Summer '05 Hot Shot and 20x200 artist,Noah Kalina, has launched an eponymously titled magazine, Kalina Magazine. Each issue is themed, and the sopohmore issue, available now, focuses on his adoration for his cat, Bean.

See more of Noah's work here and here.

Words and images have a natural need for one another. Ms. Jen Bekman has a vast visual and poetic memory which she uses to pair the two superbly on her blog, Personism. A beautiful example follows with an image from Spring 2006 Hot Shot and 20x200 artist, Ian Baguskas.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

- William Carlos Williams

You can easily spend half of your morning looking, reading and dreaming through all of Jen's thoughtful pairings. I entreat you to start here.

Miss Kitty Litter/Stephen, Brian, & Courtney by Chad Houle

Chad Houle's series, Homodomestic, focuses on gay couples and families in their homes, creating examples of an aesthetic Houle never knew while growing up in Rhode Island. He writes,

As a gay man, I grew up without any real gay examples of a relationship. I never was able to make the connection between being gay and the ability to be in a strong, lasting love. Now, in a long term, committed-and fabulous-relationship, I look back not knowing who I was or how there were so few images of that life I so greatly yearned for. My work is a manner of creating a barrage of examples of gay normality in love and life to infuse the world with what I never saw at a critical point in my life.

His images have a posed formality and take place largely in well-styled, well-furnished, and evenly-lit homes with couples seated at the dinner table, in front of the TV, or in the bathroom brushing their teeth. The "normalcy" is often pronounced through these actions, which can be interpreted as things that normal--or ideal--couples and families have the chance to partake in together.

Several other photographers' work come to mind upon studying Houle's images, which also tug at elements of domesticity and homosexuality. Amy Elkins' Wallflower series posits men against floral wallpapers, a symbol of the domestic interior. The sexuality and male-ness of the men are called into question by the contrast of these "feminine" patterns against the men's bare chests and skin. Whether pale, tan, tattooed, hairless, freckled, or hairy, the men are bared against the backdrop, forced to open up to the camera.

David Hilliard's multi-panel work also examines gay couples at home, or in nature, doing everyday tasks like folding laundry or taking a swim with ambiguous interaction between the men. The two subjects often face the same direction as one another and the viewer is aware of them not making eye contact with each other. Their body language enigmatic and it seems as though their relationship is an open question, both to them and those looking in on the moment.

Lastly, Molly Landreth's Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America also makes a journey through the queer community, identifying the who and the where of what comprises this community. Her images capture a young generation of lesbian, gay, and transgender individuals and couples, often at home caught in a formal embrace, some partially undressed and looking as though they are trying to find comfort in their own skin.

All of these works evoke questions of normality in relationships, both gay and straight. What a relationship "looks" like has many heterosexual references in everday culture, popular culture, and in art, whereas the aesthetic of the gay relationship is still very much being defined and in flux. All of these artists offer some insight here, and suggest that homosexual home-life and relationships are equally, if not more complicated than heterosexual relationships.

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.

The Fifth Annual BAMart Silent Auction featuring works by over 120 artists including 20x200 edition-makers Rachel Papo, Greg Lindquist, and Carrie Marrill, is open for bidding online through Monday, May 11th at 8 p.m. There's lots of work we're lusting over, including Lady Birley by Maira Kalman, who illustrates a column in the NY Times, And The Pursuit of Happiness, that is rather beloved by the JBP team. A live exhibition featuring the work will open to the public on Wednesday, April 29th, where you can also bid in person. BAMart will also host a cocktail reception on May 9th, 5-7 p.m. at the Peter Jay Sharp Building located at 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn. Please visit the website for more information, details on the work available, and to make your bid!

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.

Things are awfully green, gorgeous, and sunny around here but, no, we're not in Anaheim, we're in San Francisco! The whole 20x200 team, which means the whole Hey, Hot Shot! team is in the Bay Area for the weekend and we're throwing a party on Monday. Join us!

What: 20x200 Collector's Confab
When: Monday, April 6th, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Where: Chronicle Books | 680 Second Street (between Brannan + Townsend)
Why: art + you + us = a very good time

Please let us know you'll be there via email: rsvp at 20x200 dot com or on Facebook.

The party is a follow-up to our NYC Collectors Confab which brought photographers, artists and collectors together for an evening of cocktails and conversation. For our San Francisco sequel, we owe a big thanks to Chronicle Books and their (and our) friends at 7x7 Magazine for helping us pull the party together.

In case you can't join us (if you can, you should!) Chronicle is offering a lovely consolation prize: 30% off + free shipping when you enter the code 20x200 at www.chroniclebooks.com (Even if you come to the party, you can book browse and buy when you get home, the code is valid through the end of the month!)

Hope to see you soon!

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.

A warm congratulation to Cara Phillips, a 2008 Hot Shot! Work from her series, Singular Beauty, is currently up on Newsweek.com. Cara also writes a personal essay detailing her motivation to create work on the cosmetic surgery industry. See and read it here.

Jody, 2003 by Shen Wei

Shen Wei was crowned a Hot Shot in our Fall 2006 competition. Since then, he's made quite a success of himself. Not long ago I let you know about his limited edition portfolio book featuring work from his series, Almost Naked, and this Thursday, April 2, Shen will open a solo show of the selfsame series at Randall Scott Gallery in Brooklyn. There will be a reception for the artist from 6-8pm.

Almost Naked
April 2 - May 2
Randall Scott Gallery
111 Front Street #204
Brooklyn, NY

Click here to learn more about the limited edition book, and here to visit Shen's site.

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!

Image by Casey Kelbaugh

Casey Kelbaugh, a Spring 2006 Hot Shot, will have work in a benefit show opening tomorrow, Friday, March 27, at Jack the Pelican Presents in Williamsburg. Old School: A Big Show of Accessibly-Priced Little Gems, will be a salon-style showing of work that is priced with sensitivity to our trying financial times.

OLD SCHOOL
A Big Show of Accessibly-Priced Little Gems
Friday, March 27, 7-10pm
Jack the Pelican
487 Driggs Ave, Between N. 9th and N. 10th
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

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.

Ms. Jen Bekman will serve as juror to the Photographic Center Northwest's 14th Annual Photographic Competition Exhibition, Photo-Op. Winning images will be exhibited at PCNW in Seattle July 13th - September 4th, 2009. In addition, cash awards in the amount of $1,000, $500, and $250 will be awarded to first, second, and third prize winners; each will also receive a $75 gift certificate of Blurb Scrip.

Photographers of all levels and processes are encouraged to apply; the juror will look for work reflecting a larger series. The entry fee is $47 with a minimum of five images. Submissions will be received until 9:00 p.m. on Friday, May 15th.

More information about the competition and entry forms are available at PCNW'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.