Critical Mass 2011 FINALISTS

Critical Mass Pre-Screening process is finished, and Finalists have been selected:

Sandy Alpert
Jane Fulton Alt
Mariam Amurvelashvili
Amy Anderson
Ri Anderson
Chris Anthony
Evgenia Arbugaeva
Jessica Auer
Susan A. Barnett
Rachel Barrett
Mary Ellen Bartley
Steven Beckly
Daniel Beltra
Chris Bennett
Hollis Bennett
Anne Berry
Guia Besana
Tatyana Bessmertnaya
Meg Birnbaum
Cynthia Bittenfield
Aaron Blum
Tami Bone
Michael Borek
Nadine Boughton
Mark Brautigam
Shelley Calton
Colette Campbell-Jones
Christopher Capozziello/AEVUM
Christopher Chadbourne
Chung (fanky) Chak
Scott Chandler
Ronit Citri
Elizabeth M. Claffey
Daniel Coburn
Christine Collins
Beau Comeaux
Kirk Crippens
Michael Crouser
Maisie Crow
John Cyr
Katrina d'Autremont
Scott Dalton
Carli Davidson
Marc Davidson
Christopher Dawson
Brad DeCecco
Jason DeMarte
Julie Dermansky
Nigel Gordon Dickinson
Mitch Dobrowner
Carolyn Drake
Maureen Drennan
Jeremy Dyer
David Ellingsen
Andrew Emond
Harlan Erskine
John Faier
Mark Fernandes
Elizabeth Fleming
Fran Forman
Michael Forster Rothbart
Michelle Frankfurter
Misha Friedman
Lucia Ganieva
Helen K. Garber
Candace Plummer Gaudiani
Ayala Gazit
Ann George
Andres Gonzalez
Meggan Gould
Joshua Dudley Greer
Laura Griffin
Bryan David Griffith
Christoph Grill
Brett Gundlock
Yuji Hamada
Deborah Hamon
Corey Hendrickson
Lori Hepner
Amy Herman
Gabriela Herman
Liz Hickok
Nicole Jean Hill
Sarah Hobbs
Jeroen Hofman
Bootsy Holler
Jennifer Hudson
Yaakov Israel
Stella Johnson
Kakha Kakhiani
Loli Kantor
Brian Kaplan
Michael Kirchoff
Heidi Kirkpatrick
Alex Kisilevich
Ellen Kok
Richard Kolker
Astrid Kruse Jensen
Kevin Kunishi
Alejandra Laviada
Rubi Lebovitch
H. Lee
Jim Leisy
Isa Leshko
Fritz Liedtke
Beth Lilly
Sebastian Liste
Dina Litovsky
Gloriann Liu
Larry Louie
Benjamin Lowy
Mark Lyon
Katarzyna Majak
Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman
Michael Marten
Anne Leighton Massoni
Bill McCullough
Heather McDonough
Michael McElroy
Mary Beth Meehan
Michael Mergen
Leigh Merrill
Nick Meyer
Rizwan Mirza
Alyssa Miserendino
Viviane Moos
Elizabeth Moreno
Bridget Murphy Milligan
Jerome Nakagawa
Jesse Neider
Landon Nordeman
Kenneth O Halloran
Paccarik Orue
Lydia Panas
Deborah Parkin
Mary Parsi
Jackson Patterson
Bradley Peters
Rachel Phillips
Walker Pickering
Alexis Pike
Caleb Plowman
Alessandro Puccinelli
Susana Raab
Christopher Rauschenberg
Mike Rebholz
Jason Reblando
Justin James Reed
Ron Reeder
Suzanne Révy
Ali Richards
Joachim Manuel Riederer
Jesse Rieser
Jenny Riffle
Alejandro Rivas
Nick Rochowski
Kent Rogowski
Sanford Rose
Diane Rosenblum
Harold Ross
Irina Rozovsky
Fred Runkel
Jacinda Russell
Wendy Sacks
Lynn Saville
Jennifer Schlesinger
Philipp Scholz Rittermann
Dona Schwartz
Christine Shank
Geoffrey H. Short
Rebecca Sittler
Matt Slaby/LUCEO
Alix Smith
Jared Soares
James Soe Nyun
Catie Soldan
Rafael Soldi
Jane Alden Stevens
S. Gayle Stevens
Youngsuk Suh
Daro Sulakauri
Lacey Terrell
Bryan Thomas
Sherwin Tibayan
Bill Vaccaro
Ian van Coller
Stephen Vaughan
Jim Vecchi
Aaron Vincent Elkaim
Corinne Vionnet
Lori Vrba
William D. Wade
Jo Ann Walters
Toshiya Watanabe
David Welch
Grace Weston
Kate Wilhelm
Sarah Wilson
David Wolf
Susan Worsham
Marcus Yam

If you're among those listed above, within the next few hours you will receive an official email with information about how to proceed. If you do not receive this email by the end of the day (Monday, August 29th), please contact me immediately.

