's heartfelt admission acknowledges that progress flows in one direction and that the days of children doting on non-electronic toys may be behind us. For some of us (even we who didn't grow up playing with dolls) these paper dresses, hanging on a string as if on a clothesline, recall the intensity of feeling that simple playthings can evoke in children. These objects could once nurture sustained attention, maybe even a childhood form of obsession; they were the analog interface for overwhelming fantasy worlds. Absent of this devotion, the dresses are now simply suspended in time.

We'll continue to blog contenders until the newest Hot Shots are announced on November 30th. Thank you for being part of this round of Hey, Hot Shot! and stay tuned for much more to come!

Pride by Tait Simpson

Tait Simpson's series Hold Tight renders itself as both physical object and collection of images. Apparent and more extended interpretations of the title phrase manifest in his work—a mother in a close embrace with her child on the beach suggests a literal tight hold, while an explosion of rainbow balloons (with a visual likeness to recent Sony BRAVIA commercials) begs to be contained. Whether bound by object, bound by idea, or unbound—the tension created by enclosures that seemingly exist to limit and partition space without apparent reason frustrates the natural desire to reign free.
Rather than creating a narrative from one image to the other, one, as a viewer, engages in a game of search, looking for the artist' interpretation on the theme.

Tait writes of the series,

Hold Tight is a recent collection of images that deal with the desire to tame that which is inherently outside of our control, the contrasting freedom that this control proposes to limit and how these ideas relate to our identity.

The artist's collection of twelve 8.5"x11" images from this series is also for sale, as displayed above, packaged together in an archival box. Limited to an edition of seven, the work can be purchased on the his website where you can also see the rest of the images from the series.

Rhonda and Chantelle by Graham E. Miller

The series, Suburban Splendour, by contender Graham Miller seeks to capture moments of "quiet desperation." It's a phrase that's tossed around so often in art and literature that it has become hackneyed; only rarely is it executed as well as this. What is so visceral about the work is how real the moments are. The carefully considered lighting and sense of space in the images enforces a kind of isolation that is present throughout the work. Instead of fretting over the conceptual or technical details, the viewer is pulled straight into the narrative of each frame. Who are these "characters," as Miller calls them, and what is it about them that we identify with?

Miller writes:

These characters are troubled, but not irretrievably lost; they carry a dignified endurance and a sense of bruised optimism. These people are survivors. They have a desire, as we all do, to be transported from darkness into light.

To some extent, it's a theme to which we can all relate, and a timeless one too. Miller cites many influences from art and literature such as the films of Paul Thomas Anderson and Ray Lawrence, paintings by Edward Hopper, and the writings of Raymond Carver. Thus it comes as no surprise that the photographs possess the depth of a great story and the cinematic beauty of a film still.

Below is an excerpt of the poem Tomorrow by Raymond Carver, with which the series has been paired.

I remember my mother, God love her,
saying, Don't wish for tomorrow.
You're wishing your life away.
Nevertheless, I wish
for tomorrow. In all its finery.
I want sleep to come and go, smoothly.
Like passing out of the door of one car
into another. And then to wake up!
Find tomorrow in my bedroom.

The resulting images embody the contradictions of our day-to-day lives; they are personal yet universal, composed yet true to life, and simple yet magnetic. The entire Suburban Splendour series, among other work, can be seen at Graham's portfolio.

Backroom by Nicole Hatanaka

Morbidly fascinating taxidermy is central to the work of contender Nicole Hatakana. Nicole's Taxinomia series, shot with a 4x5 field camera, documents the back rooms and archives of natural history museums and nature labs.

Nicole writes,

Underscoring this project is an interest in how specimens become worthy of preservation and study. What gets preserved and what gets thrown away? Which objects are put on a pedestal and which in a drawer? What determines value? More broadly, my practice is an attempt to deconstruct such binaries as ordinary and extraordinary, order and disorder, official and non-official, valuable and insignificant, in order to reframe the ways in which meaning may be constructed and interpreted for both the individual and the collective.

At its core, the Taxinomia series is about history; how what we choose to archive versus what we present in museums shapes the way that we interpret our past. About a week ago there was a fascinating article in New Scientist about a tiny necklace camera that was originally invented to help Alzheimer's patients jog their memory but may soon be sold to consumers as a "lifelogging device." The article suggests that as soon as next year anyone could wear this camera to automatically archive whatever is in front of them every 30 seconds.

However, unlike digital photographs, taxidermied animals take up lots of physical space and require expert preservation. In an age where we have the capacity to record and archive infinite amounts of digital information, the images from Taxinomia are a thought-provoking historiographical documentation of how we grapple with the challenge of preserving the tangible aspects of our history.

Contender Kyle T. Pierce's illustrations of maps drawn over photographs give geographic contextualization to his portraits of place. Both an illustrator and photographer, Kyle's pen and pencil are as strongly guided by the lines and shapes of the objects in the images as they are by his imagination and memory. His series' work together—sometimes with contiguous illustrations meant to connect images—to tell both fantastic and narrative stories of personal adventures. At times, the illustrations take on more abstract concepts, connecting ordinary objects like this car interior to an anatomy of Things that were lost (what I have found).

He writes,

There is an immediacy to drawing by hand that makes the end product feel more "alive." I use primarily pencil, ink, and oil pastel, and draw from life, photographs, and memory. In recent years, my illustrations have incorporated photography, allowing me to merge the real and surreal in an authentic way. The (3) submitted photographs are from 'Montpelier' and were shot during the 4th of July parade in 2006. In 2008/2009, the series was overlaid with fragments of a hand-drawn map of Vermont copied from the 1930 edition of the 'Commercial Atlas of the World'.

Kyle's drawings are often guided by the typographic, with slogans like "Stop searching forever, happiness is just next to you" written in playful cursive over photographs of his children splashing in a pool. The words and photographs both take on new meaning as one views the work—concentrating on the text and image as discrete and unified entities. They recall the optimism and wonder in simple joys conveyed in 20x200 edition-maker Shaun Sundholm's Untitled (Let's Get Lost), where he states, "Let's find some beautiful place to get lost."

Kyle's work also summons photographer and illustrator Jane Tam's series to the fun house, which also integrates both mediums. Her line drawings depict men and woman entangled in everyday activities like strumming the guitar or sitting at the office, though often—unlike Kyle's—laced with flirtatious innuendo.

Many more of Kyle's joyful illustrations, photographs, and illustrated photographs are available on his website. Where photographic memory does not do an experience justice, Kyle is on-hand to add aesthetic accent.

Tracks by Katie Koti

Landscapes seduce us. Even the most city-bred of people will succumb to the collective unconscious of beauty we see in nature. Painters and photographers have enticed us for centuries with such imagery, and will surely continue to do so. In contender Katie Koti's series Asunder, the Rhode Island artist visibly connects the landscape to the nature of the human body, furthering the idea of man's connection to the surrounding environment. Bent and nude, her figures—faces sometimes obscured and sometimes fully-bared—are entangled in the structures of their surroundings. The landscape and body become interchangeable, yet discrete entities.

Despite this seemingly natural reciprocation between nature and the body, the series' title, Asunder, suggests a separation more apparent than meets the eye. The nudity of the body is stark, and automatically draws our minds towards ideas on sexuality.

Katie writes,

Our society has attempted to rigidly define gender and sexuality into a binary divide. There is often a sense of disconnect that one can experience as a result of not fitting into these boxes. I hope to challenge these dichotomous roles as well as expose the struggle an individual can go through inside of their skin.

In previous work on gender study, Katie has highlighted this divide through scientifically arranged portraiture. Tightly cropped bodies systematically "undress identity" and remove the restrictive terminology we commonly associate with sexuality. In Asunder, Katie's figures are fixed amongst fields, bales of hay, decaying machinery, and other natural landscapes, their skin and bodies exposed in an external struggle with the place, they should theoretically feel most at ease.

Be sure to check out Katie's website to see additional work from this series as well as the The 50 States Project, where she is a participating artist. Hot ShotsShawn Records, Justin James Reed and 20x200 edition-maker Brian Ulrich are also contributors to the project, capturing portraits, the landscape, and industry across the United States.

Lois at Trindle and Lake, 2008 by Andrew H. Kessler

Contender Andrew Kessler's large format photographs of crossing guards are both formal portraits, and heart-meltingly sentimental. Upon seeing them I found myself recalling days from my own childhood, shuffling along icy sidewalks towards school with the aid of crossing guards to help guide me on my way.

About his work Andrew writes,

[This series] explores the personality, commitment, and dedication of the crossing guards in three towns. Each more interesting than the next, always on time to their post, some with more than 30 years at their posts, serious about this sometimes dangerous (drivers texting, doing their makeup, etc) work of getting children and adults safely across the street and to their destination. Sharing these images with adults evokes memories and immediately the stories start to flow of when they were young about their local crossing guard and the impact they had on their lives.

Bundled up in neon vests and coats, Andrew captures these nostalgic community staples, on foliage-laden sidewalks, in crosswalks, and on street corners. However, Andrew's series is not comprised of casual images of the passerby; they are elegantly executed with the detail and clarity afforded by very-present 4x5 camera. The crossing guards' sense of responsibility and focus is evident, and in the landscapes behind them, one can practically smell the aroma of the changing seasons.

Put on your scarf, mittens and backpack and head over to Andrew's portfolio to check out all of the portraits form his series, Crossing Guards.

p.s. We will continue to feature contenders here on the blog, Flickr and Facebook until we announce the 2009 Second Edition Hot Shots on November 30th. But, your last chance to enter is TOMORROW, October 23rd at 8:00 p.m. (EDT). Apply now!

Bench by Leah Holscher

Austalian-born contender Leah Holscher documents "colour, pattern and lines" in the pursuit of capturing the "beauty of ordinary things." Photographing familiar, even boring, objects and settings can elicit subtle qualities in them that otherwise go largely unnoticed. For me, the photographer who did this most vividly is William Eggleston, whose huge influence endures today. (A quick glance at previous Hot Shot winners supports this contention.)

Leah has traveled throughout Europe, Asia, Central America, the United States, and North Africa in search of "intimate scenes of quiet, unconventional beauty" that reveal "how we affect our surroundings, the natural arrangement of objects, what is kept, what is discarded, and what we leave behind."

See more of Leah's work on her website.

Amazon Relic and Brooklyn Summertime by Joshua G Warren

San Francisco-based contender Joshua Warren photographs "portraits" of fire hydrants in-situ, creating a colorful taxonomy of this sidewalk staple. About his series, Joshua writes:

They are these funny, stubby, phallic warriors, yet they speak to our greatest fears. They are the last line of defense against losing all one's worldly possessions. They are conduits to a vast unseen subterranean aquatic network. They are the dashers of hopes of rock-star parking. They are like Facebook for dogs.

With an idea as charmingly simple as this, there is definitely strength in numbers; Josh has already captured forty-two fire hydrants in his series. The obsessive aspiration for completeness of such playful work reminds me of one of my favorite artists, Daniel Eatock, who photographs abandoned car batteries.

Car Batteries by Daniel Eatock

Joshua's statement about his fire hydrants works beautifully in the case of Eatock's work as well:

Despite their being mass produced, each one is unique... Because of their ubiquity, however, they are the kind of thing that you almost don't see at all... until you start really looking. At any rate, I find them really beautiful, hilarious and compelling.

Perhaps taking cue from Bernd & Hilla Becher's catalogical portraits of large-scale industrial structures, Josh brings his camera to the more equanimous street-level capturing an object familiar to all of us. His work is a light-hearted and unpretentious reminder to reconsider the way we see everyday objects without somber or pedagogical overtones. Head over to Josh's portfolio and take a look at all the rusty, silly, patriotic, and colorful fire hydrants that you've probably missed.

Antler Speaker by Adam Caillier

At first glance the ambiguous thing at the center of Adam Caillier's Antler Speaker could be a sculpture, perhaps a shambling Joseph Beuys installation. Closer scrutiny reveals the kind of haphazard assemblage you make when moving apartments—if "you" are a college student and most of your gear is still at your parents' house (except the antler, you have to take the antler).

Or perhaps it is somewhere in between: a pile of arbitrary, decontextualized stuff that takes on a totemic power in bizarre combination. Adam seems to suggest as much when he says his work aims to "describe the traces of the everyday, the contained energy of the objects that make it, and my nascent awareness." An MFA candidate at Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD), Adam intimates that his consciousness as a photographer may not be much better informed about the nature of this energy than we viewers. His family history ("My father is a mortician/construction worker, my mother is a teacher, and my sister does hairdos in New Hampshire.") seems to ground him in things as facts, however prosaic or absurd.

Our awareness is left to contend with "what is there," visible but not totally knowable. The rest of his oeuvre explores these same ineffable qualities.

Lovely You In The Lovely Field by Erin L. Shafkind

A vacant stare in an abandoned wilderness with a funny hat. These are the simple elements that make up the amusingly beautiful photography of Erin L. Shafkind. Her subjects gaze directly, and indifferently, into the camera, unaware of the discomfort they create for the viewer. Comparably, this contrived ineptitude has become a staple in the world of independent film-making (along with quirky personalities, melancholia, and bangs). The fact that Erin captures these images with an analog film camera augments their connection to the forced awkwardness found throughout the scripts of indie films.

Erin, who works as a teacher in Seattle and is a self-proclaimed big fan of puffy clouds, champions the anti-aesthetic. In a separate black and white series, she focuses on the randomness of objects, people included, in their surrounding community. Everything is quiet, simple and charming. Women play the accordion among cows, furniture is strewn about a field, and men hula-hoop in suits. It's all a display, simultaneously symbolic and meaningless.

Erin hopes all her photos engage our notions of narrative around a framework of fashion photography. Her models coyly tease our perception of reality—Are they real? Are they human? Are they beautiful? But unlike fashion photography, her images exude a plainness. And the titles, like Bath Tub Beauty and Your Horns Take My Breath Away vaguely reference trashy romance novels, giving away her whimsically silly nature and letting viewers in on the joke. It's just her friends in strange headgear.

Untitled, 2009 by Janelle E. Jones

The midnight black crows that create domestic catastrophe in contender Janelle Jones' images seem to have no regard for keeping a clean house. They rip apart the contents of the pantry, shred roll after roll of toilet paper, pull apart feathered pillows, and in their anthropomorphic state, embody a house as though misbehaving children.

Jones creates her cacophonies with intention, with the birds devilishly still lingering at the scenes of their crime. Unlike other photographers who either explore the invitation of the wild beast into the unadulterated home as in Amy Stein's Domesticated or glorify the animal-as-human as in Jill Greenberg's large-scale posed Monkey Portraits, Jones portrays the birds as the obviously guilty, but shameless invaders who seem completely unaware they are treading unusual territory.

She writes of her work,

Humor, in its various forms and degrees, also plays an important role in my thought and creative processes. My work often suggests an air of irony and absurdity, and pushes the viewer to question first the truthfulness and then the apparent meaning of the image. By pushing situations to the point of absurdity, I am able to reduce overwhelming ideas to physical situations that are visible and understandable.

The crow, known to be both an intelligent and ominous avian, is the star of the Aesop's fable, The Crow and the Pitcher wherein the bird finds a pitcher full of water, but cannot drink it because its beak is too short. Rather than giving up, the crow drops pebbles into the pitcher one by one, until the water level is high enough for it to drink the water. Whether Jones views her carefully articulated gaggle of mess-making crows as intelligent, plotting creatures, or as a foreboding presence, she captures them with her tongue-in-cheek.

See more from this series and others on Janelle's website.

Untitled, 2009 by Rebecca S. Horne

I had the chance to meet Rebecca Horne at a portfolio review event a few years ago and was immediately taken with her work, wherein pitchers of water mysteriously empty themselves, a cup of coffee reflects a heavenly vault and paper bags express their previously unseen tragicomic selves. Her visual vocabulary is of the humble and domestic, but her rigorous compositions create a powerful allusive quality. The everyday materials and objects which comprise the subjects of her work are "evocative of raw, organic relationships," as she says, and lately she has begun to include herself in the photos (however obliquely, as above). Painstakingly assembled, the world she crafts is of a slightly surreal domesticity that feels entirely fresh.

Rebecca is also the Photo Editor of Discover Magazine, and has the enviable task of making the latest astrophysical visualizations somehow assort with product shots of clunky-looking scientific gadgets. She uses her blog to muse on her own work (read about her process with the above photograph here), other photographers she admires, and the challenges of forging a distinctive visual style for a consumer science magazine (including this recent favorite, "Why Is Black Hole Art So Shiny?"). Rebecca is a true thinker and photographer whose work lies in the space where personal symbolism and quantum physics intersect.

You can see Rebecca's portfolio here.

