View of the Jen Bekman Gallery during the Winter 2007 Hey, Hot Shot! exhibition:

The Spring Hey, Hot Shot! winners were just announced. Hey, Hot Shot is a quarterly competion hosted by the Jen Bekman Gallery in New York. After looking at the websites of all the winners, I have to say that it is another very impressive group.

This year has been a pretty good one for me, coming on the heels of two really bad ones (imagine sending out over a hundred applications for exhibitions, awards, etc without one single success). Yet by far the accomplishment I am most proud of is being included in the Winter 2007 Hot Shots.

A friend made me aware of the Hey Hot Shots competition several years ago. Since then, I have watched Jen do an amazing job making a name for her and her gallery. There is a great diversity to photographers chosen, and if you look at the resumes of the winners, you will quickly see that they are going on the quality of the images alone. As a result, she finds and showcases a lot of very fresh work.

There are two things about my experience with the competition that bear mentioning:

• I remember perfectly my feeling upon receiving the email that contained my acceptance. It came on what had otherwise been a very bad day. The subject was “You’re a HotShot.” That simple line of text changed my whole outlook on things for a little while. You’ve got to carefully hold onto each and every success, and let them carry you through all the failures.
• With several of the competitions, Jen publishes a list of “runner-ups.” I look at a lot of photography, and feel I am a pretty good judge of quality. However, looking at the websites of those who had made the list of runner-ups, I honestly had no idea why my work was chosen over theirs. I think it’s pretty easy to separate those who are making competent work from those who are making really good work. However, when it comes to determining who gets the big kudos, so many things beyond just the work itself come into play, including personal tastes, timing and luck. While it’s easy to write this side of things off as something you can’t control, luck is ultimately a matter of probably and statistics. The more you put yourself into a position to get lucky, the more likely it is that you will.

I can imagine the responses:
“So let me get this straight. You’re a tenured professor of photography making a stable living at a job that allows (and even expects) you to be a artist. You’re showing with some regularity. Do you know how many people would kill for that? Wake up and realize how good you have it.”

I can’t argue. No matter how frustrated I get with my career, I keep in mind that in the bigger picture, things are pretty good. So what am I looking for?

I know a lot of artists for whom the making of work in and of itself is enough, and I have immense respect for those artists. Part of me wishes I could be one myself. Yet ultimately, I became an artist because I felt I had something worth sharing. In order to share, you need an audience.

The art world reminds me a lot of the movie and music industries: there are proportionally a very small number of slots available at the top with almost all of the attention going to those who have made it there. In my deepest, most ambitious dreams, this is where I want to end up. So what does membership in this group look like? For me, these are some of the telltale signs:

• Ongoing representation with galleries in one or more of the major markets: New York, Chicago, LA, San Fransisco.
• Exposure at some of the major museums in New York, DC, Chicago.
• One or more monographs from the better art presses.

This is what I’m after, but I know there’s a good chance I will never acheive it. Hence, the name of this blog… (though I’ve never met Mr. Ulrich, I’m hoping he won’t be offended by my twisted up allusion to his own blog). Luckily, not matter what else happens, I will always love making photographs.

How good I’ve got it: The photo area at school masquarading as my private studio during the summer:

Another rejection letter to add to the pile:

So here I am jumping on the blog bandwagon…

Dont’ get me wrong- I think blogs are a very useful and powerful tool. I have followed the rise of blogging in the abstract since the beginning, and finally found one with thoughts I care about in the form of Alec Soth’s blog. Since I started reading his blog, I have come across several other great ones that I now follow regularly. Check out my blogroll if you’re curious about which ones.

However, not being a particularly high profile member of the fine art photo community, I doubted anyone would really care about my musings regarding the contemporary photography world. It seemed like a lot of effort for something that few would follow.

More recently, it occurred to me that maybe I do have some stories worth telling, ones that have some merit due to my experiences if not my renown. We hear plenty about those artist who “have made it,” but what about those struggling for the already packed stage? It seems the trials, frustrations, frustratoins, (did I mention frustrations???), successes and lessons experienced by someone bent on being a successful artist might just be useful to enough people to make pursuing a blog worth it, at least for a little while. This blog will focus on the arguably less talked about side of being an artist: self-promotion and the quest to find and audience.