If you're not among the Finalists, please know that your work has been seen by of a fantastic group of Pre-Screeners who were really invested in the Pre-Screening process. We’ve heard from them that they were impressed with the quality of work this year. As has happened in the past, it is inevitable, that some of the Pre-Screeners favorites didn’t make it to the Finalist round. So, if your work found a fan, that fan will remember. Regardless of the results, you made a wise choice to believe in your work by submitting and that, alone, is valuable.

Thank you to everyone for being a part of this process! We are grateful for the opportunity to see your photographs and hope that this process leads to new prospects for you and your work.

Thoughts on the Pre-screening process

These past couple of weeks I've been pre-screening the submissions for this year's Photolucida Critical Mass program. I've never juried anything of this scale before and while I'm used to critiquing and reviewing work one-on-one with photographers, this is a completely new experience for me. 700 photographers + 7,000 images = a ton of work... and a unique opportunity. There have been countless times that I've submitted my own work to competitions and for juried shows, never to understand the perspective of those looking at the images, what they might be looking for, what order of priorities might be in place, what the level and quality of the other work submitted was. I thought that by writing my experiences in jurying, it might give my fellow artists a glimpse into how to better prepare for submissions. Let me preface all of this by saying that this is merely my own perspective. Other jurors, most likely, have different priorities when viewing work, and may have a different process for viewing work online.

All that being said, here are my thoughts:

Artist Statements
For me, it's critical to read each artist statement before I look at the images. I'm sure the reverse is true for many jurors, but I want to have some idea about what I'm going to see and what the intent of the artist is before delving into imagery. I read every artist statement. Because there are so many entries to see, I have to read quickly, so the statements that get read in full are those that are limited to about 3 short paragraphs. I have to say that about 85% of these statements need major work. The language is often vague, process-oriented, filled with art-speak, and generally, not helpful to understanding what the work is about. I truly believe that I'd rather see something like, "I made these images simply because I felt compelled to do so." than most of what I'm having to read with these entries. If you are not a good writer, or struggle with writing about your work, try to write three paragraphs and answer the following questions:

Why do you photograph?
Why did you make this work?
How does this work relate to who you are as an artist?

If you can just answer these clearly, you'll be way ahead of what's out there.

The Viewing Process
These images, on both my laptop and desktop at my studio, are larger in size than what exists on many blogs or social media outlets. When the images load, I see the top of the image first and as it loads down I begin to see the rest. This is a small point, but I found it interesting how many times I noticed technical flaws in images because I was forced to see the tops, or edges of the image before the centers. If you have blown-out edges, or a lot of digital noise in the upper part of your image, that's what I saw first. Just a reminder to make sure you look at your files from corner to corner, not only where the focal point of your image may be.

Hierarchy of Ratings
There are four ratings that you can give to a body of work. Naturally, I save the lowest score for work that I cannot connect with in any way, and the highest score for work that I feel is publication-worthy. The trouble areas are in the middle. How I decide between these middle ratings depends on how I answer two questions, Do I feel this work is or should be still in development? and Have I seen enough that is at a high level of quality that I would want to see more? If I feel that the work should still be development, I go with the lower of the middle scores. If I feel that it could be complete, or close to completion and that I'd like to see more, then I give the higher of the middle scores. This can be tough at times, and where strong sequencing and editing really help.

So what am I evaluating when looking at these portfolios, specifically? This is the list and the order varies depending on the intent of the artist and my own interpretation of the work (keep in mind that the list is in no particular order):

Concept
Subject
Composition
Technical Ability (how well are the online images crafted - please no more purple skies)
Writing
Beauty (yes, this does matter to me)
Mood
Context

Other Notes
I made some other notes on interesting things that I've seen.

1 One photographer submitted nine images instead of ten. I actually appreciated that. It said to me that this person was confident enough to realize that they didn't have ten strong images and that they would just put forth what they thought was worthy. If you don't have ten really strong images, but you have nine, maybe it's worth just submitting those? I don't know how other judges reacted to this, but I found it interesting.

2 A few photographers used one of their ten entries for images that weren't photographs in their portfolios. For example, one used an installation shot which I found very smart because the installation of the work was very important to how I interpreted the images. Another used a shot of an actual book which is how they saw their work being presented in it's final format. Seeing these were extremely informative in understanding how the artist would want the work presented.