Untitled, From the series "The Cybernetic Tourist" by Elizabeth Obert

Contender Liz Obert's series, The Cybernetic Tourist, is a wonderful exercise in meta-photography: pictures of tourists taking pictures. Liz writes,

We use devices such as cell phones and cameras to connect to the world, but by doing so we become disconnected and removed from our immediate surroundings. I find this behavior particularly ironic in settings where people go to escape their usual hectic lives, but are unable to fully disengage. . . .This body of work is about observing and documenting people interacting in these spaces who are more concerned with the framing of the moment rather than the experience itself.

Her series is so interesting to me because, as a photographer myself, I often have trouble reconciling my desire to be on both sides of the camera at the same time. Back in August there was a great article by New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman titled At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus. Kimmelman writes,

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

Kimmelman and Obert both suggest that in our frenzy to see as many attractions as possible, we're losing out on the subtleties of the experience. All this talk, it turns out, is quite timely because tomorrow, October 17th, is Slow Art day at the Smithsonian Museum. According to the Smithsonian, the average person pauses "less than 8 seconds to take in a work of art." (5 seconds of which might be spent snapping a picture.) Tomorrow, the museum will celebrate art the slow way by encouraging visitors to reflect at length upon a few pieces of art and then participate in a group discussion at lunchtime!

Whether or not you can make it to the Smithsonian tomorrow, I urge you to stop by Liz's website, the Jen Bekman Gallery, or another favorite gallery or museum to take in some art, slowly.

I'd like to conclude with a quote from Ms. Bekman herself, a strong advocate of all things slow:

If we really take the time to savor what we consume, we're more inclined to be discerning about what exactly the input is. Conversely, if the makers of what we consume know that we're paying attention, they're more likely to give us the good stuff. Oh yes, my theory is riddled with flaws, I realize as I type this, but allow me some idealism, won't you please? Work with me people!

Common Composite: Clocks by Ted Ollier

There's something compelling about composite photography, like that created by contender Ted Ollier. Tens, hundreds, or even thousands of overlaid images allow us to see trends and patterns that are invisible to the naked eye, or, as in the photograph above, an object in multiple states of existence.

Ted writes,

In a sea of undifferentiated grey, nothing sparks an interest. Add a speck, a dot, a mark--and something emerges from the gloom. Something draws the attention and the eye. Something engages the mind. The world is, and we are designed to analyze it in ways that baffle the most advanced digital computational systems we can devise. Blur it, average it, dice it, compress it, and the mind still gleans some sort of information from the inputs it is provided.

Ted's work reminded me of some of my favorite composite images from across the web, which can have the effect of diluting the individual object, while simultaneously evoking a a sense of awe in the surreal quality that the multiples creates. Jason Salavon takes Playboy centerfolds and layers them to show "the evolution of this form of portraiture" through the decades.

Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized), 2002 by Jason Salavon

Penelope Umbrico's 20x200 edition, 87 Suns From Fllickr - 29 Visible, culls nearly a hundred sunset photographs found on Flickr into a single, celestial image:

87 Suns From Flickr - 29 Visible by Penelope Umbrico

Ho-Yeol Ryu visualizes the trajectories of an entire day's worth of flights at the airport resulting in this image below:

Busy Airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu

Most recently, a new project by Joshua T. Nimoy made the rounds, declaring that the average color of more the 26,000 pieces of art in the collection of the MoMA produced this shade of brownish gray:

In addition to his composite photography, Ted, a self-proclaimed "armchair philosopher" has many other conceptual projects on his website in a diverse range of media like printmaking, sculpture, installation and sound. Browsing through, I began to wonder what a composite of all his experiments, or a composite of all the composites, would tell us about the works as a whole.

Contender Jeff Seltzer caught my eye with his new series because it conveys my exact feelings on this blustery fall day. It's slightly eerie, melancholy and desolate, though the presence of chairs and empty bike racks, in some of the images, leave a sense of nostalgia and longing for the warmer months and good times we just left behind.

Jeff intends the series to reveal socialized structured space and how it imposes societal norms upon its inhabitants—an idea that has become of interest to me as a recent immigrant to New York City, exploring the nooks and crannies of its underbelly. There are grand buildings and streets intended to be viewed, to have us take something away and leave us with the feeling of awe. We create our own spaces of comfort to feel familiar and confident, but much of this is based on the aesthetics that have already been laid out before us. In photographing an educational building, Jeff is revealing the constructed experiences that channeled most of us through our childhood and created our perception of the use of space.

Jeff describes his series:

The series of images taken at Los Angeles Valley College (L.A.V.C) is a study of contradictions between the perceived benefits of formal and structured educational environments, and the reality of order as a potential repressive tool. The images, which in each case represent a pre-set state of conditions determined by the institution, seek to show an inherent rejection of these state affairs by the photographer, by portraying either their distinct abandonment, state of repair, or isolation.

His work reminds me of the work of performance artist Alex Villar that was part of The Interventionists at Mass MoCa in 2004. The series, titled Other Spaces, documented Villar intervening and reclaiming spaces in New York City that normally go unnoticed. This included the tiny crevice between two buildings, an empty concrete alley behind a gate that normally went un-tread, and the space underneath a stoop. All of his actions, as well as Jeff's, inspire viewers to look at what is not in front of us, to step off the beaten path and take in the forgotten and unused.

Jeff Seltzer is based in Los Angeles and was educated at San Diego State University, receiving a BA and an MA in Rhetorical Theory.

Refinery Triptych (panel 1) by Massimo Cristaldi.

The work of Massimo Cristaldi is concerned with the ineffable qualities of the visible world. Here, nature and industry make an unlikely pair, yet they make a conceptual reciprocation. The flock of starlings in this photograph are drawn to the refinery's thermal flows; en masse they create a kind of super-organism that almost emulates the scale of the artificial complex. And, they create an amazing visual tension as well.

Having written about his body of work Simulacra elsewhere, I continue to be drawn to the ideas behind his photographs, which in his words represent "possible and strange harmonies." He adds, "I dedicate a particular interest to boundary lands in unstable balance between progress and leftover traces of a time gone."

Based in Catania and Rome, Massimo has received awards from the Prix de Photographie de Paris and International Photography Awards this year alone. Much more can be seen at his website, which The New York Times recently called out as a must-see portfolio site.

Beale Street by Thomas Griscom

Tom Griscom has been collaborating with the San Francisco State University Labor Archives and Research Center to document important sites of labor revolt and unionization in the Bay Area. Beale Street depicts an area bridging the Financial District and Multimedia Gulch whose traces of labor struggle are today largely eradicated. Though many brick warehouse spaces remain, it is hard to imagine this neighborhood of corporate centers and oyster bars was once the site of the violent climax to the months-long West Coast Longshoremen's Strike 75 years ago, popularly known as "Bloody Thursday."

But this stirring historical reflection is only one motivation behind this body of work. Tom says,

By no means is this project a political statement as much as it is about me trying to understand the allure of the West Coast for so many people, myself included. It has always had the promise of a better life, both the quality of and financially. Choosing these structures has been a look at what remains, what has been reappropriated, and what is gone completely. What started as a small collaborative project for [the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' triennial] Bay Area Now last summer, then turned into a 50 page thesis and show, and now I am expanding it further to parallel the downturn California is facing

With this in mind, these panoramic portraits are especially poignant in that the format is ostensibly suited for the romantic sweep of California's vistas, only to document a restless and sometimes bitter history.

More of Tom's labor sites and other portfolios can be found on his website.

Perhaps the most famously photographed set of twins in the art world are Cathleen Mulcahy and Colleen Yorke, also known as The Wade sisters or the Diane Arbus twins. Arbus photographed the sisters in matching dark green dresses, after discovering them—and their startling eyes—at a local party for twins and triplets in 1967.

The photograph of the Wade sisters was discovered among many photographs of "freaks" and "outsiders" in Arbus' collection after she committed suicide in 1971. They suggest that Arbus compartmentalized twins among the bizarre and tragic forms of humanity that existed in her vision of the world—a world that was both a point of fixation and an entity that engulfed her psyche.

Contender Andrew A. Henderson has also sought out twins in his project, Seeing Double, but only twins in the village of Kodinji in the southern state of Kerala in India. The village is comprised of 2,000 families, but contains 250 sets of twins, a phenomena that has occurred without apparent explanation. Henderson notes, "while most twinning occurs in the West because of the widespread use of fertility drugs, doctors cannot attribute a reason to why it occurs in Kodinji, especially given that India has one of the lowest twinning rates in the world."

Henderson's work is a catalog of double-dom, and the pairs of his brothers, sisters and sister-brother combinations stand side-by-side shot head-on, unsmiling, in an ambiguously located forest. Some pairs are dressed alike, some not, some sets identical and others fraternal and disparate enough in appearance that their twin-ship is only knowable through Henderson's documentation. Henderson neither celebrates nor condemns the individual sets of twins—and rather, only suggests that their existence is a difference to anthropologically acknowledge. His stage-lit forest backdrop avoids making commentary about the rest of the village of Kodinji—whether it is poor or industrial, conservative or liberal, or if the twins are welcome or outcast in their own community.

Henderson has also photographed other hierarchical and classifying elements of Indian society including a series about individuals who suffer leprosy titled The Untouchables and another, Dreaming for Fiza about the struggle of transsexuals. Images from both series are available on his website.

Lola Series 2 by Joshua Schwalbach-Scott

This image from the Lola series by contender, Joshua Schwalbach-Scott, is the type of stylized photographic eye-candy that might be more at home on a billboard or your TV screen than on the walls of a gallery. Upon seeing the images I became instantly nostalgic for the viral Sony Bravia ads featuring bouncy balls and paint cannons.

Outside the context of logos, headlines, and lifestyle-branding, the Lola series (actually outtakes from a commercial perfume shoot) evoke an abstract kind of whimsy. These images, Joshua writes, are:

. . . artistic interpretations out of items in our overly commercialized society, which is an overall theme throughout my work.

To me, this recontextualization of commercial photography is akin to the appropriation work of Richard Prince, whose infamous rephotographs of the unbranded elements of magazine ads created a bold new category of fine art.

Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, by Richard Prince

Lola Series 1 by Joshua Schwalbach-Scott

However, Joshua's work isn't limited to literal explosions of color. Other portfolios up on his site such as Snapshots and Hong Kong show his engagement with street and travel photography. The diverse subject matter allows us to see several sides of a single artist whose experimentation and crossover between personal and commercial work makes him an exciting photographer to watch.

129 6th Ave W, Dickinson, ND, 2009 by David Ebeltoft

Even in this digital age, the physical qualities of the work are still critical considerations for photographers. What kind of film (for those who still use it, and there are many), the type of print, the quality of print stock, and not least, the matte and frame are all material choices which affect how the photograph is displayed and perceived.

It helps to see the work in person, of course; I saw the importance of these qualities at the 2007 solo exhibition of Helen Van Meene's work at Yancey Richardson Gallery. Van Meene used framing to her advantage by encasing her beatific portraits of children in thin, dark walnut frames to give the images a votive-like quality. The portraits were not only beautiful and eerie, but the slight frames reflected the delicate character of these children.

Contender David Ebeltoft brings this approach to light in his new body of work, Residential. He writes about the project,

My current series, Residential, was built on the idea of how a home's external appearance and formal composition can be extensions of the individual, their family, and community. The framework of each dwelling became a symbol, a scene from an ordinary existence that helped shape my idea of how a home, both aesthetically and conceptually, should look. The split-toned, gelatin silver prints are 'housed' in a white-stained 1/2in Baltic-birch matte and ebony-stained 2x4 walnut frame.

David Ebeltoft completed his BFA in Photography and Museum Studies at the College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2002. David received the Grand Prize at the 2008 National Small Works Exhibition at the Arkell Museum and was most recently awarded the 2009 AATTA Arts Fellowship at Dickinson State University.

Photographs with magical light always capture my heart. This obsession with luminous qualities began with the intensive lighting in the work of Philip Lorca DiCorcia, was solidified by the 2006 exhibition Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and extends to the unearthly glows found in the photographs of 2009 Hot Shot Mike Sinclair. The misty haze found in Contender Sarina N. Finkelstein's work just reinforces my swooning. Golden sunshine is just, well, sunny, and instantly implies the endless summer of the West Coast. It is surprising, then, to see this light fall on sobering and increasingly all-too-familiar subject matter (as we've also observed in the entries from other Hey, Hot Shot! Contenders this year): the effects of the recession.

Sarina documents the surprising resurgence of gold miners in the mountains of Northern California and their struggles. Says Sarina of the project,

This body of work focuses on five California gold prospecting communities. The miners here--victims of recent layoffs, veterans, ex-convicts, and freelancers in between gigs--are dependent on the income from their claims to feed their families. Selling an ounce of gold at $1000/oz provides them with hope for survival. The New '49ers arrive in Winnebagos and pickups, having sold their homes and farms for subsistence. They create the same semi-permanent Hoovervilles along the edge of the river canyon as their predecessors.

This image strikes me because it documents a pregnant moment: a young man casually strolling down a riverside, a family in the far distance. At first glance it seems idyllic. However, the context casts the image in a darker light; this is a place of hardship, where people take on unknown odds in unlikely ways to survive in the worst economic climate in generations. But it is also full of promise; accidental but tight-knit communities emerge as they face the same hardships and an uncertain future together.

Sarina Finkelstein received her BFA in Photography and Art History from Washington University in Saint Louis, and then completed her MFA in Photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has been a guest speaker for the Professional Women Photographers (PWP) and a featured photographer in PWP Magazine, as well as a speaker and award recipient at the 2004 Society for Photographic Education National Conference.

Untitled (Aren't They Beautiful?) by Kara Suhey

"Aren't they beautiful?" asks contender Kara Suhey in a series of photographs that documents her own candy red fingernails. The work, in both appearance and thought, resembles the spontaneity of images made on a camera phone and questions her intent to create photography-as-art. The series appears to be a recreational afterthought, but Kara's naivety is sweetly feminine with a touch of nonchalant narcissism. She knows what she's doing.

The precise stupidity of the statement [Aren't They Beautiful?] leads one to ask whether or not I might be serious. It's this hazy area of childlike wonderment in which these photographs dwell. In the gravity and simplicity of the present moment, my own red and shining fingernails are radiantly beautiful.

This kind of self-aware work acknowledges the action of artists to create and show, while mocking the formality of this action itself. Everything is delivered with a sly wink. Though the photos clearly examine the concept of beauty, they cheekily poke fun at feminist ideologies as well; direct embodiment of our generation's post-feminist wit and irreverence.

But truly, it's all about having fun while making and sharing art. Kara and her longtime friend, Mina Karimi, have also been collaborating on a series of performance projects under the idea that Everything Will Be Okay. Part public art and part motivational speaker, their goal is to surprise everyday people by bringing a bit of unexpected joy to their lives. This includes organizing a NYC reenactment of the unforgettable parade scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and a two-month Dance Everyday tour.

This project idea came to us as a tangible extension of our longtime ideal that you should follow your bliss and do what you truly feel like doing. This means taking an active role in your own enjoyment and cultivating a creative mind, playful spirit, and performing the work you genuinely would like to do.

Kara's projects are quite inspiring for all struggling artists out there, reminding you that the power of one person (or two!) can greatly influence the collective experience.

x2EXP60 by Damian VanCamp

Edward Weston once quipped that "consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk." Hot Shot Contender Damian VanCamp's work seems to take this advice to heart in his series Watching The World. VanCamp sidesteps compositional convention by exposing his roll once, leaving it for a while (in the process forgetting what he had first shot), and re-exposing the film. The resultant images are generated by creative chance, revealing distorted overlays of textures and unexpected intersections of light and shadow.

According to VanCamp Watching The World is best understood next to Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai's poem, "The Resurrection of the Dead," part of which reads:

We will not take anything with us.
Even plundering kings, they all left something here.
Lovers and conquerors, happy and sad,
they all left something here, a sign, a house,
like a man who seeks to return to a beloved place
and purposely forgets a book, a basket, a pair of glasses,
so that he will have an excuse to come back to the beloved place.
In the same way we leave things here.
In the same way the dead leave us.

See more of VanCamp's work on his website.

LESS 7 by Sergei Sviatchenko

Browsing through this year's second edition of Hot Shot contenders, the bright colors and faceted shapes of Sergei Sviatchenko's photo collage submissions brought my scroll to a stop. A 60-year old architect from the Ukraine, Sergei uses collage to invite the public within his artistic process, asking for reflection on our modern vision of life and culture. His most recent series, LESS, explores portraits and architecture, recombining photos into singular objects that float against a flat space of emotive neon. He writes,

It might sound absurd or surreal, but the recontextualisation [sic] of familiar everyday objects, with the use of photo collage are turned into scarp contoured, sculptural expressions, point out the media imagery all around us and delivers the imagery in new, dynamic forms.

