People - 1^ST PLACE WINNER: Matt Hamon

This current series of photographs focuses on a small group of primitive skills practitioners who attend the annual buffalo hunt on the perimeter of Yellowstone National Park in Montana to scavenge animal parts and other animal products left behind by Native American hunters. After offering assistance to hunters by field dressing, skinning, quartering and carrying off buffalo to vehicles for transportation, any meat scraps left behind are canned or packaged, fat is rendered and placed in jars, hides are tanned and bones are used to make primitive tools and ornamental objects. These individuals see themselves as a neutral party to the often controversial polemic around the hunt and management of Yellowstone buffalo, and aim to make use of what would otherwise be left behind.

About author:
Matt Hamon is a portrait photographer who lives in rural Montana. His photography exists conceptualy and aesthetically in the spaces between photojournalism and staged editorial imagery. Matt hails from a small, remote town in Northern California. A sense of place informed by wandering the woods as a child inspires his enquiry. Self-described as "post-rural"*, Matt currently lives in Potomac, Montana near the Blackfoot River and teaches in the School of Art at the University of Montana in Missoula. Matt is a featured artist in Scott Ligon's forthcoming book from Watson-Guptil/Random House, "Digital Art Revolution."