3 With pricing, if you're not sure what to price your work at, you should do some research and try to go to more gallery shows where you can see what similar work is priced. I saw a range of prices, from $75 up to $4000. I have to say that if someone prices their work at $100 for a 16x20 print, it does make me wonder how much experience they have in showing and how active they are in the community, because you would know that for a relatively accomplished photographer, a 16x20 print would sell for much more than $100. Remember, all of what you apply with, from website addresses, to pricing, to writing, to image preparation, gives jurors clues as to your credibility as a working artist—best to use every opportunity to show that you working and connected to what is happening in this community.

4 A ll of us should read at least once, Bruce Fraser's Real World Book on Sharpening, my bible for sharpening images. There are so many files that I see online that could be made so much better if sharpened properly. I'm not going to use any of the images I saw with the submissions as an example, but below I have one of my own. The first is undersharpened which is what I'm seeing in most cases with the entries. The bottom one is sharpened to how I would want it viewed. Again, this is a personal preference, and maybe most felt that they wanted a softer look, but with so many like that, I started to question it.

© Lauren Henkin. All rights reserved.

© Lauren Henkin. All rights reserved.

My hope in writing this is that you might think as carefully about the presentation of your submissions that are viewed online as you do for galleries.


Lauren Henkin
www.laurenhenkinblog.com

Critical Mass Pre-Screening Notes

Where are we in the Critical Mass 2011 process? Most pre-screeners are close to finishing up their jurying, and Photolucida will announce the finalist list the week of August 22^nd. Everyone who entered will receive a CD with all the 2011 submissions inclusive in September.

Finishing up my own pre-screening, I thought it might be interesting to translate some notes jotted down into a general look at the content trends (‘trend’ in this case meaning ‘direction’ and not ‘fad’) of this year’s Critical Mass – what ideas/content are emerging photographers spending their time, talent, and emotional energy on?

The notes below are a neutral look at some general trends. No category or example is meant to have more weight or importance over another.

Image prices varied greatly - from $15 to $9,000.

Imagery mediums ranged from iPhone jpgs, expired Polaroid film, ambrotypes w/black fabric, large format w/150 year old French Petzval lenses, encaustic work, photographs frozen under ice, mordancage.

A loose attempt to categorize some of the submissions:

Literal imagery (trees, landscapes) to conceptual (the photographic interpretation of the word ‘sic’), to three dimensional (photos on saws).

Multiple entries of night photography, blurred photography.

Natural disasters: floating oil spills, tsunami damage, wildfires.

Self: self-portraiture over time (polaroids, passports), middle-class identity, adoption, self portraiture taking cues based on Victorian spirit photography, examination of self as man in pink tutu, childhood memories.

Cultural sub-groups: Neo-nazis, Klanspeople, Freemasons, marijuana farmers, rubbish dump pickers, Hasidism/Greek Orthodox Christians, women healers, opera characters, South African gangs, people with chickens, roller derby people, hunters, scavenger hunters, cage fighters, Japanese apple farmers, Jewish culture in Morocco, Burmese refugees, ice fishers.

People with disabilities: formal portraits of, blind people choosing to be parents, prom at a school for the blind.

Sex: drag queens, sex parties/clubs, S&M, porn industry, prostitution.

Nudes and naked people: abstract and non-abstract.

Family: parents aging/dying, children in modes of play/evolution, motherhood and fatherhood issues, working through suicide of a spouse, siblings in institutions, mother/daughter relationships, family members with cancer, same-sex parents, mental illness.

Abstracts: nature, peeling paint, graffiti, the body, food molecules, stained glass.

Chernobyl (the aftermath of, the tourism destination spot of).

Animals: disabled pets, aging animals, kennel club dog shows, the equine, the family of simianus, bats & fireflies.

Places you may or may not be familiar with: estate sales, garden shows, yard alters, zoo exhibits, examining rooms, funeral homes, public restrooms in department stores, NYC lobbies, spots where overdoses occurred, soccer fields in rural South Africa, African clinics, abandoned lace factories, voting booths.

American landscape: Yellowstone, Las Vegas, Appalachia, a ‘piano farm’ in North Carolina, Blackfoot Indian reservation, the Snake River plain, the Catskills, road trips, small towns, large cities, amusement parks, sustainable farms, the psychology of “the West”,

Public Spaces: Urban sprawl, man-made environments, tourism, theme parks.

Incorporating one’s own face into existing art/photographs.

Artful documentation of physical aspects of photography: developer trays, viewfinders.

Economic Recession: undeveloped real estate sites, abandoned houses, middle-class struggle, farmer suicides, deserted auto dealerships.

Military – training grounds, children playing war games, realities of Iraq & Afghanistan, the JROTC, Sandinista & Contra veterans.

Hard to categorize: jello cityscapes, explosions, how the inner psyche reflects the culture at large, journal of dream recordings, liminal spaces, people with freckles, protected memory, psychological landscape, interpretation of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

It has been amazing to see so many varied projects cross my computer screen - so many worlds to absorb and think about - thank you!

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