Following a large history of photomontage artists from the Constructivists to the Dadaists, Sergei takes the medium one step further by also photographing his collages parading through real space. These pieces are interacting with fingers, toes and various environmental elements, adding a voyeuristic and process-heavy dimension to the work.

Sergei's surreal world of jumbled miscellany is more readily experienced in his large-scale, pervading installation work, which include drawing, painting and video (an expansion on his belief that all art is inherently a collage).

In 2002, Sergei opened a collaborative non-profit exhibition space, Senko Studio in Viborg, Denmark. The space showcases emerging new media artists and experimental projects, while his accompanying venture, Senko Frame Project, has expanded to include contemporary video art.

His most recent show, Mutatis Mutandis, in collaboration with photographer Jan von Holleben, combined human and animal structures superimposed over scenic landscapes at the Farmani Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.

Toys R'Us Customer Pickup by Darrius Thompson

Darrius Thompson's Toys R' Us Customer Pickup is spare in subject and composition but long on possibility. On one level is the frank presentation of a bland, if not unsightly, scene. A steel door is barely demarcated from the surrounding surface, the side or back of a major retail store. The asphalt comes right up to the edge of the building save for a small patch of concrete. The few other details are pedestrian; the stain on the door is perhaps the most compelling detail of the overall picture.

This attention to the banal and ugly has a proud pedigree in modern photography. Lewis Baltz turned his camera on the unexpressive surfaces of corporate buildings in his landmark The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, published in 1974. This would soon be succeeded by the New Topographics exhibition and catalog (of which Steidl has also published a volume dedicated to the show and its legacy). This attention to the ready-made environment at hand transformed photographic practice in allowing the quotidian and distasteful as legitimate subjects for depiction and consumption. Darrius is clearly embracing this tradition in its entirety.

Darrius has more work up on his site as well as a blog and resource site, urbansand, both worth checking out (including interviews with 20x200 edition-maker Michael Lundgren and contender Bryan Formhals).

Untitled by Matt Dallos

Contender Matt Dallos returns to us in this round of competition with work from his series, I Want The Red One. The images, taken at a carnival-like scene full of burly men examining muddy fields full of tractors, pays homage to one of America's most trusted pieces of machinery. The tractors here are the reason for celebration; they are being examined, fixed, rode upon and raced, with swaths of onlookers concentrating on the vehicles. On the neighboring fairgrounds families en masse gather to watch fireworks, sparklers, and nighttime tractor riders creating an aura reminiscent of some of 2009 First Edition Hot Shot Mike Sinclair's large-scale portraits of fairgrounds, rodeos, and carnivals.
These large-scale celebrations bring about the opportunity to observe both individuals, and individuals as a dynamic group, who are often focused on a specific spectacle—in this case, it is the tractors.

This work is a departure from Dallos' previously submitted series of triptychs, which examined intersections of man and nature on the South Island of New Zealand, but both are entrenched in the connection of humans to the land. Of his work, Matt writes,

I constantly immerse myself in topics such as our relationship with the land, the idea of human scale, agri-business, the dichotomy of wild and civilized. But in my life I am unable to separate these abstract ideas from the reality of topography, geology, ecology. In the end I am bound to the rock, to the pavement, to the trees, to the land.

See more from I Want The Red One and other series on Matt's website.

p.s. You can see more photos from our first-ever Hey, Hot Shot! Confab + Print Trade on flickr!

Untitled (Sleep) by Jaime Permuth

Jaime Permuth ventures into challenging territories of contemporary art practice with his series, The Completely Visible World. Permuth casts a nude couple into a grimy service core, magnifying their apparent vulnerability with the kind of lighting and metallic effects seen in high-end print ad campaigns and German car brochures. Upon scrutiny, they are behind a window, wherein light-studded trees are seen in reflection.

Of this body of work, the Guatemala-born, New York-based Permuth says:

In our twenty-first century, an endlessly sharp and unforgiving spotlight is cast on the body, which once captured is then processed and altered by digital technologies to please the greatest number of consumers. Humanity is redefined as the vast array of spectators which decides how all should look and move through space.

Seen through portals and windows throughout The Completely Visible World, this modern Adam and Eve are subject first to the photographer's staging and manipulation, then our gaze, and ultimately, a commercial context. It's unclear whether even having each other in this harsh environment will suffice, which is an allegory we all might want to ponder.

bright black sky by Julia Galdo

Hot Shot contender Julia Galdo has submitted a series of self-portraits that offer fragmentary narratives full of tension and curiosity. Julia writes, "What I learned while making [this] work is how to project emotions, problems, anxieties through the interaction of an environment. . . . It's my hope that they connect with the person in that frame in a sympathetic way."

Photographers who explore desire and female identity now constitute a distinct category of the modern canon, inclusive of Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman and Anna Gaskell. Galdo's work shares these qualities, yet possesses its own sense of isolation and everyday surrealism.

See more of Julia's photographs on her website.

Waiting room, Alishan, Taiwan. 2008 by Magda Biernat

New York-based photographer Magda Biernat returns to us again in this year's second edition of competition with compelling work from her travels abroad. After entering 2009's first round of competition, she was selected (by Jen herself!) as a winner of Photo-Op, the 14th Annual Photographic Competition run by Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW).

Born in Poland, Magda attended the Wielkopolska School of Photography before making her way to New York via Seattle. Then, after stints working at Magnum Photos and Metropolis Magazine, she embarked on a year of travels in 2007 to see where and how people live in seventeen different countries around the world. The image above was made during this time abroad, and is part of the series Inhabited. While many of Magda's earlier projects look at the outsides of living spaces and buildings, lining up the geometries of architecture and nature in cities both near and far, Inhabited makes a departure into closed and more personal spaces, inviting us behind the walls of buildings previously captured.

She writes of Inhabited,

I look into the quiet spaces where people sleep, wait, and work. The interiors of the rooms I've shot serve the same purpose no matter where they are found. Stripped of obvious cultural references and detached from their surroundings, they gain a kind of disorienting universality. The rooms are unoccupied but on closer inspection, items like a crumpled pillow or a half full bottle of water imply the human presence. By carefully composing each frame and eliminating the people who otherwise would help distinguish the place geographically, I wanted the spaces to become anonymous.

Though the habitats are void of people, their objects—bed posts, chairs, windows, and table legs—create the framework for Biernat's intimate insight into their lives while maintaining an overarching cultural ambiguity. One is only able to discern her possible location by tiny hints like Chinese script written on a calendar, and is left to guess who is living in these spaces, and where in the world Biernat is capturing their homes. The tone of the images is hushed and patient, and one imagines Biernat to be shooting in silence, surrounded only by the natural light that finds its way into each of these spaces.

See more of Magda's work from this series (and others) on her website and take a look at more of our contenders on flickr and facebook.

Leon, 2009 by Michael C. Mccraw

Our latest contender, Michael C. Mccraw hails from the city of Birmingham, Alabama. His work focuses on the South as a place that is both his home and a place he longs to find the feeling he supposes that home is supposed to elicit. He writes of his work,

My work is about the comforts of home, and the constant search for it. What it means to be Southern, and the disconnect I feel with the region I've spent all my life. Our connection with the rivers and hills that run deep through our past. The ever-changing landscape and people. Slowly being choked by growth and kudzu.

Many photographers before Mccraw have focused on capturing the essence of the South, exceptional among them William Eggleston, Emmet Gowin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Paul Kwilecki. Each works in a unique tradition ranging from Kwilecki's documentation of the rural poor that seems an evolution of the photographers hired during the days of the Farm Security Administration to Meatyard's placid portraits of children and families in backyards, often dressed in costume or wearing masks. Eggleston's Memphis-born eye is often associated with the word "democracy," reflecting on his equanimous approach to both the portrait, the landscape, and the mundane; his recent retrospective at The Whitney was named Democratic Camera in acknowledgment of this approach. Emmet Gowin is best known for his large-format black and white rural landscapes, family and dramatic vignetting.

One is led to ask whether there is common thread through the work of all of these above, and if there is, is that thread quintessentially Southern? Must one be Southern born and bred in order to capture the South, or is the South more an idea than an aesthetic that can be captured at all?

Gene Thornton, in a review of the 1981 exhibit I Shall Save One Land Unvisited featuring 11 Southern photographers at the International Center of Photography, asks similar questions about characterizing the South:

What do people think about when they think about the South today? Magnolias and moonlight? Rednecks, sharecroppers and the Ku Klux Klan? The Old South of romance and legend as memorialized in ''Gone with the Wind'' and the novels of William Faulkner? The New South of Henry Grady and the Atlanta Constitution as anatomized in the novels of Walker Percy?

He goes on to write that new photography from the South is indistinguishable from new photography from elsewhere, but that doesn't mean it's not Southern. That the South has become a hotbed for photographers is the bigger reason for celebration than suggesting a unified essence emerges from it.

Mccraw recently began a blog which features more of his work; on it is currently a sole post of "travels with amy" featuring a selection of images, presumably taken in the South. Mccraw's work represents a glimpse of photography being made by young southerners today and suggests that the desire to continue the tradition of capturing a region is ever-strong.

Girl on Wilshire by Bryan Formhals

Bryan Formhals has enough creative activity going that he merits an extended post. As a curator (or, visual editor? more on that below) his online exhibition endeavor La Pura Vida Gallery, which presents innovative monthly group exhibitions, just turned two years old. Pooled from Flickr and presented with a simple PREV/NEXT navigation, these shows have an unmediated intimacy that exemplifies what an online gallery should be.

But of course Bryan is himself a photographer and worthy Hey, Hot Shot! contender whose Girl On Wilshire is from a body of work created on peregrinations around his former base of Los Angeles, where the "pure, golden, electric sunshine" seduced him into photography. It also embodies the creative ambiguities inherent in his photographs; here a woman-shaped outline hovers among a conflation of picture planes and reflections at indeterminate distances. It is an image of fugitive images.

Bryan took some time out to answer a few questions about La Pura Vida and how his photography coincides with the practice of editing and curating images.

What seemed missing from the way that photography was presented online that you wanted to address when you started LPV Gallery two years ago?
I'm not sure I was addressing the wider spectrum of photography online, it was more related to how photography was presented and organized on Flickr that I wanted to address. I was an admin for HCSP (Hardcore Street Photography), which was my first taste of editing photos. After doing that for about a year I become a bit bored with editing a single type of genre. My interest in photography was expanding and I simply wanted to investigate a wider variety of work. The way photos are presented in pools on Flickr is basically a constant stream. It's hard to sequence and really present a selection of photos in an interesting way. So really, I wanted to take some of the great work we were finding on Flickr and present it in a more manageable and interesting way, which meant taking it off Flickr.

When you started out how did photographers find you to submit their work?
Like I mentioned, LPV spun off from HCSP which is one of the most prominent documentary/fine art groups on Flickr. Most of the photographers that initially found LPV came from there and through basic networking and promotion on Flickr. These days though, the blog, Twitter, and Tumblr also bring in new submissions.

What I think is unique about LPV and the network of groups we have established on Flickr is that we're essentially crowd sourcing the editing. There's the perception that finding work on Flickr is challenging and it can be, but if you network and follow certain people and groups, the good work gets filtered up to you. I have the 'favorites' of a few dependable people on my RSS and keep tabs on a few pools, so that's how I find the work. And really, that's how much of it bubbles up to LPV. It's actually very interesting how it kind of organically happens.

As a photographer, when did the path of curating engage your curiosity, and how?
I was in L.A. because I wanted to be a screenwriter and about 4 years ago I got burned out and just lost the motivation to write, but I still had creative impulses that needed to be satisfied. So I started bringing a camera with me on my walks around LA. As is the case with many people, I became addicted and started to study the history of photography. But at the same time I was networking with other aspiring amateurs on Flickr and eventually fell in with the street photography crowd.

As I continued to study photography, I quickly learned that lesson that everyone interested photography learns, which is that you need to look at lots and lots of photography. And right now, there's really no better place to find a high volume of new photography than Flickr. Editing and curating forces you to make choices. I enjoy that. I like deconstructing a photograph and figuring out why I like it (sometimes I have no idea why!). The process of fine tuning one's sensibility is one of the joys of consuming and appreciating art. The simple act of discovering new photography is thrilling to me. And for my own work as a photographer, it's absolutely necessary because I want to improve and expand my photographic vocabulary. It's a never-ending process I imagine.

Untitled by Lina Scheynius

At first the shows were "edited," but now they are "curated." Is this just a difference of phrasing or is there a philosophical difference?
Back at the beginning I did most of the edits and I can't call myself a curator with a straight face, so I always put "edited by." But when I started bringing on different editors each month, they would say "curated" by and I would just leave it. For me, what we're doing on LPV is editing. I know online curation is a bit of a buzz term but I'm not sure it's appropriate. I think people are probably throwing it around because it adds a bit of gravitas to what we're all doing. But essentially, I think we're editors.

Your show titles and themes have an allusive, poetic quality to them. What defines an LPV Gallery show?
The titles and themes were an accidental quirk. We really didn't even have themes until April 2008. I was doing an edit and when I saw this photograph the phrase 'beautiful consciousness' just popped into my head. From there, I went with it and we started using quotes, songs, and book passages as the themes. This probably isn't unique to LPV, but I think it's part of what defines an LPV show. We take our inspiration from more poetic or philosophical ideas rather than anything too literal. An LPV show is kind of a mash-up of vernacular, documentary and fine art photography. I don't really like looking at photography through the prism of genres though. It gets too rigid for me.

You also seem to follow issues around copyright, appropriation, and larger theoretical debates about representation. How do these issues inform your "big picture" (yes, pun) of the state of photography today? And does this change the kind of work you are interested in?
I'm very interested to see how photography evolves online and it bothers me when corporations and unscrupulous entrepreneurs use the chaos of the internet to take advantage of content creators. Of course, the use of content on the web can be confusing and is ever evolving, so I think we need to keep an open mind. But we also need to speak up and keep people informed when we see something we know to be wrong. I want to see photographers and artists take more control of their content and not be so shackled to the whims of publishers and the bottom line. I'm really interested in photographers and groups who can build their own kingdom so to speak.

Untitled by Reuven Lebovitch

Contender Reuven Lebovitch's submitted series stages humorous situations around the home inspired by deeper psychological complexities. A woman simultaneously knits and unravels a sweater, so it is unclear whether she moving forwards or unwinding. A cross-stitched image of a small town in the mountains is hung precariously on a wall with dozens of nails and holes of past attempts surrounding the frame. Lebovitch's images suggest that the home is an extension of the human psyche—our desires to decorate and partake in domestic activities like knitting a sweater are bathed in a Rorschach of process. Reuven suggests that how we go about these daily tasks speaks volumes about our individual quirks—and that perhaps she who is most focused on knitting the sweater may also be the last to notice that it is unraveling.

See more work by Reuven on his website and additional images by this season's contenders on facebook and flickr.

Early morning meditation on Mount Guogong by Xiao Xiao Xu

Chinese-born photographer Xiao Xiao Xu immigrated to the Netherlands at age 14 and only recently returned to the hometown she left a decade ago. Xu describes this town, Wenzhou, (also the name of the series), as a "very sentimental journey for me to rediscover my home, my childhood and my memories." Using photography—a medium she found as a way to express herself while searching for identity in the Netherlands—Xu captures a collection of portraits, interiors, and profiles of everyday objects in her native Wenzhou.

Together, the images form a humble large-scale portrait of a town that we are invited observe along with Xu as she rediscovers it herself. Two middle-aged men enjoy a cigarette break together, a young boy in school uniform stiffly holds his posture, and the crowded balconies of a skyrise residential building are murky but visible through the branches of a flowering tree. Xu suggests that her memory of her hometown is about the intimately commonplace—that to be in Wenzhou is to silently observe daily rhythms with the keen eye of someone native-born. Ten years spent away cannot remove the inevitable feeling that, for her, this is still home.

Many additional images from Wenzhou are available on Xu's website alongside several other projects. Next week I'll be looking at other young Chinese photographers whose work has caught our eye (including some of our very own Hot Shots and 20x200 artists), but we're also curious to hear of any projects coming-from or about China that have caught your eye. Please let us know!

Golden Eagle in Medroom by Annie Marie Musselman

As I reviewed the latest batch of Hey, Hot Shot! contenders, this image by Annie Marie Musselman stopped me in my tracks. It's from her series Finding Trust, about which she writes:

Looking for truth after my mother passed away in 2002 I found the Sarvey Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Located in the foothills of the beautiful Cascade mountains, it's a place where injured, wild creatures come to finish their journeys or start new ones, where I've seen love, trust and intuition that equals that of a mother and child, a home where a few humans have come together to save the lives of many precious creatures.

