I first came across Jen Bekman in 2003, when she started a small gallery in New York in 2003 and curated a show (the third at the gallery) ‘made in ny‘, a mixed show that included work by Mitch Epstein and other photographers along with street art and “works on paper” (also what most photos are printed on!) but what really brought her to my attention was the international photo competition, Hey, Hot Shot! which she started a couple of years later. This describes itself as “The best thing going for emerging photographers” and it is certainly worth considering an entry, though you have missed the latest of these now semi-annual events, which closed on June 17, and you can see the Hey, Hot Shot! 2008 – First Edition Winners on the blog along with pictures from some other entrants, and, until Aug 23 at the Jan Bekman Gallery in NY.
The two photographers who interest me most among the five winners are Kate Orne and Colleen Plumb, but all of the winners and those of the 20 or so ‘Honorable Mentions’ I’ve looked at have some fine work – this is a tough competition.
Entering Hey, Hot Shot! is also how photographers approach Bekman’s latest venture, 20X200 which is based on a simple formula:
large editions + low prices x the internet = art for everyone
Each week two new art works come on sale, one of them a photo, available in 3 sizes. The smallest size (on 8.5×11″ paper) is in an edition of 200 and sold for just $20, hence the site name (though mailing to the UK more than doubles the price), with a medium size print (17×22″ paper) at $200 – edition 20 – and a larger print (30×40″ paper) at $2000 in an edition of 2.
Some of the $20 editions – which go on sale online at 2pm EST on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (which I think makes it 7pm in the UK) – sell out in a few minutes, but others are slower sellers, and there were 20 of the $20 photos still available when I looked at the site, and a great choice of the more expensive editions – though $200 is still cheap looking at current market prices.
If you are interested, you can sign up for free on the 20X200 site and get advance notice of future editions. I think this is a great idea, although the delivery cost for those not in the USA makes it considerably less attractive.
You can of course buy low cost prints of some of the classic works of photography from the Science and Society Picture Library. Their prints are not editioned and come from the Science Museum, National Railway Museum and the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television which includes the Royal Photographic Society Collection, one of the best collections of the first 100 years of photography in the world. Prices are extremely reasonable and print quality sometimes rather better than that of vintage prints. You can buy some really iconic photographic images- if you’ve always wanted a print of Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘The Steerage’ it’s yours for £7.50 at around the correct size.
Walker Evans, Auto parts shop. Atlanta, Georgia. 1936
Library of Congress (available as 20Mb Tiff)
Cheaper still is the Library of Congress. Its pictures are also available as prints at low cost, but you can also download some as high quality scans for free and make your own prints – which can be better than the originals. Only a limited selection of the work is available as high quality TIFF files, but it does include a number of pictures by Walker Evans to name just one of my favourite photographers.
