Gumball Machine by Katie Baum

Peeps by Katie Baum

Wednesday Editions: Katie Baum

Wednesday greetings, collectors! It's Youngna Park here again, happy to report that the never-ending rain has at last subsided, Hey, Hot Shot! is finally online again with a newly extended deadline, Jen is back in New York, and we have two sunny new editions for you today from Berkeley-based photographer, Katie Baum. Jen first spotted her work when we were reviewing the last round of 2008 Hey, Hot Shot! submissions and pegged her images as being excellent candidates for 20x200 editions.

Peeps* and Gumball Machine make us feel like kids in a candy store—a world where colorful cake, spilled juice, and a bathtub full of watermelon are abundant—and representative of the sticky-sweet memories of Baum's youth on the East Coast. As she moves further away—in space and time—from the textures and colors of her childhood, the need to record the past manifests through these candied recreations. Wavering between the conscientiousness of an adult and a child's eye view, simple items like a rainbow of barrettes, Parcheesi board, or set of jacks become a portal to the past as Baum arranges and captures carefully selected items with a desire for evoking nostalgia. Baum's chosen title for this series, Chasing Memory, also speaks to her illusive hunt to embrace memories and the tangible ways her youth appears in the present.

As we mentioned yesterday, and you may have noticed on your own, Hey, Hot Shot! was offline due to a massive outage at our hosting provider Media Temple, which took down some 15,000 sites. We are deeply sorry if you tried to submit your images to the competition during the hours the site was down, especially since the outage hit just as the entry period was ending. We have re-extended the deadline to Friday, May 8th at 11 PM EST so anyone who was not able to upload images can still enter. Entries completed prior to the outage were unaffected.

Sara Distin, Kara Canal, and I have been posting about those entries on the competition blog and we'll continue to write about and open the floor for discussion on the contenders on Flickr and Twitter until this edition's Hot Shots are announced on Thursday, May 28th. There are lots of opportunities for your work to get a bit of air time as a contender, even before the Hot Shots are selected, so we hope you'll take a peek at a sliver of the work that's caught our eye thus far and contribute to the discussion.

I'll start with accolades for Mary Ellen Bartley, whose series paperbacks brings a whole new meaning to not judging a book by its cover. By arranging and stacking the variable white-sides of books, exposing only their pages, she tugs at the notion of book-as-object, offering us a refreshing palette of whites. Jon Sheridan, Ryan Monaghan and Ryan Carter look at man's relationship to nature, through their respective works on restoring a family campground, exploring hunting culture, and a study of a caribou-hunting community in the Yukon. German photographer Anne Schwalbe also looks towards nature, capturing patterns and abstractions in her environment that avoid specificity of place. Katrina d'Autremont captures the complexity of establishing identity when bridging cultures as she spends time with her extended family abroad.

Sara writes, "I was excited to re-visit the work of Sam Falls and see Liz Kuball's newly edited website. Liz has also provided some great notes on reviewing and editing your own work before entering the competition on her blog. New-to-me artists who are exploring the link between geography and identity include Frederic M. Lezmi and Ayano Hisa. Offering a critical perspective on being out and about in the world as a backpacker is photographer Joerg Brueggemann. Last-to-note for now, is Anita Cruz Eberhard, one of a handful of photographers we've seen in this round working without a camera."

Kara Canal keeps herself busy over on the 20x200 blog but also takes a peek at the contenders from time to time. Her eye gravitated towards earlier contenders Christopher Paquette and Ina Senftleben.

As I write, entries are still coming in, and Jen will be back next Tuesday with a full round up of contender posts and a brand new double-edition from a seasoned 20x200 edition-maker. Until then!

*Peeps will ship a few days after orders for Gumball Machine, but rest assured that it will be on its way as soon as possible!