Annie's series made me think of other striking animal portraits in recent memory, with Jill Greenberg's (aka The Manipulator) monkeys and bears foremost in my mind. Greenberg's well-known work is fantastic, but she presents her animal subjects as spectacles.

Worried, 2005, from the series Monkey Portraits by Jill Greenberg

Like much animal photography, Greenberg's work feels voyeuristic, as if I were peering through the bars of a (very clean) zoo. What appeals to me about Finding Trust is how candid and yet subtle the images are. Perhaps it's the palpable closeness between Annie and the animals she cares for that closes this gap of perception and emotion. Instead of feeling like I am watching from afar, her photographs give me the sensation of being with the animal in that exact point in space and time.

Fawn Looking Out Window by Annie Marie Musselman

Once drawn in, I feel the intense vulnerability and urgency of the moment. As Annie writes:

There is limited time for pictures during moments of crisis, constant worry over sick and dying animals, but all the while looking for moments to shoot the beauty around me. The more I am with these creatures, the more I see their inner beauty and intelligence and the more frustrated I become by humanity's neglect of nature. I believe the wild creatures among us embody the instinct and love we have lost, and with this I realize the purpose of my work.

I am reminded of something 2009 First Edition HHS! contender Sam Falls said in an interview. Though he wasn't talking about animals specifically, these words still resonate: "The pieces I always return to and can look at over and over in a museum's permanent collection are works that make me feel and not think, where there's no pedagogy but just empathy."

Dog Culture_3 by Philipp Engelhorn

Hong Kong-based photographer Philipp Englehorn captures photographic stories that take him to some of the world's poorest regions. In Dogs of Kabul, Engelhorn enters the ring of weekly dog fights, a tradition in the Muslim regions of Afghanistan that has been celebrated for centuries.

Dog-fighting, which carries weighty legal repercussions in the United States and many other Western countries, is a community event in Kabul serving as both ritual and spectacle. Englehorn notes,

Up to 1000 people gather in the early mornings to see Molossel Dogs (Powerful local Breeds Like Koochee Dogs) fought by strict rules. There are no death and only little blood in these fights...It feels like a wrestling match of 2 ancient warriors.

The fights celebrate the animals and their owners rather than positing the dogs as beings to be sacrificed either for money or for pride. The dogs are treated as loved and prized possessions and dog trainers spend hours exercising their "warriors" in preparation for the weekly fights. In the image above, the older man dressed in white serves as the judge of the day's fights making sure no dogs are excessively wounded as they tug and tussle with one another. The crowd billows into the mountains, fixated on the animals, and one stares back at the crowd in their dark dress worn against the snowy mountainous backdrop.

In contrast, the most visible images of modern-day Afghanistan in the media convey a different side of the country—one of perpetual turmoil and instability. Pictures depict American military troops stationed in Kabul, soldiers firing mortars and missiles from army bases, Afghanis lined up for an election with questionable validity, and innocent citizens injured by bombs and violence. Englehorn's essay offers unusual insight into a weekly ritual that offers a point of pride, entertainment, and reason for communing for this otherwise turbulent society and suggests that traditions as these are ways to hold on to the stability they can.

Untitled (page no. 6) by Timothy D. White

HHS! contender Timothy D. White hails from Auckland. He's spent four years in the far northernmost reaches of New Zealand working on the project he has submitted to us, True North. White set out on the project to "explore preconceptions of an area of NZ regarded as 'hopeless' due to its poor socioeconomic nature and geographic isolation." His images, and accompanying self-published book, strive to show the true nature of the region.

As he writes, "the journey became an exploration of the area's spiritual nature as well as... the 'social landscape', including local Maori, organic farmers, and a disappearing way of life (or what has been described as a 'vision of the future' in uncertain economic times)."

I can't help but think of 2008 First Edition Hot Shot Derek Henderson's achingly beautiful Terrible Boredom of Paradise, also taken taken in New Zealand, and of course, 2009 First Edition Hot Shot Kurt Tong and his series, Farewell in Labrador. It seems that in the far corners of the world, where people are struggling to find a balance between a certain quality of life and inevitable "progress", there are, thankfully, a handful of photographers around to document what may be, or is already, lost. For as slowly as we may think time passes, it can all happen quite quickly.

Our Border by David Rochkind

Whether you're a seasoned photographer or just have a passing interest in photography, don't miss the article on page C1 of yesterday's New York Times by Randy Kennedy, Treasures From an Underground Trove. The big news is that, for the first time ever, a small portion of the subterranean National Geographic Society photo archives in Washington are being unearthed for an upcoming gallery show in Chelsea. While there will surely be controversy about the possible sale of these artifacts to private collectors, the part of the article that most interested me was this comment by Maura A. Mulvihill, vice president for the society's image collection and sales:

Photojournalism has really only recently been recognized in the fine-art world... And we are sitting on this vast, amazing collection, and started wanting to find a way to get it out into the world.

This quote in particular strikes a chord with me because just yesterday we received an entry from Mexico City-based contender David Rochkind, whose entire practice straddles the line between fine art photography and photojournalism. The photograph above is from his series Heat, about which he writes:

Heat is a project about Mexico while it is undergoing a transformation caused by a drug war that has seen inconceivable brutality and violence. The drama is played out on a daily basis and is becoming routine, even banal, to those involved. The wounds of the war bleed into every corner of the country, staining the very fabric of Mexican life with violence, death and fear. I am fascinated by the space between what Mexico has always been and what this carnage is creating. The heat of the conflict is melting two worlds together, making a singular Mexico defined as much by violence and tension as by history and culture.

Differently from many fine art photographers, on David's website each photo has a caption and each series has a story. As he writes, "I want to draw viewers in with beauty, engage them with social conscience and, finally, force an emotional investment in the picture from shared feeling and experience." To think that photojournalistic content is only just emerging from its role as strictly news blows my mind. In a way, David's combination of fine art and photojournalism parallels the "melting of two worlds" shown in his captivating images.

Flora 026 by David Axelbank

HHS! contender David Axelbank's entry instantly reminded me of a show I saw at the Guggenheim three years ago, "Spanish Paintings From El Greco to Picasso." No, his photographs do not recall El Greco or Picasso, but brought to mind lesser-known still-life painters Zurbar and Juan Sánchez Cotán. I was then, as I am now when looking at David's work, impressed by the depth of the darkness that the three artists employ in their compositions.

From his statement, David writes:

The flower forms emerge out of the dark, their distinct personalities condensed against the black background. Simple and raw in their presentation, these compositions nevertheless maintain a formality typical in floral photography, their night time setting serving to heighten their sensual beauty and the sensory experience for the viewer.

View more of David's work on his site.

Elena by Pedro Cota

Just a brief moment of introduction—my name is Alan and I've just joined the team at Hey, Hot Shot! This is extremely exciting for me because, as mentioned earlier, I had the privilege of developing numerous photography books as an editor at Chronicle Books.

Being involved with Hey, Hot Shot! is a chance for me to continue to work with the photography community in a new way, and the opportunity to see new work continues to thrill me. Jen Bekman and I met years ago at one of the photography portfolio reviews that I used to attend fairly often, and have stayed friends ever since; that we now get to work together is a treat. I'm looking forward to helping her and the whole great team here continue to keep Hey, Hot Shot! the best thing going for photographers everywhere.

All that said, I'd like to introduce contender Pedro Cota, whose mysterious Elena portrays his wife descending a pedestrian bridge in an atmospheric fog. Based in Guadalajara, Mexico, Cota arranges his subject and surrounding elements in a way that is arguably theatrical. This careful composition, combined with precisely selective lighting, reflects his training as a cinematographer in Madrid. This is a suspended moment whose ultimate narrative is elusive.

Cota has more work up at his site and some allusive questions about photography and representation (in Spanish). Keep the amazing entries coming—enter now!

Just Before the Moment of Overwhelming Awareness, 2008 by Mario David Correa

Contender Mario David Correa's series, The Window Seat, is inspired by Russian Constructivism photomontages. Although the work is not politically driven, Correa finds enchantment in collaging together a "combination of unrelated subjects, locations, times and events" on an overhead projector. Once the new composition is arranged, Correa rephotographs the image to create a new narrative landscape.

See more of Correa's work on his site.

Human Landscape by Natalie Chan

Having grown up in Taiwan, contender Natalie Chan views her new-found home in New York as an inspiring playground in which to make images. Currently a student at the School of Visual Arts, Chan describes her experience of creating images in the city as a way of simultaneously looking both inward and outward. She writes of her series Waterland,

I photograph people that catch my immediate attention--often those absorbed in their own world. In contrast, my photography of objects leads to a process of self-reflection. Many of my images are of single isolated objects; in a way they are portraits. However, they involve a different kind of perception. No one looks back at me or communicates with me, so rather than interpret someone else, I am forced to look more and more into myself.

The majority of images in this series, more of which you can view on her website, are taken by bodies of water in and around New York: the beaches of Long Island and Coney, Liberty, and Governor's Island. While swimmers, sunbathers, and sand—obvious indicators of waterside activity—are present, Chan also finds a plethora of coastal anomalies: the boy on crutches who can't go in the water, a woman dressed entirely in gold awkwardly draped across a chain-link fence, and a beach full of massive multi-colored balloons that seem to swallow up all the people running around below.

Head over to Natalie's website to see more from the Waterland series and other projects.

Speedboat & Hearse by Chris Hoare

London based Hey, Hot Shot! contender Chris Hoare left his job as a graphic designer and picked up a Wista Field camera to aid him in "capturing the enivronments in which people live and regularly come into contact with, but remain largely unnoticed".

See more of Chris's work on his site.

Independence Day #5 by Paccarik Orue

Peruvian contender, Paccarik Orue, whose name means "tomorrow" in Quechua sends us images from his series Independence Day, which focuses on American SUV culture. He looks at the irony of Americans celebrating the Fourth of July in their fuel-charged vehicles, blind to the implicit dependency on oil and resources created by the vehicles they drive. He writes,

In the 1990s, Sport Utility Vehicles (S.U.Vs) became extremely popular in the United States, due in part to low gasoline prices. These vehicles became a cultural symbol of the country's dedication to the motto "bigger is better." That was until the price of oil reached record highs in the mid-2000s...for many, the S.U.V. is a way of life and there is no other type of car that will do. This work is a portrait of Shelter Cove, a small town in northern California, taken July 4, 2009. The American way of celebrating Independence Day involves S.U.Vs, illustrating the irony that people celebrate freedom and democracy with vehicles which further our dependence on cheap, foreign oil, which mostly comes from places where there is neither freedom nor democracy.

The recently introduced Cash for Clunkers bill, which offers $3,500 - $4,500 of government rebate money to those who trade in their current cars for more fuel-efficient vehicles was so popular in its first 24 hours that it expended the entire $1 billion dollars allotted to the program. The senate voted to add another $2 billion to the program, suggesting that the trend towards bigger, faster, and gas-guzzling cars may be coming to an end. But, in order to bring the ever-present lust and cultural acceptability of the SUV to an end, their normalized omnipresence in American suburbs and role as vehicles to aspire to owning must also come to an end. Perhaps in another decade, the image of kids running a muck next to flags and having a barbecue—as depicted in Paccarik's images—will no longer feature the SUV as an symbol of identifiable Americana as well.

p.s. Haven't applied to HHS! yet? Why wait? Apply here!

X-mas tree, Mojave, California by Stephen Antonopoulos

Australian photographer Stephen Antonopoulos writes, "I try to examine bonds formed amongst people and the places they inhabit. " In the case of the photo featured above, the absence of people illustrates their relationship with the Mojave and the harshness of its climate. The scalding light and withered state of the tree and surrounding "live" plants also make clear the unforgiving nature of the desert.

The abandoned Christmas tree is a bit of an emblem of Western culture, even without the tree-stand still attached to its base, the origin of the acutely out-of-place vegetation would be clear. In this photo, a seemingly benign tradition appears to be odd and maybe even sinister—the remains of something that might be stumbled upon in a Coen brothers film.

Take the photo below, from 2009 First Edition Hot Shot Mike Sinclair, as a "before" image to Antonopoulos' "after":

Antonopoulos' image is from his series Mojave. See more of the images on his website.

I know it's early in the year to be talking about the holidays and you may be thinking it's also early in the season to consider submitting your photos to HHS! But, it's not! We'll be seeing turkeys and tinsel before we know it and even before that, this round of HHS! will come to an end.

uncl jimmi s hog crossin by Tom Swanston

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Tom Swanston hails from Chattachoochee Hills, Georgia, a place we imagine from his submission is rife with slow-moving rivers and long dirt roads. Describing himself only as a "southern man," Swanston's images offer a sepia-toned glimpse into slow bodies of water and land that perhaps dictate his days. One imagines characters like Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer floating down river on a raft, drifting between fallen trees and weeping willows while the sun beats down from the sky.

With titles like, walkin by em ol ten ants farm and uncl jimmi s hog crossin, southern inflection is implicit in Swanston's depiction of place. One gets the sense that Swanston is strolling by on a hot summer's day, stopping for a pause while he pulls out his camera and takes in the southern air.

Remember: the competition is open for entries through October 23rd, and we'll be blogging here about contenders until the Hot Shots are announced. Follow us on twitter, facebook, and flickr for updates on contenders, past and present Hot Shots, and other photography news.

Happy Friday!

Two Mantles, 2009 by Jacqueline Bates

Contender Jacqueline Bates makes work about identity. More specifically, she makes work that examines her own vulnerability as an Italian American woman. With her series of diptychs, La Vita Americana, Bates provokes a conversation about past and present conceptions of Italian feminine identity.

From her statement about her work she writes:

I am interested in the position of a woman in a family, what her roles are, how they transform from generation to generation, and how isolating they can be. I examine rites of passage and family traditions which, although far removed from their socio-spiritual origins, continue to be a central part of Italian-American cultural identity. To contrast the color suburban photographs, I present three types of black-and-white imagery: film stills from Michelangelo Antonioni's classic 1960 film L'avventura; snapshots of my parents at the time of their marriage; and my own fictional film stills.

View more of Jacqueline's work on her site.

Slaughterhouse 1, 2007 by Axel Dupeux

The bloody reds of Axel Dupeux's series about slaughterhouses are affronting and catch you off-guard. Animal parts are strewn in the drain of a sink, and blood runs thick like a river. One feels exposed to information about their food-source that perhaps was really not meant to be seen and the slaughterhouses, devoid of human presence, seem like a fresh crime scene left-behind.

Dupeux writes,

On one hand, I thought the texture of blood had an inner violence and a certain beauty at the same time. The Slaughter of the beef by Rembrandt was one of the main images I had in mind. On the other hand, I always find some ambiguity in the way infrastructures are built to deal with serial production; in this particular case, I was torn between a contradictory feeling of seeing the perfect mechanism of the slaughtering process, yet I couldn't help thinking it was also a somewhat terrifying illustration of the level of development Humankind reached.

Dupeaux's series brings to mind Erika Larsen's series about hunting, The Hunt. Here, speckles of blood in the snow and bloodied fingers and animals are also present, but there is also a sense of community and comradeship that motivates the actions of the hunters. Their connection to nature—the long walks through the woods and late nights under bright stars—also complete the hunting experience. On the contrary, Dupeux's images depict a de-humanized killing factory, where the killing the animal is purely for profit, rather than experiential in itself. It renders his exposè of food-production far more brutal and--literally--difficult to swallow.

See more of Dupeux's work on his website, including additional images from his slaughterhouse series. [Warning: some readers may find the images from this project to be disturbing]

Enlightenment by Alex Leme

We all love books over here at JBP. Really, we seriously LOVE books. Have you noticed? In case you missed it, the JB Gallery's summer show is full of novel works, perfect for Summer Reading. So, call him smart, call him strategic, but Alex Leme submitted work from his series Literary Ghosts, that would surely catch our attention over here.

In his statement, Alex writes:

I have always found libraries to be accommodating, peaceful and welcoming spaces brimming with fascinating people, mysterious aisles and compelling stories. Literary Ghosts is a photo essay that intends to depict the elusive, poetic and haunting qualities of those places. This is much more a character study than a mere portrayal of their content, and physical characteristics. I want to dig deeper and explore the ghosts, mysteries, secrets, victories and tragedies surrounding libraries.

The mood, lighting, angles and compositions that Alex utilizes in his photographs of libraries are similar to those in Eric Percher's Work, which could also be described as an investigation into "ghosts, mysteries, secrets, victories and tragedies." Percher's images focus instead on office spaces and high-stress work environments, but likewise, elevate the drama of untold stories that might otherwise be considered mundane.

