Blog About Photography

Despite my best efforts, I can’t get them work­ing again. Can some­one help me with this? I’ll send you an inkjet print of any image you’d like as payment.

© Greg Wasser­strom
This is funny. I look like Bea.

The win­ners of the Spring ’07 Hot Shot were announced yes­ter­day, and I was thrilled to see I was given an hon­or­able men­tion. Very encour­ag­ing! Take a moment to read about the win­ners and look at their work, and of course don’t for­get to check out the hon­or­able men­tions too.

With these com­pe­ti­tions, I always won­der what cri­te­ria are used to make the deci­sion about the win­ners. No doubt all the win­ners are incred­i­bly tal­ented, but I don’t envy the job of the peo­ple who have to decide. This obvi­ously isn’t a life and death kind of deci­sion like pick­ing who gets to use the life raft, but I’m sure that it’s some­thing of a tough call. Choos­ing the best work seems prob­lem­atic enough with­out hav­ing to worry about mak­ing sure all the artists work well together.

© Bea Frem­der­man

There was an item about Bea on Style Press the other day, and look­ing at the pho­tographs on her site, I real­ized that she’s one of my favorite Flickr con­tacts. Maybe I’ll get tired of this brand of diaris­tic stuff, but right now it cer­tainly doesn’t feel like it. Bea’s images are par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing to me because at 19, her images seem more sin­cere than some of the peo­ple who are known in the art world for sim­i­lar work.

© Brian Ulrich

I’m incred­i­bly excited about A New Amer­i­can Por­trait, open­ing June 21 at the Jen Bek­man gallery. Per­haps my excite­ment affects my per­cep­tion, but I have the sense that some­thing his­tor­i­cal is tak­ing place with the hang­ing of this show, along the same lines of the 1967 New Doc­u­ments show at the Mod­ern that intro­duced Diane Arbus, Lee Fried­lan­der and Gary Wino­grand. Think­ing about MoMA these days, it’s hardly the place where cutting-​​edge work would be pre­sented as it is hap­pen­ing. It seems to me that no group of peo­ple bet­ter under­stand con­tem­po­rary pho­tog­ra­phy than the group of peo­ple involved in this show.

Jen and Joerg Col­berg have co-​​curated it and it will fea­ture work from Alec Soth, Brian Ulrich, Todd Hido, Chris­tine Collins, Jen Davis, Ben Don­ald­son, Amy Elkins, Shen Wei and Peter Haakon-​​Thompson. If this isn’t a defin­i­tive show, I don’t know what is and should prob­a­bly think about find­ing a new way to spend my time. What’s more cer­tain though is that it’s worth a bus trip to New York to be at the opening.

Will there be a book? I cer­tainly hope so.

Update: The date of the open­ing has been moved to Fri­day, June 22. Any­one inter­ested in going up to New York City with me?