Leme's photos are also related, somewhat, to that of Winter '07 Hot Shot Mickey Smith. In her series Volume, Smith photographs stacks of books in libraries, as she finds them, relying on the books themselves to relay both the stories of library-goers and librarians and the role that books and magazines play as valuable objects in our lives.

See more of Leme's libraries on his website.

In-between Double #1, 2009 by Hye-Ryoung Min

HHS! Contender Hye-Ryoung Min's photographs are dreamy, to say the least. Her series of merged images, In-between, reminds me of when I forget to advance my Yashica and end up with a double exposure that is never as perfect or poetic as what Hye-Ryoung Min offers.

Like our previous contender, Annick Rosenfield, Hye-Ryoung Min is also a graduate of SVA. In her statement about her work, Min reveals her approach:

My process begins by capturing a first image of the main character, and then finding and layering a secondary image that provides emotional texture. Beyond that, I rely on the geometries of the urban landscape to convey the essential solitude of city life. I also work with elements that contrast stillness and motion, and round shapes that imply circularity and evoke the cycle of life. Finally, the process of photographing, finding, connecting, eliminating, and blending is completed by the addition of a unifying color layer that integrates all other layers into a single narrative thread. I assemble these images to make visible what is hidden, ultimately revealing a third language which breaches the gap between world and artist. It is in fact a world of images where subjects are dreaming my own language.

See more of Hye-Ryoung Min's work on her site.

Walter, 2008 by Annick Rosenfield

HHS! contender Annick Rosenfield's steely-eyed subject Walter looks askance while reaching into his pocket. His look is timeless, his posture stiff and formal, and his face bathed in a cool, natural sunlight that could be nearly any time of day.

A 2009 graduate of SVA's MFA program, Rosenfield's work has been published in Photo District News and The New York Times Magazine along with numerous New York City galleries. Of her work, she writes,

These images are from a series I made of minimalist portraits. I wanted to see how little information I could give the viewer and still make an interesting photograph. With this series I was particularly interested in the use of gesture, facial expression, and negative space.

You can see additional work and portraits by Rosenfield on her website.

And remember: we'll be blogging about contenders from this round of competition here on the blog right up until the Hot Shots are announced. The contenders' photos are also featured on flickr, and on the Hey, Hot Shot! facebook page. If you're on facebook, we hope you'll become one of our fans! Apply today!

Untitled, 2007 by Carrie Chalmers

Ithaca-based photographer Carrie Chalmers' series In November is awash with the even, gray light of an early winter's day. Snow dusts signs, yards, and rooftops and landscapes are dominated by hues of white and gray. This work was created on Thanksgiving Day 2007, when Chalmers traveled from Ithaca to Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side), and found herself intrigued by the semi-urban landscapes several blocks away from the main tourist strip. It is left to question whether these spaces are void of people because it is a holiday, or, as the language on signs and visions of vacant lots suggest, that this is a community in greater decline. Either way, a lingering sadness hangs heavy in the images' color palette and one can imagine Chalmers with her camera as the lone soul who was walking around on this day.

She writes,

The gaudy strip along Victoria Avenue and Clifton Hill seemed dull in the grey light despite the flashing signs of nearly empty attractions. But a few blocks away in the residential and commercial districts I found the sublime and paradoxical in structures and landscapes. The photographs express a struggle between expectations and disappointment, the present and absent, the possible and impossible, the familiar and foreign, loneliness and connection.

Chalmers' series brings to mind several of the images in Alec Soth's well-known project, Niagara, like Balloon (above), which also captures the feeling of abandon and an affronting loneliness in this supposed tourists' paradise. Large, blank building and motel facades at night create a discomforting portrait of a place when juxtaposed with hopeful newlyweds and out-of-towners. Combined, the images make up a uniquely American and unusually uncertain destination.

Visit Carrie's website to see additional projects and more work from In November.

Amy and Miles by Katie Shapiro

Our very first contenders post of the season! We opened the 2009 Second Edition of Hey, Hot Shot! yesterday and already the entries are coming in. We're excited.

L.A.-based photographer Katie Shapiro had the right idea and submitted her work right away while our eyes are fresh and hungry. I recognized Katie's work immediately; she's a previous HHS! entrant and more recently, I saw this image on fellow L.A. photographer Aline Smithson's blog, Lenscratch. As Aline wrote, "the old adage is good things come in pairs" and that's just what Katie's after showing. She photographs couples, examining relationships, physically and visually linking her subjects. In this sweet, sunny image, Amy and Miles are joined by Amy's braid which curves up and echoes the arc in the window coverings, creating more than one visual relationship, that between Amy and Miles and that between the couple and their surroundings.

To see and study more duos, visit Katie's blog Only Diptychs. To see more work from this round's contenders, stay tuned here. And don't forget to enter Hey, Hot Shot! early and often! Kidding, just send us your work soon, we can't wait to see it.

Singing, 2009 by Maureen Drennan,

Its that time of year again-the time for MFA graduates to release to the world the bodies of work they've been pouring their energy, blood, sweat and tears into for the past two (or more) years to turn into perfection. The School of Visual Arts is no exception and the 2009 MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Thesis exhibition is currently on view through next Thursday, June 27th. This year the exhibition is curated by faculty member Bonnie Yochelson and features the work of the 21 graduating students, including our own 20x200 artist and Winter 2006 Hot Shot Jessica Bruah as well as Hey, Hot Shot! contender Maureen Drennan.

One of the great things about the work that I see just from browsing it online, is the diversity in each students interests as well as their approach to the medium. There is passionate photojournalism by Scott Houston, personal narrative poured out in book form by Johanna Heldebro and even voyeurism presented as small intimate shrines by Yiftach Belsky. Can't wait to go see the show in person!

The exhibition is displayed at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th Floor from June 15th-June 29th. It's open Monday through Friday from 10-5pm, so catch it while you can.

Untitled by Craig Reynolds

Once again, we come to images of man's imprint on nature, where the men themselves are devoid from the frame of the image. The imprint here is less about environmental commentary, like that by work of contender William Goldkind, and more about how we forge relationships with nature, and clear spaces in it, to become our own. When did we develop the idea--or is it intrinsic to our adaptive paths--that we could draw lines in the grass for our recreation, or occupy a space in the woods, with a mattress and tarp? What paths that we tread accept the environment as it is, and when and where to we find the need and permission to change it? Reynolds explores his surroundings with open eyes to these intersections of human and natural circumstance, working to discern the fine line between accepting nature and adapting it.

Silhouette 1 by Tabitha L Lewis

The women in Tabitha L. Lewis' photographs begin to take on the characteristics of their natural surroundings. Limbs become branches and light shines through clothing as it does through leaves at the edges of a frame.

Lewis might be better known as Tabitha Soren, MTV VJ of "Chose or Lose" fame. She's done some growing up (along with the rest of us who would remember her from then) since appearing on television at the ripe age of 19. The themes in her work are evidence of this growing up — exploring the changing relationship women have with their own flesh and bones. She writes:

No longer are our bodies considered our genetic inheritance. They are projects to improve, design and update. My images are an attempt to align the varied, natural shapes of women with varied, natural shapes in the landscape.

See more of her work on her website.

Cage by Ania Gozdz

Polish-born RISD student Ania Gozdz's photographs resonate with the sort of existentialism that is central to a lot of Eastern European literature. But philosophical wonderings about the nature of our existence in words is one thing, representing them with images is another.

She writes:

Slipping in and out through the surface of representation, my work aims to highlight the symbiotic relationship between life and death and explore the failings of memory and materiality despite their perceived stability... I'm also intrigued by how flux and memory shape the distressed, porous narratives of our lives, and by how the ruptures in the understanding of ourselves can be the richest well of learning and reflection to draw from.

Gozdz's works walk the line between representation and abstraction, see more on her website.

Thanksgiving by Aya Brackett

Hot Shot contender Aya Brackett writes of her upbringing in a traditional Japanese house in the mountains of Northern California. Having spent some time in Northern California myself observing the bounty of this region's land, I can see why Brackett turns her camera's eye to creating images of food, with aesthetics and arrangement inspired by still life painting.

She writes,

The Between Meals project is constantly ongoing simply because I am continually interested in how food still lifes suggest a greater context and a narrative of human life outside the camera frame. These are not really food shots per se, but compositions that happen to employ food; the inspiration derives from the objects humans consume and use in their everyday lives. I am moved by how these mundane objects can be evocative cues of domestic life, but are still aesthetically exciting.

The work in this series captures moments before and after meals, when ingredients are laid out on a table or counter, or only the last drops of red wine can be seen in the neck of a glass. One sees the rinds and peels of devoured fruit next to cigarette butts and cracked nut shells; the remnants of indulgence and enjoyment and ritual. Brackett captures food without its creators, but their presence can be felt strongly in each of her images.

See additional work on Aya's website.

A Rock Decaying Around Itself by Jeremias Paul

A decaying rock, a dead bird, and a hole in a curtain can be simply taken as objects of everyday life, or, read with the significance of how these items and their circumstance came to be. HHS! contender Jeremias Paul explores "spirit-beings" through photography and sculpture; the works are meant to question existence and coincidence through the language of familiar forms, and encourage inquiry rather than simple answers or explanations.

Paul writes,

Songlines, as believed by the indigenous peoples of Australia, represent ancient paths left behind by ancestral spirit-beings during the creation of the world known as the Dreaming or Dreamtime. These spirit-beings manifested themselves in everyday forms ranging from inanimate objects to people, and even natural phenomena. It is believed that their existence is revealed to us through the signs that they have left behind in the world that surrounds us.

In the above image, a red rock crumbles upon the surface of smaller rocks below it. Where does this rock come from, what causes it's decay, and where is it located? What makes this rock red? One can ask innumerable questions both big and small about both object and circumstance, no matter how minute the point of focus may at first seem. This pushes the viewer to examine the decaying rock, dead bird, and hole in curtain more closely, and then from further away, at each glance of the object.

See addition work from the Songlines series on Jeremias' website.

Inauguration by Simon A Biswas

We're well past Obama's first one hundred days. And the worst economic climate we've recently encountered has proven to be a serious buzz kill. So, I was happy to stumble upon this photograph that gave me goosebumps again (we also have the a/c cranked in the office!).

On that Inauguration Day, people from all over the country gathered on the lawns of the White House, camped out to hear Obama's speech, even if he couldn't be seen and his words came through elevated speakers. It was one of those days that seemed too good to be true and that feeling is evident in the early morning light that echoes the hope expressed by this father photographed with his daughter, too young and too exhausted to really know what's going on.

Photographer Simon A Biswas, it seems, was in the right place at the right time, to capture the right man at the right moment.

Ben by Maureen R. Drennan

The tired eyes of Ben, above, speak to a life full of struggles. He lays in bed, looking one part listless, and one part contemplative; as a viewer, one wonders what it is that might be plaguing him. Contender Maureen Drennan has fixed her camera's eye on Ben for the last year and the ways being a marijuana grower in California puts him in a position of both social and cultural isolation.

Drennan writes,

We met a year ago and through this project have become close. Although marijuana is legal to grow and use in the state of California within strict guidelines, there are many situations in which it is still illegal. It is still not culturally acceptable to be involved in growing or selling pot. Due to the nature of rural farming and the reality of the illegalities of growing and distributing large amounts of marijuana "Ben" is socially and culturally isolated.

Situated between the fine lines of what's permitted and disallowed by the law, Ben becomes marginalized, while trying to maintain a living. Drennan documents small moments in his day: the morning in bed, weighing his crop, and walking down a quiet mountainous road to who-knows-where. Each speak to the lonesomeness that can come about by opting into a contentious trade, where the rules are as easily broken as they are made, because those rules are still as yet so unclear.

See additional work by Maureen on her website.

Sand Storm by Chelsea Brewer

Strange but true, I've managed to pick another photographer, this time Chelsea Brewer, who is working out of California. Maybe it's MOMA's Into the Sunset exhibition that has me subconsciously gravitating towards these photographs?

I was consciously drawn to this work, not because their left-coast-ness was clear, but at first glance, the image above reminded me of Michael Corridore's Aperture Portfolio Prize winning series Angry Black Snake. Corridore's photographs document that very specific moment of euphoria in spectator events when the climax has occurred and the crowd, covered in dust, ash or smoke, physically become part of the spectacle. In Brewer's above photo, the subjects are not watchers or participants, they are instead subject only to the wills of nature and the sand and sun and wind around them. It is these elements that unite her subjects throughout the series: as Corridore's portraits are as much of people as they are of sport, Brewer's photos are as much of people as they are of a place.

See more of Brewer's new work on her website website.

sprinkle by Mary L. Rasmussen

It's warm and sunny and the weather's just right for a little day-dreaming about longer days and later evenings. Most of Mary L. Rasmussen's photographs appear to be taken during that extended period of time between late afternoon and early evening when you're not quite sure when one has ended and the other has begun and all of a sudden you realize that the sun may soon be rising.

Both her portraits and landscapes are dark and mysterious, her subjects are guarded but not distant — they're really a bit of a tease. For more, see Mary's website, appropriately titled faint in between.

Bird teeth lunch of beans, Jonesport, Maine, August 2007 by Jonathan Levitt

Contender Jonathan Levitt writes that the images in the project, Wake to Songbirds Wake to Crows are about the "idea of home." When one looks to this series on his website, one finds photographs of chickens and horses, tractors and trailers, dogs running wild, and fresh tomatoes in the sunlight--an idea of home that is far from the urban bustle of HHS! HQ in downtown Manhattan. The fields looks idyllic and peaceful, like a place where the rhythms of the day move slowly and deliberately.

A photographer who comes by way of culinary school and time spent on farms, Levitt lives-by and observes the land with the eye of someone who has toiled many hours in the sun and dirt. His images whet the tongue with the lure of some kind of quiet life, where carrots are eaten after being pulled fresh from the ground and the eggs you cook with are never more than a few hours old. He tells a story about cycles--of life to death, morning to night, spring to fall--with this growing series of work, capturing elements of the spirit of rural Maine.

See more images by Jonathan Levitt on his website.

Memory Grove, Salt Lake City by John Paul Jespersen

Contender John Paul Jespersen's night images offer up winter wonderlands that, at first glance, appear unreal or created. There is hardly a trace of man in the backyards of condos or on the snowy mountains he captures, but then, in the distance, a light can be spotted off in the distance.

The skies take on green and yellow and purple hues, full of the swirling colors of both ambient and incandescent lights, emanating from street lamps and reflecting off the snow that has piled onto trees and homes. His world is quiet, and at rest, unaware it is being captured through a camera.

See additional work by John Paul Jespersen on his website.

Terrain Vague #2 by Christian Vium

Christian Vium's HHS! entry "explores the fringes of Nouakchott, the windblown capital of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, where [Vium is] currently conducting long-term research on climate change, water scarcity, human adaptation and vulnerability." While his stated purpose is clearly documentary, the photographs remind me a bit of the surreal work by former documentary photographer Roger Ballen. Discarded bits of scattered trash become stage props — a fire burning low and skeletons of ships at sea. Unlike Ballen's work, human presence is marked only by their absence and what they've left behind:

In effect, the objects seemingly scattered in the open space are the traces of nomad encampments, the former residents now most likely inhabitants of the vast slum areas closer to the city, where an estimated 65 percent of the city's population lives. The particular beige light is a result of the constantly blowing winds, which hurls sand particles into the air, blurring the boundary between heaven and earth.

Vium is a photographer and anthropologist currently employed as a Ph.D. Fellow at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. See more of his photography on his website.

When We Finally Came to Rest by Cody Bratt

With just hours left to apply to Hey, Hot Shot!, we're tapping our fingers watching the last minute submissions roll in. One submission that came in late last night was the cinematic trio of images from Cody Bratt's series From Home and Back. Shooting stars criss-cross the desert night sky, taking me to an un-specifiable place out West where I half expect to see a cowboy to stumble across the image. In one image, lights are on in a home that sits alone in a great expanse, and a trailer door flaps open in the photo above, but human presence can only be detected through these hints, rather than seen standing in the open.

The blue, cold hue of the scenes captured here feel like movie stills from the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men. One can imagine the protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, who finds himself on the lam from a cold-hearted killer after finding a suitcase full of cash, in a setting such as these, hiding out for night in this trailer before taking off on the run again.

For Bratt, these images are about abandonment and discovery, and he writes,

There are likely thousands of stories in each place and, on the face of it, the voices inhabiting them have long since silenced themselves and moved on. But it is precisely this abandonment that makes these photographs about the opposite - discovery. Or put another way, accumulation. Each shot is a discovery and a love letter to the stories people held dear in these places.

The stories here are left to the imagination, and for Bratt, writing a history in found objects and places, is the beginning of a way to grow attached to what he has discovered.

Settlement 1 by Corinne Silva

Plastic doesn't leave us, it's become ubiquitous. We're slowly training ourselves to not use it and reuse it when we have to but we're a little late in the game. We've all seen Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers and Plastic Bags, 2007 which depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds. But, the plastic habit is not particular to Americans, it's all over the world, and as photographer Corinne Silva points out, it's all over the desert region of Almeria in southeast Spain. Working as part landscape photographer, part documentary photographer, Silva's work examines the many ways plastic is utilized in this arid, isolated, and rapidly developing region and all of the things its use has come to mean.

She writes:

Here on the periphery of Europe, the northern and southern hemispheres meet, as do migrants from both compass points. Historically a contested border territory, Almeria still bears the traces of past empires: crumbling watchtowers guard the coastline and Moorish castles compete for space with ancient Catholic churches.... Increasingly visible in the landscape is plastic, innovatively used and reused. Plastic simultaneously coats and reveals. I focus on the use of plastic and what it represents to examine the physical effects of exclusion, desire and exploitation.

See the rest of the series on her website.

Humming Bird by Kelli L. Pennington

Kelli L. Pennington writes:

My practice uses the snapshot aesthetic to engage desire and intimacy. By photographing my friends, family, lover, and myself, I want to mirror the experiences of tenderness, cruelty, and love directly and with limited mediation.

There is certainly something both tender and cruel, sad and beautiful, and despite Kelli's role as a passive mediator, surreal about this photograph. While the moments when the animal and human worlds collide, most often to the detriment of the former, are fairly common, they often feel out of the ordinary. The power that we wield over the animal kingdom is tangible and the fragility of birds and beasts evident. It can be heartbreaking.

The shirtless subject in Pennington's photo is rendered softly, obscured by the reflections of trees and clouds; the empathy she feels for both the hummingbird and captor is palpable. On her website, Penningon's woven formal and casual portraits with landscapes, fluidly moving from one to the other — it's elegant everyday drama.

Pregnant Girl with Keys by JO ANN WALTERS

Informed by her upbringing in the "Middle West" of America in a small town by the Mississippi River, Jo Ann Walters makes portraits of the men, women, girls, and boys who make up her surroundings, capturing them with the intimate eye of an insider. In the image above, Pregnant Girl with Keys, the young woman clutches her chest and holds a glassy expression in her face, her maybe-visible pregnant stomach hidden by the folds of her soft gray sweatshirt. Walters portraits show subjects with a veneer of poise that seems undermined by their youth, or a questioning stance that suggests an underdeveloped hardness they want to possess. The images bring Tema Stauffer's The Ballad of Sad Young Men to mind in which a series of teens and twenty-somethings are posed along Main Street of blue-collar Binghamton and emanate a visible tension and uncertainty in their gait.

The Shipwreck by Yann le Coroller

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Yann le Coroller sites Americans Gregory Crewdson and Philip Lorca diCorcia and Canadian Jeff Wall as influences on his work but it was seeing the photography of Masashi Asada in Japan that sparked his series about Alonso Quixano. Adopted from and inspired by Don Quixote, le Coroller composes and photographs the lighthearted and surreal adventures of a man "a little bit lost in [his fantasies]."

While the filmic parallels between le Coroller's work and that of his influences are evident, his series is a little less Lynch and Hitchcock and little more Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Juenet's Amelie seems a likely female counterpart to le Coroller's Alonso. Unlike Amelie, Alonso's adventures occur outside of France, in Vietnam instead, exaggerating his stereotypically French appearance.

The photographs comprise a book but each image contains its own story, leaving lots of opportunity to invent your own narratives. Daydream a little on Yann le Coroller's website.

Lauren at the Gorge, Reading, VT by Samuel F. Falls

The first time I wrote about Samuel F. Falls' work, I wasn't sure what to say. All I knew was that the images hit me in my gut in a good/disturbing kind of way.

I was somewhat relieved when I came across Johanna Reed's interview with Falls. If you're curious but a little speechless about the work, it's a must read. Part of the reason the work is so hard to write about is that Falls chooses highly personal, emotional subjects that are often linked only by Falls himself. But as in life, people, animals, and places reappear again and again, providing a semblance of history and the passage of time, and gradually instilling trust in Sam's way of working.

For his HHS! entry this time around, Falls selected three images of his ex-fiancee, Lauren, including a black and white portrait taken with expired film on the Valentines' Day the relationship ended. Falls' statment and images recall the tradition of photographers and their muses, historically including the likes of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti and more recently, Leigh Ledare and his mother. Falls revisited the photographs post-break-up and created a new project, Monocarpic. He writes:

The images here are from this series depicting Lauren over the course of our relationship from its beginning in May 2008 right up until our "disengagement" late this winter... The images I've collected range from places like New York City, Panama, Florida, and Vermont, and traverse extreme happiness to bold sadness. Though the photos were taken with my Crown Graflex, I never intended them as part of a preconceived project, which I believe has allowed me to capture the emotion and natural snapshot feel without loosing the pristine photographic capacity of a 4x5 camera. Lauren has helped me edit these images into a 112 page book, Monocarpic, which means "(of a plant) flowering only once and then dying".

The series also falls into context with Falls' larger body of work on his website.

Campground 086, Winter by Jon Sheridan

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jon Sheridan's How To Fix A Campground series tells a story and a memory about the farm and camp he grew up on in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He writes,

In the late 1960s, my family converted part of our farm in rural Virginia into a campground. We ran it until 1997, closing it when my father died. My family is now renovating our rundown business. We sort through objects and spend time in ramshackle spaces, remembering when they were new. We tear out old rotting walls and burn the debris; we clear underwood and burn the brush. These pictures are about our day-to-day laboring as we try to reverse entropy. Things fell apart. We are putting them back together again, blending old meaning with new.

His work pays homage to a place that was once greater than its current remnants, as his family simultaneously tries to rebuild their campground to its state of former glory. The images show a place that changes with the seasons, and only survives by the efforts of Sheridan's family. They labor in the snow, at night, and through all states of emotion -- sweeping, sanding, and stacking wood--working by the blueprint of a former place to create a place that will exist in their future. He raises questions about humans' relationship to nature, and what it means to create a meaningful physical space that will also serve as a place in our memories.

See more work from How to Fix a Campground on Jon's website.

Sunset, Isla Vista, California by Liz Kuball

Sunshine and palm trees, long stretches of highways and beaches, California is many things to many people. None the least, it's a western outpost, a land of milk and honey, Steinbeck's promised state of epic stories in East of Eden. Like the Trasks and the Hamiltons, generations have immigrated and emigrated to CA, fleeing past lives and loves and searching for something better for themselves and their families. Full of allusions and illusions, the destination may or may not be exactly what one's searching for. Photographer Liz Kuball knows this well, she writes:

When you move out to California from back east, you come for a reason: You're leaving behind a bad relationship, or escaping your hometown, or thinking you'll be a star. And what you find when you get here is that things aren't what you thought they'd be... And you'd think that, after all this, you'd become disillusioned and go back home, and some do, of course, but many more of us stay and instead of growing bitter, we hang on — hang on to a world that, to us, is even more fantastic than the one we thought we'd find, because it's real in its absurdity and because we have stories to tell.

In her series California Vernacular, she's found and documented CA's reoccurring themes of both personal and grand proportions, a visual equivalent to literature. For her HHS! entry, Kuball shared with us a few examples: an orange tree, heavy with fruit, dripping from the other side of someone else's fence, the odd manifestations of best efforts to manicure lawns, and in Sunset, Isla Vista, California (above) evidence of endless vistas and opportunities cropping up in the most unlikely place — on an apartment building with a For Rent sign, large and blocky, edging out blinding light.

Kuball is no stranger to fiction, she has masters degrees in both literature and writing, learning along the way that she was really a photographer. Her debt to schools has not gone to waste, her blog provides good reading fodder, especially for fellow HHS! contenders. If you're still putting your entry together (do it fast, you're running out of time!) or are wondering what it's like to pick just three images for a very discriminating panel, read Liz's post from two Sundays ago, Status Report. Then cross your fingers and hold your breath with the rest of us!

untitled 2 paperbacks by Mary Ellen Bartley

I, like everyone at HHS! HQ, am a lover of the book, so I was excited (beyond words!) to see a submission from contender Mary Ellen Bartley, whose paperbacks series challenges us not to judge a book by the cover, the title, or the spine. Bartley stacks books in towers and rows, exposing us to pages available in myriad shades of white, and asks us to consider the book-as-object, and that object as emotional, even without knowing its interior contents.

She writes,

I'm exploring the possibility of creating beautiful even emotionally moving images by photographing mundane things in a purely formal way, investigating their visual qualities and relationships without assigning them much meaning or significance. The palette I discovered in the stacks, containing chalky Necco wafer pastels, fog grays and tooth colored whites, creates a calm meditative atmosphere. The quiet colors and the deliberate exclusion of clues to the books' contents serve to mute the narratives, information and ideas the books must contain - implying that the act of simply looking can be enough in a photograph.

Mickey Smith, a 2007 Winter Hot Shot and 20x200 artist, first brought us work from the stacks with her project Volume. She, like Bartley, pays heed to repetition, line, and mass, but also celebrates the Pantone-palette of color one can find in the library with works like Word Study and More Books. Bartley's books suggest a quieter relationship to her library, and I can imagine her stacking books one-by-one, rearranging their white-ness until they look just right. Perhaps it is true in this instance, that what's on the outside is more important, than what is on the inside.

Also! If you haven't yet heard, the deadline for HHS! has been extended to next Tuesday, May 5th @ 11 p.m.. Apply here!

Gardner by Ryan Monaghan

At the core of hunting, is the basic mission to kill. Whether killing for food, or as sport, the task is visceral and physical, both for hunter and hunt-ed alike. Hey, Hot Shot! contender Ryan Monaghan explores this culture in his work, showing the two-sided beauty and brutality of hunting and trapping.

He writes,

They [the images] show the results of a tradition that is no longer vital for human survival, but yet has spawned an entire subculture around it. The photographs touch on the complex sentiments felt when successfully acting upon the primitive urge to harvest something wild and elusive, and explore the cold beauty that is often found in a world considered so violent by so many.

Like photographer Erika Larsen, whose photo essays The Hunt and Young Blood also explore the clashing duality of the gruesome and the graceful in hunting culture, Monaghan's portraits of show much more than the blood of capture. Community, connection to the outdoors, and elements of ritual reaffirm the bonds some feel to this age-old pastime.

See additional work from this series on Ryan's website.

Bihac, Bosnia & Herzegowina by Frederic M. Lezmi

Contender Frederic M. Lezmi's series From Vienna to Beirut focuses on the cultural and geographical spaces and signs his finds on the borders between Europe and the Middle East. He calls it the "in between'' and it's clear that there is no clear line between here and there, or if there is one, it's not continuous. There's evidence of history and the present, the East and the West, and young and old intermingling and confusing one for the other. While these themes course through much of our news today, this work is an exploration that is also relevant on a personal level for Geneva-raised, Germany-based, half-Lebanese Lezmi.

While his approach is entirely different, his work is slightly related to that of recent Hot Shot Yijun Liao, and fellow contender Ayano Hisa. All of the photographers blend a little personal history with contemporary global issues regarding the continued cycle of meetings, clashes, and reconciliations between the East and the West.

See the rest of From Vienna to Beirut on Lezmi'swebsite.

Julian Alps, Slovenia by Cindy Schafer

At first glance, this photograph from HHS contender Cindy Schafer stirred a flood of images, including 2008's First Edition Hot Shot Derek Henderson's Reids Farm. And it makes sense that there are so many associations because, as Schafer writes, everyone does laundry. Like contender Magda Biernat, she's traveled far and wide and taken photographs to prove it. You might say laundry's a bit of an obsession, and Schafer admits:

I don't think there is any aspect of laundry that I don't like. I also like to think of myself as a feminist: a woman who values political, social and economic equality between the sexes, a woman who has many more educational and career choices than the generations of women who came before her. Yet, laundry, along with other types of housework, has historically been considered "women's work". It embodies the soul of domesticity; the antithesis of everything a 1970's feminist stood for.... Laundry is washed in every corner of the globe, at every level of the socioeconomic spectrum whether one does it themselves or pays someone else to do it. Culturally, laundry unites us. Socially it still divides us.

See more of Schafer's work on herwebsite.

San-Zhr Pod Village, Danshui, Taiwan by Magda Biernat

Globe-trotter Magda Biernat spent one year photographing where people live in seventeen countries. A peek at her website reveals a keen interest in structures; she also freelances for architecture firms and design studios. While her images are void of actual people, her perspective is more personable, not to mention colorful than, say, the Bechers, deviating a bit from the typographic vernacular. She writes:

Guided by an interest in urbanism and habitation, I focus my work on the built environment and its influence on global societies... The core vision was to recognize the integrity of the way people live under different, in many cases, extraordinary conditions.

Before embarking on her trip around the world, Biernat worked for Magnum Photos giving her lots of exposure to photojournalism and also an apt departure point for exploring her own work.
She maintains a pretty straightforward point of view but the light surrounding each home varies, revealing more of the place in which she was photographing. Fog shrouds the pod villages in Taiwan and long shadows and blue skies stretch over Tipi Resort in Namibia. The weather starts to inform the places people live as well.

Hearse In My Childhood Driveway by Susan Worsham

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Susan Worsham's photographs of her childhood home and town in Virginia are haunted by the past. Worsham returned to this home just prior to the passing of her mother, and has since lost her father and brother as well. The home she knew has lost its former occupants and taken new ones, including a man who houses caged snakes in her father's office.

Her images emanate with nostalgia even though they are filled with portraits of new friends and strangers met since her return. Animals, fruit, and family photographs allude to the living, but are manifest in their more solemn and morbid forms: birds and rabbits lay dead, the fruit is past peak, and the photograph is old and speaks of those no longer with us. Reoccurring characters pose nude and forlorn, against the textures and patterns of the house's wallpaper, bedspreads, and carpets suggesting that there are living spirits still within this house. A woman's pregnant body and a rug scattered with apples make allusion to Eve, rebirth, and new beginnings, while set against the texture of the old home's history. The contrast of the past and present are weighty, but beautiful.

See more from this series, Some Fox Trails in Virginia, on Susan's website.

Shades & Shadows, July 25, 2008 by Rita Maas

Rita Mass is one of several HHS contenders who have included multiple images as one to convey their ideas. Also see the work of Matthew Dallos, Anthony Georgis. For these photographers, the single frame isn't enough.

Maas' images relate more closely to the work of Uta Barth who often uses multiple frames of abstracted interiors and landscapes to convey relationships in perception; and often working, like Maas, with the most simple elements, light and shadow. Maas explains her process:

Viewing each work becomes an experience relating to the viewers understanding of his own surroundings. These ephemeral images evoke the passage of time, seasons and weather. They heighten our sense of impermanence. The subject matter becomes the experience of seeing; common encounters in intimate and familiar places explore moments where content and meaning become inseparable.

Her statement lends the work for comparison to Silvio Wolf's Horizons, where content and meaning are also inseparable. Wolf's film leaders (the part of a roll of film that is partially exposed when loading the film and typically discarded when the film is processed) "reveal(s) a threshold, the clear limit between light and darkness, between matter and language."

See more of Rita Maas' work on her website, which includes more abstract work along with some elegant still lifes.

We're heading into a great summer season of abstraction in photography, spearheaded by The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, curated by Lyle Rexer, and on view at Aperture Gallery in NYC May 15th - July 9th. The exhibition accompanies the release of a book by the same name and a handful of related events, including a panel discussion at NYPH'09 with Rexer and artists Jack Sal, Wolf, and Penelope Umbrico.

At JBP HQ, we're certainly celebrating all of this summertime photo goodness and will be releasing a special 20x200 edition in mid-May with a super special photographer to kick it all off. Sign up for Jen's newsletter for details. And you'll find me and Jeffrey Teuton, Associate Director of the JB Gallery at NYPH'09. Hope to see y'all there as well!

Anonymous, Seoul by Grace Kim

Rumpled sheets, blood stains, and drawn curtains are hallmarks of the aftermath of the affairs contender Grace Kim captures in her series, love hotel. Photographing beds and hotel rooms in Seoul, Korea just moments after a secretive couples' departure, the textures of the empty used bed evoke a sense of sadness and loneliness in what has been left behind. The rooms reek of similarity; textured wallpapers and blankets feature graphic flowers and geometric shapes. The sameness is further emphasized by Kim's stark black and white film choice, so the viewer's focus is concentrated on tiny leaks of light through the curtain's edges or the contrast of white sheets against the darkness of the room. The theme of anonymity also extends from the persons partaking in the affair: protecting identity and choosing an indistinguishable place are obvious ways to protect their secret relationship from the other spaces of their life.

Kim writes,

The photographs are personal reflections on the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of love. Absence inspires imagination and nostalgia, and what is secret or forbidden seems genuine in a way, because it actively questions and resists the status quo, rather than remaining complacent.

What is love without a face, and what is love confined to a hotel room? Kim asks compelling questions about what we choose to confide, and also challenges the viewer to ask questions about her access as a photographer to her subject: How does she gain entry to these hotel rooms? How does she find couples engaged in affairs? How does her Korean-American identity aid or inform her photography -- this project and others?

See more from love hotel on Grace's website, as well as her other projects, loveland and one night stand.

Box Turtle by Katy Higgins

If the limits of what we can know about a species can be interpreted by the shape and definition of their environment, then a zoo is a trove of information for geologist, sociologist, and artist alike. Like Ian Whitmore, whom we wrote about yesterday, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Katy Higgins gives us glimpses into interiors without the dweller's presence--in this case, the man-made environments of zoo animals. We are challenged to glean what the animal is and how they live from what is in their space: water, branches, rocks, food, toys, sun or shade, despite it being a construction of their keepers' creation.

Katy writes of her project,

the images in the The Empty Exhibit are concerned with attempts to reduce the infinite complexity of the world to concrete visual representations--in a sense, to diagram life. In this case, my photographs document the false "natural" environments that are recreated in zoos, ostensibly both for the comfort of the animals on display and to inform and educate the viewer. These exhibits, then, hold the promise of presenting some kind of truth about the world, but they are necessarily limited - there is only so much we can learn about an animal and its native habitat through a life-size diorama, no matter how detailed it may be.

See more of Katy's work on her website.

Anna by Ian J Whitmore

Whether you are TV friend or foe, nearly everyone in America is at least familiar with the wooing effects of the television set. They are imbued into the everyday of our culture: we gather at each others' houses for Lost parties, crowd around for the Oscars and Superbowl, and fall asleep night after night to the glow of this electronic box. Years after a series has ended, we make pop-cultural references to the characters of our childhood -- about the moral lessons they taught us, the fashion tips they gave us, or the social scenarios they first introduced us to. What is it about the TV that captivates us, and what does it say about how we see and consume information?

In his series, Channels, Hey, Hot Shot Contestant Ian Whitmore photographs where we place televisions in our households. How do they become a fixation, or mainstay, of our living spaces? Do they dominate the room, or are they hidden away?

He writes:

This work is a visual inquiry into the personal spaces where our televisions reside. This point of contact between the viewer and the world has become customary in contemporary culture--facilitating the exchange of information and the satisfaction of certain desires. In recent years we have developed a collective and public eagerness to peer into each others' life; we see this in our entertainment, news and the Internet. If we view these spaces passively and voyeuristically--the way we view the world through the television--certain questions arise. How are we viewing one another and through which lenses? Through what lens do we find greater authenticity, honesty and clarity?

Whitmore titles his pieces by the homeowner's name, though the person--or persons--are never present. One peers in on their belongings: books, backpacks, posters and trophies, and gets a sense of the dweller. The person is clean or messy, owns a lot or a little, prefers to decorate either sparsely or with gusto. Owning a TV is only as normal as owning a bed, though here, the TV is always on, and a faintly illuminated person on the screen looks back at us. We are made to feel as though we are looking in on them, rather than the TV-owner, a disorienting and thought-provoking role-reversal.

This series brings us to today's 20x200 edition, The Drive with Christine, which also features a television set photographed by Chad Muthard. Here, puzzle pieces meet the screen, blinding the information pouring out from this simple set. It is a conversation, between two people, as well as between the TV and its viewer.

See more on Ian's website and see more HHS! contenders on flickr!

Little Boys, 2008 by Ayano Hisa

SCAD MFA student Ayano Hisa returned to her home country of Japan to photograph, realizing that after her time in the United States, "My eyes became a lot more sensitive about traces of history, relations between countries and problems and hopes in contemporary world." While she's looking at and addressing issues that are very much a part of this world, there seems to be something very ethereal about her photographs. Her color palette is a little washed out and dreamy and she manages to find situations that also don't seem quite real. This photo of grown men resting in a playground and accompanied by a cat (a cat!) was submitted along with a photograph of a mother and son looking at a memorial made of origami cranes for A-bomb victims and one of two women using umbrellas as parasols as they stroll along a path dappled with deer. For certain, see these images and more of her work on her website.

She bridges the past and present fluidly, illustrating reminders of what has been and how that has shaped and will shape what we see and experience today. But for some reason I can't shake the feeling the Hisa's Japan is a sort of Never Never Land where even the worst of history can't make us grow up. Maybe it is the intimacy and ease with which she photographs that also makes the first words of her statement ring true to an outsider in her world, "being in one culture sometimes makes a person blind to other cultures as well as his/her own culture..." — something that fellow contender Joerg Brueggemann might contend with. And so with these photographs I am learning to see a little better.

Untitled by Stephanie Diani

Marriage--in all its glory and catastrophe--is depicted time and again in literature, films, and song. In fact, many of the expressions of marriage that first come to mind depict its downfall rather than its success through affairs, deceit, and prolonged unhappiness. Rather recent novels like Revolutionary Road and The Corrections articulate dysfunctional families living in the facade of normality, until secrets break lose and emotions explode into situations of ruin. American Beauty takes a similar storyline to film; Desperate Housewives and Weeds (about a suburban housewife who turns to drug-dealing) bring it to TV. There is no shortage of well-dressed, middle-aged married women who become embroiled in misdeeds due to their marital displeasure in our culture, whether they are an accurate portrayal or not is left to question.

Los Angeles-based Hey, Hot Shot! contender, Stephanie Diani, photographs staged, fictional marriages, capturing couples' postures and actions with an air of disillusionment. The couples never make eye contact, but engage in activities often attributed to the specific gender's role: a woman knits (albeit morbidly, by an axe), a man holds a golf club, liquor in his other hand. The relationships here display tense bodies in cinematic lighting, and there is an explicit sexiness in the women's dress and posture without stirring any emotions of intimacy. All of the couples are well-dressed, Caucasian, and appear to be upper-middle class, speaking to problematic marriages as a classed affliction. Whether these portraits of marriage speak an element of truth to how some marriages really are, or more-so adopt a pop-cultural view of dysfunction in relationships, Diani makes a strong stance about her vision of marriage.

See more work on Stephanie's website.

My Parents Eating by Lindsay D'Addato

Man and nature do not always live in perfect harmony, as photographers Edward Burtynsky, David Maisel, and Chris Jordan depict in their respective works. Civilization's toll on Mother Earth has been great--perhaps too great for the human mind to digest--and respect for nature's bounty are not often held to a high standard. But, aside from human's impact on nature, how do we incorporate or live with it? Why do we buy flowers, plant gardens, mow lawns, or live on farms? How do we interact with "nature" we have transplanted to our homes?

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Lindsay D'Addato asks these questions in her series For Paradise, bringing her Toyoview large format camera to the scene of suburban intersections of man and nature.

She writes,

In recreated interactions the images depict the ways in which we domesticate and tame nature in order to make ourselves feel at home, not only in our surroundings, but also with each other. The large color photographs move from the great outdoors towards domestic and suburban landscapes, reconstructing what it means to live in natural harmony. Although our linear understanding of progress can never be satisfied, our present glory lies in our self-conscious paradise.

D'Addato's subjects, posed by a dead deer or sitting next to a massive dining room bouquet, seem unsure of how to interact with the "nature" around them. Their bodies are stiff, their glances askew, often unaware that the nature is even something to notice at all. She suggests that humans are wont to control nature, as they are their social and spatial environments, as inadvertent as the action may be.

See more from this series on Lindsay's website.

Noch ein Winterwald by Anne Schwalbe

Like yesterday's featured contender, Matthew Dallos, Germany-based photographer Anne Schwalbe also photographs the lines and patterns in nature. Schwalbe, however, departs from landscapes into the abstract, often focusing on the subtle minutiae of undulations caused by raindrops, the varying densities of fog, or the asymmetry if a pine tree. She abandons the specificity of a place, avoiding characterizing them by their distinguishing markers. Instead, Schwalbe invites her viewers to interpret the spaces she photographs, saying, "I want to have a complex void in my photographs."

Her work evokes comparison to Japanese photographer, Rinko Kawauchi, who is well-known for her natural-light photographs of details in nature and everyday life: flower petals, an eaten watermelon, a crack of lightning. The similarities extend from subject matter to their both using the 6x6 square format; Kawauchi shoots with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera and Schwalbe a Yashica - Mat 124 G. Both photographers emphasize the beautiful color palettes expressed in nature, and show a welcome talent for honing in on the subtleties so many of us miss in the everyday.

See additional work on Anne's website.

Caravan Storage by Matthew Dallos

Matthew Dallos' multi-panel work presents us with scenes that bridge man and nature. Power lines meet mountain-sides and a trailer park is is crowded, without a soul in sight. Timbered logs lay in a field, now empty of growth, and one feels faintly forlorn about the implied trail of the humans. Photographed on the South Island of New Zealand, the landscape appears at first and second glance, both familiar, yet foreign. Where are the people who tread in these person-less panoramas? And when do they occupy these spaces? The nature of these spaces has been dictated by our intrusion, and we create new lines that change the landscape.

Like the work of David Hilliard, who was also mentioned earlier this week, the multi-panel frame lends to the way one interprets the narrative. The image is partitioned, so reads like a storyboard, even if originally composed as a single frame. Hilliard's images suggest a human narrative, where lights are on in a house and his subjects meandering in foreground and background often experience a passive and mysterious interaction. In contrast, Dallos looks to the lines of the landscape to speak the "story of the place" without human subjects to carry that voice.

See more from this series on Matthew Dallos' website.

Cecil Hotel, Los Angeles by Tom Griscom

San Francisco based photographer Tom Griscom follows the rich traditions of landscape photography in the American West, bridging the past and present by creating black and white images with a digital camera, and focusing on California, the western most state. He writes:

Starting with the survey of the West by Timothy O'Sullivan, to the pristine facade by Ansel Adams, and then to the bleak irony of New Topographer Robert Adams, I follow the evolution of landscape representation in the West and how it was influenced by the social climate of the time.

The view from the hotel room, is of course, a theme in its own right as well. Robert Frank's view in Butte, Montana has influenced many photographers, including Todd Hido (scroll down to see Frank's photo).

While his territory covers far more than the American West, Andrew Hetherington has documented numerous hotel rooms and the sites to see just outside in his project A Room with A View, aptly described by these words from Robert Polidori: "I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It's the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first."

What one saw first could also describe O'Sullivan's works. He photographed as pioneering explorers ventured west, often illustrating the weaknesses of man up against the vastness of the wilderness. Ansel Adams' photographs departed from what one actually saw to what one might really like to see, glorifying landmarks of the west and making cause for their preservation. Robert Adams picked up where Adams left off, documenting the altered and often destroyed landscape. See more of what Griscom sees now, in our current social climate, as he continues to work along this distinguished lineage on his website.

Also of interest, if you are in NYC, MOMA's exhibition Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West. I haven't seen it yet but with works from Robert Adams, John Baldessari, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O'Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston, and Carleton E. Watkins it promises to be a thorough study.

Drop Goal by Anthony Georgis

At any level, the practice and dedication to sport is full of emotion and drive, whether a pickup game of backyard soccer or a competitive professional league. In his series, Blood Makes The Grass Grow, Portland-based photographer, Anthony Georgis captures the myriad roles of a young woman as a high school student, teenager, and competitive rugby player. He observes the complex emotions and physical display of these girls' determination on the field, and also focuses on how their game-time mentality gives way to the everyday of school, home, and teenage relationships.

The dichotomy is presented as diptychs, contrasting notions of individual vs. team and player vs. referee. They create the beginnings of a storyline that we look forward to seeing further explored, whether it takes us through the arc of a match, or off the field into these athletes' everyday lives.

Third Bar, Nam Song River, Vang Vieng, Laos by Joerg Brueggemann

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Joerg Brueggemann sends photos from the lands of Lonely Planet: Ko Pha-Ngan in Thailand, Arambol in Goa and Vang Vieng in Laos. He writes:

Here the world's traveling youth gathers to fall in love, experience drugs, ride elephants or just to have beer or two. Every year millions of young people from first world countries travel the planet taking with them nothing more than their backpacks. These modern travelers are hoping to find freedom, cultural exchanges and a lot of fun. It is a very hedonistic youth that is very much concentrated on itself. Backpacking has become a tourist industry on its own that has developed its very own touristy infrastructure.

It's true, for some reason, we're a generation that has an unprecedented desire to see the world and the will and the means to travel. Not since Kerouac inspired legions to hit the road have we had such a propensity for exploration. We've even elected a president who is known and lauded for his own wanderings; we admire and revere the traveler and long to be on the go too. But for what? Brueggemann's photos seek to answer this question; they are an incisive and insightful rebuttal to work like Ryan McGinley's I Know Where the Summer Goes. Where McGinley staged dreamy, epic moments of hedonism — naked boys and girls leaping, running and falling from the heavens like gods — Brueggeman's documented the real indulgences of mere mortals, the better and the worse.

Brueggemann's series Same Same but Different won an honorable mention in CENTER's Project Competition and can be seen on his website.

Olympia 4548 by Richard Gilles

In his series, Signs of the Times, California-based contender Richard Gilles looks at blank billboards peppered along America's roadsides. A common sight to anyone who's made a roadtrip--or, traveled any amount of distance on a highway-- the boards suggest advertising has expanded beyond it's own capacity for communicating effectively, and serves as a confused medium for encouraging consumption. Photographing those billboards left blank and looming over the varied landscape, Gilles plays with perspective articulating the way the empty signs dwarf buildings in the horizon.

Gilles writes,

In photographing with this new series of photographs, I am exploring what these signs say about us or to us when they are empty. Is a blank billboard an advertisement for an economic recession? Or is it a minimalist object whose message is only that which viewer brings to it?

The images bring to mind Hiroshi Sugimoto's series of Drive-In Theaters, where blank, glowing white screens suggest an other-world, where one is alone with a veritably empty slate on which to impose their imagination. These blank screens, whether at one point showing films or advertising, suggest the impact of visual culture and passive information consumption we engage in. Both suggest the experience can be isolating, even though we're all partaking in it at one point or another.

For those of us born to an immigrant parent, or parents, the tension between being American and being "other" create complex identities entangled in multicultural traditions. Hey, Hot Shot! contender Katrina d'Autremont has returned time and again to Argentina, her mother's native land, opening her camera's eye to her family and exploring her relationship to them as well as how they influence who she is. Nationality acts as one variable in this familial exploration, but d'Autremont also considers the idea of "home" and the idealization of a space as factors in her work.

Her images offer an intimate, but controlled look in to her maternal family. Relatives are posed, though rarely in direct eye contact with the camera and the setting is uniformly indoors, creating a feeling of privacy. In the series Si Dios Quiere on her website, recurring subjects in her extended family start to become familiar to the viewer, building a narrative for the family she continues to discover.

Untitled from the series What Light Remains in the Absence by Adam E Thorman

Writing from a cafe in sunny San Francisco, it seems geographically appropriate to reflect on the work of Bay Area artist, Adam Thorman today. Thorman is heavily influenced by his natural surroundings and the interplay of light on nature, as well as poetry, which he incorporates into his work in collaboration with others.

In the images submitted to Hey, Hot Shot! from the series What Light Remains in the Absence, the play of light off of water, through windows, or as the glimmer of energy in an otherwise dark space, articulate the way that light can define a space or a mood. The time of day is often ambiguous--is this dawn, dusk, or somewhere in between? Even light and strong glows work in interplay, whether off an otherwise ordinary surface, or off a subjects face and body.

See more at Adam Thorman's website.

untitled by Jenny Pfeiffer

In recent months, images of foreclosed homes, unfinished houses, and emptied-out businesses have filled newspapers and magazines. Areas hardest hit by the foreclosure crises, like the Midwestern cities of Cleveland and Detroit, are often looked to as the most striking examples of mass abandon, but suburbs and cities in every state are facing the same types of devastation.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jenny Pfeiffer, an Oakland-based artist and photographer, looks at foreclosure in a housing development in Tracy, CA.

She writes,

Only about half of the new homes were completed and the open space created an unnerving atmosphere. I wanted to capture both the high expectations of the neighborhood yet also the sadness of living without neighbors. Regardless of the barren landscape, the new settlers are still trying to make this place their home. They take care of their yards but at the property line they stop and go no further. They have moved to Tracy for space and a sense of community, yet it feels like they are out there all alone.

Pfeiffer looks at the homes in Tracy from the exterior, showing the vast emptiness of undeveloped plots of land and residents alone in their supposedly growing communities.

Her work evokes thoughts of several other projects we have come across on the web that help us visualize the housing crises and the recession. Photographer Todd Hido, who exhibited work at Jen Bekman Gallery in A New American Portrait, creates images of foreclosed homes' interiors, with marked eerieness to their emptiness. Brian Ulrich, a Midwestern-er who also exhibited in the same show, photographed the series Stores That Are No More for Time, where the carcasses of familiar stores lay empty and in overgrowth.

Perhaps what is distressing about all these images--Pfeiffer's, Hido's, and Ulrich's--is that they are devoid of people, their only residue left behind in the form of worn carpets, empty driveways, and abandoned shopping carts. They suggest that our physical toll on the world, in the form of houses and businesses, is not so easily erased even when we have departed these spaces, and forces us to think about having a greater conscientiousness about the places we occupy and create.

untitled by Mikael F Kennedy

As inspiration to his The Odysseus series, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Mikael Kennedy looks to the classical myth, The Odyssey, one of Homer's epic poems telling the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus' decade-long journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Odysseus is faced with tests of physical strength and mental will as he faces the unknown, forced through the full gamut of human emotions during his expedition.

Kennedy's work looks to both the sea and solid ground, returning again and again to the notion of the journey. This is captured through images of paths and roads, and of lone men looking out into the horizon or out on large bodies of water, as though peering into the unknown, but with the intent of heading somewhere. The scale of man is often dwarfed by the scale of the landscape, also suggesting the force of nature is a beast not easily overcome.

Kennedy writes,

In The Odyssey, the character begins his story sitting on the shore staring at a "wine dark ocean" longing for his home. This is where we begin, staring out into the horizon with a sense of longing, absence or lack and from there wander out into a world that is both foreign and familiar in its terrain....This collection of photographs revisits that perspective: the one of cresting the hill to unknown plains or coastlines, reminiscent of the work of the Hudson River Painters and American exploration artists who were moved to capture and portraying the vastness and isolation of this new world. The Odysseus becomes a journey through the vistas of America - this search is for a renewed vision of the land, a vision that carries both the excitement and isolation of exploration.

See more from Kennedy's The Odysseus series on his website.

Martini Man by Pierre Drouin

Like Anita Cruz-Eberhard, Pierre Drouin is one of several photographers we've seen this year who are not using a camera. He begins his process by making about seventy flatbed scans of his subject, using only the light that the scanner itself emits. He then edits the resulting images together, composing "a cubist picture, just like if you unfold a sphere on a flat surface."

Photographer Jonathan Johnson also uses a scanner to create images. He's scanned the height of an entire tree and the lifespan of a garden. Working outside, natural light provides an unpredictable element that clashes with the light from the scanner, yielding entirely abstract results. Drouin's results are also abstract but relatively precise, each scan yields a crisp file to work with. In the distance between these two artist's work, the diversity and range of the scanner as a photographic tool are evident. The results feel very painterly, with Drouin, of course, most closely referencing Picasso and Braque, and more recently, David Hockney's photo montages.

A little bit farther out of the art park lie other creative uses of the scanner: Via enthusiasm unbridled, I stumbled upon scanwiches: scans of sandwiches for education and delight! (Just for fun, it is Friday after all!)

Working with or without a camera, we want to see your work! Send it our way!

While news of the Iraq War appears on the front page of international newspapers regularly, the day-to-day lives of Iraqi citizens are rarely explored in depth. The consequence of the war on Iraqis' civil rights, everyday freedoms, and simple safety, are overlooked by many, but for those who are experiencing raids on their homes, have endured torture by the militia, or have lost loved ones, the realities are glaring and enduring.

Lebanon-born photographer, Amro Hamzawi, takes viewers through a painful, but enlightening journey of Iraqi refugees in his series Iraqis Today (Testimonies). Here, he illuminates the struggle of families--showing physical suffering, deteriorated homes, and many who are grasping onto the little they have left. Descriptions of the scenes at hand illuminate that the images are only a taste of the depth of the atrocities; invisible and emotional wounds supplement those we see.

He writes,

It's difficult to give a precise estimate of the number of civilians who perished or were injured as a result of the invasion, but by all accounts the conditions on the ground are a humanitarian disaster with the civilians caught in the line of fire between the occupation forces, the militias that have taken over the country and the various insurgent groups wreaking havoc. With its infrastructure destroyed and its resources pillaged, Iraq has become a shadow of itself....This collection of portraits of Iraqi refugees seeks to bring the human dimension to the forefront and show the ravages of war from personal perspectives.

Spring 2007 Hot Shot and Jen Bekman artist Nina Berman is another photographer who looks at the effects of war on individuals. Her series Purple Hearts focuses on soldiers who have returned from war, injured, and lives forever changed. Both her project and contender Hamzawi's exploration of testimonies and stories of their subjects enable individuals who have experienced the traumatic nature of war to have a voice and share their stories.

See more on Amro Hamzawi's website.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Laura Graham combines the enigma of the mask with the stylistic effects of a custom wet plate large format camera to create ephemeral images that evoke the quality of an artifact found. A life-long collector, Graham describes roving for objects at antique stores and flea markets, then finding inspiration in what she finds.

Like Sally Mann, another female photographer who photographs on wet plate collodion 8x10 glass negatives (hers over 100 years old), the process is intrinsic to the images aesthetic. The negatives are exposed while the plate is still wet, creating effects like swirling focus and vignetting. Graham describes the method as enabling her as an "alchemist"; the final product is unpredictable, but can be transportive.

No. 06 from the series DIGITAL IKEBANAS by Anita Cruz-Eberhard

Anita Cruz-Eberhard creates fictitious photographs of Ikebana floral arrangements. The arrangements exist only as digital files or prints and are comprised of images taken from the online databases of university biology departments. Cruz-Eberhard explains that the images "have been repurposed to investigate the relationship between artifice and nature."

Visually, the images relate to Martin Kilmas' Flowers; and he's also playing with ideas of nature — in particular, gravity — and artifice, the somewhat false ability to see things that we wouldn't otherwise, via photography ala Muybridge.

I think the work actually might be closer to that of 2008 First Edition Hot Shot, Colleen Plumb. Plumb began her series, Animals are Outside Today, looking at "fake nature." You can see this work on 20x200; you'll also see that as she's worked her initial intentions have broadened to examine not only simulation but also "consumption, destruction, and reconstruction as well as notions of endurance and the reality of loss." When considering these other ideas, Cruz-Eberhard's images get interesting, she's certainly deconstructing and reconstructing, and creating something that could, technically, live forever, without actually existing in "real" life.

***Quick reminder: if you want to see your work here, on 20x200, or maybe even in a group show at Jen Bekman Gallery, you have five weeks left to get your entry together and apply!

Mexico-based photographer, Jan Smith, explores abandoned structures around the world, photographing remains of former inhabitance with ghostly bodies in their midst. The loosely defined bodies of nude men and women take form in spaces like the one pictured here--Gunkanjima Island--a former under-sea coal mine in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, which was abandoned in 1974, and also in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Namibia. The remains share remarkable similarity despite their distant geographies, suggesting a similar spirit inhabits abandoned spaces, regardless of place.

Smith writes,

Such structures exist for themselves only when they are abandoned. Without stewards, they achieve this transformation in exchange for mortality and disappearance from our memory. They live in a realm that shows itself and at the same time withdraws from us. Their acquired consciousness is like a horizon that defines itself by what we see, but also more largely by what remains veiled.

Smith's project, Ausencia y Abandono, is ongoing and you can see work from this series on his website.

Breakfast with Stephen Frost by Ryan Carter

Ryan Carter, a staff reporter for The National newspaper in the United Arab Emirates who has traveled and photographed communities in vast regions of the world, explores Old Crow, a remote Arctic community with a shrinking population in the Yukon, Canada with his submission to Hey, Hot Shot!

He writes,

With a declining population of less than three hundred, the Vuntut Gwitchin of Old Crow have hunted migratory caribou for thousands of years, and share an intimate relationship with these transient animals. Twice a year, the Porcupine Caribou Herd travels through this community to and from their calving grounds on "1002 lands" - a coastal region of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. The 1002 lands are an unprotected portion of ANWR being explored for oil and natural gas. It is estimated over 6 billion barrels of oil exist below these Arctic plains. The controversial debate to develop this region has burdened the American government since this land became a federally protected area in 1960....My project doesn't confront or explore ANWR, its ecology, the 1002 lands, or the oil industry. Instead, the photography aims to quietly document a small First Nations population, its fading traditions and dependency on ancestral lands, all threatened by North America's need for energy.

Carter's series brings to mind the images of Fall 2007 Hot Shot and 20x200 artist, Birthe Piontek, whose recent series, The Idea of North, also took her to the Canadian Yukon. Her work also explores those who live in a territory less trodden, with focus on individuation found in people's quest for the glory of imagined remoteness.

Carter's camera also finds and intimate place with the Old Crow community, whether out hunting caribou or in a resident's kitchen. Work on his website from Guatemala, the United Arab Emirates, and the Eastern Democratic Congo, also show how Carter seamlessly enters geographies of transition, documenting communities with an observant eye. Carter has completed assignments for The New York Times Magazine and International Herald Tribune, among others, has also been a nominated for a World Press Photo Award and been awarded a National Geographic Grant, participated in The Eddie Adams Workshop, Barnstorm XVIII, and has been selected for numerous group exhibitions in both the United States and abroad.

Reforestation, 2007, by David Ondrik

Albuquerque denizen David Ondrik is in search of the sublime. As he defines it, "the sublime is a combination of the grotesque and the beautiful". Using a Holga 120S camera, Ondrik creates musing landscape images of New Mexico.

From his artists statement, he writes:

In artistic expressions of the Sublime from the 19th century, man is small, in awe of and overwhelmed by the purity and enormity of Nature. The sublime in the 21st century has "transcended" this. It is no longer possible for man to be in a Romantic fog, far removed from the muck. I am no longer awe struck by the great vastness of untouched wilderness, were it even possible to find such a place. I am instead awestruck standing on the precipice above a drought-stricken reservoir, a superfund site, an (utterly avoidable) forest fire. These consequences of modernity are what make me feel small and powerless.

Ondrik's approach is a fitting foil to fellow contender Erin Tyner. Both are concerned with the scale of things--Ondrik by the enormity of Nature, and Tyner with the miniature bittersweetness of daily life.

Tilt-shift lenses, often used in architectural photography because their focal plane enables capturing buildings along parallel planes, has gained popularity as a mechanism for creating scenes in miniature. A similar effect can also be created through macro lenses, which is how Atlanta-based photographer, Erin Tyner creates miniaturization in her series, Half Awake.

She writes,

I find myself drawn to subjects possessing bittersweet qualities....In my Half Awake series I construct scenes using household items, natural objects, and model train figures. By pairing figures and context I create characters that are engaged with an unfolding narrative.

By recreating scale to the size of the miniature--whether it be person or object--the viewer departs reality into a land of the photographer's imagination. Photographers such as London-based artist, Slinkachu, who will release a book titled Little People later this year, have been placing scenes of tiny people under park benches, on sidewalks, and in the subway for years, leaving them to be discovered (or stepped on) by passerby. Whether creating scenes in your bathtub, front yard, or in public spaces, the photographers utilizing this lens technique must shrink their world--albeit temporarily--to the few from just a couple of inches off the ground in order the create their new and tiny worlds.

Cycles of consumption, recycling, and their effects on the earth have been brought to light in the art world by photographers like Edward Burtynsky and Chris Jordan. Each of these photographers focuses on the effects of what we consume on the environment, drawing attention to the mass of consumption and the havoc of disposal.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender William Goldkind also turns his attention to recycling, particularly scrap and junk metal, looking at the connection between the earth and the manufacturing industry.

He writes,

The recycling industry has become a prominent and lucrative sphere of manufacturing. The reuse of materials is central to this body of work. The machinery and processes that enable the makers of primary materials to use scrap again, creating a closed cycle of consumption is both a critical component of the economy and mimics the natural circle of life. Metal as we know it begins life deep in the earth, it is mined and manipulated into refrigerators, cars, jewelry, and other products, as its use diminishes and ages the metal returns to the recycler and their furnaces for rebirth to be used again.

By honing his camera in on metal both on the micro and macro levels (from crushed aluminum cans to the large-scale carcass of an airplane), Goldkind looks to the big and small metals that are re-incorporated into use. He works to redefine what is "junk" and where the cycle of production truly ends.

Hey, Hot Shot! contender Diego Ravier had an unlikely beginning as a project manager in the automobile industry, but has since switched paths to focus his camera on on exploring the discrimination and social rejection endured by those living with genetic disorders and stigmatized diseases. Trained in Paris and residing in Frankfurt am main, Germany, Ravier's work is set in villages of equatorial Africa.

In his series, Genetic Contrast, Ravier explores the world of Africans suffering from albinism. Their skin lacks melanin, making it whiter, and their eyes are often gray, blue, or brown -- a much lighter hue than those without the disease. Many suffer problems with their vision and skin, and are extremely sensitive to the sun.

He writes,

They also face the indifference of the rest of their community about their suffering. In addition, their peers suspect them to be related to good and bad omen. Often, they live in hiding from the unforgiving communities around them. It is difficult to define what "normal" means because there are plenty of non-written rules by society. Some physical anomalies make one look different from the majority. If this causes social prejudices, the result is always suffering and little or no social integration.

Ravier's images show the sense of isolation brought about by albinism--children without playmates, a grown woman unaccepted by her husband's family, young men and women who struggle to get jobs because of their skin color--as well as the struggle of the community around albinos to understand how to accept individuals born with this genetic anomaly.

See more work on Diego Ravier's website.

As a clinical social worker for thirty-five years, Hey, Hot Shot! contender Jane Alt is familiar with the inside of the psychiatrist's office. In her series, The Treatment Room, she brings her camera into the usually off-grounds office, and captures images of patients, environment, and the doctors, all anonymously. Through her images, Alt hints at the body emotions of conflict, focus, resolution, and anxiety in a space that offers both comfort and frustration.

In her statement, she writes,

The Psychiatrist's office is an intimate place with a mystique of its own. ... I explore these spaces and their meaning with my camera. The office, as a site for many dramas, functions as an empty stage waiting for its players. Behind closed doors I release the shutter, providing visual access to a world veiled in privacy.

In a recent NY Times slideshow, psychoanalyst Mark Gerald brought his camera into the offices of others in the same profession all around the city. In contrast to Alt's project, he chooses to reveal his subjects in their settings, focusing on the psychoanalysts themselves, inspired by both the offices similarities and differences.

See more from The Treatment Room at Jane Alt's website.

Horizon # 2, 2008 by Christopher Paquette

Philadelphia photographer, Christopher Paquette, has submitted work from his series Collected Horizons. I'm reminded of Mark Rothko and Andreas Gursky, and how their approaches flatten and challenge our way of seeing.

Christopher writes:

This project consists of a series of minimalist and abstract horizons taken in a variety of locations, both indoors and outdoors. It is a study of layers, textures, depth, and perspective.

View the series here, and visit Christopher's Photography blog here.

Plänterwald #3, 2007 by Ina Senftleben

Hot Shot contender Ina Senftleben photographs Berlin's defunct Spreepark in her series Plänterwald. Ina's images are bewitching in their eerie quietude, and make me think if I were to enter them I'd somehow be living in a Douglas Coupland story about the end of the world. When viewing the complete series one cannot help but recall Anna Gakell's photographs, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition. What if, at the end of the world, the planet were overrun with identically clad nymphettes? See what I mean on Ina's site.

In contrast to 2008 Hot Shot Hosang Park, whose images of parks in Seoul, Korea are void of people, and highly attentive to the geometries created in these man-made spaces, the work of 2009 Hey, Hot Shot! contender Kurt Tong speaks to his memory of--and relationship to--recreational spaces in China. Tong is inspired by worn and yellowed childhood photos of himself and his siblings in Chinese parks full of bumper cars and ice cream stalls--the objects and emblems that made the parks unique. With time, the parks have changed, and his memory of the parks of his childhood are fading.

He writes,

In 1958, at the beginning of The Great Leap Forward, when private ownership was banned, many existing parks were renovated and new parks were built all across China for the people, many were renamed People's Parks. Over the years, they became main focal points of the cities, where families have their outings and couples meet. China is changing at a staggering pace, the economic miracle means that the Chinese are enjoying a much more affluent lifestyle. Shopping and Internet have replaced bumper cars and Ferris wheels. Many of these parks have fallen to disarray. Millions of older Chinese would have grown up with these parks and have memories of time spent in them. Just like the parks, their memories are slowly fading away with time.

Tong's People's Park series and other projects can be viewed on his website.