CENTER’s 2013 Editor’s Choice Award was jurored by Susan White, the photography Director at Vanity Fair. She awarded first prize to
Jennifer McClure for her terrific introspective series,
Music From A Farther Room, second to
Michael Butler, and third prize to
Richard Tuschman. Jennifer’s
prizes include participation in Review Santa Fe, an invitation to participate in the Art Photo Index, a portfolio review through the Eyeist, a $125 gift certificate for Singer Editions printing, an online exhibition at VisitCenter, and today’s feature on Lenscratch. Today we feature Jennifer’s work, and tomorrow, Michael and Richard’s.
Susan White’s statement follows:
There were plenty of wonderful photographs in a variety of styles and subject matter. Because of the breadth of styles and subjects, it was somewhat difficult to narrow the options until I simply decided to respond to those images I found compelling and beautiful. I considered how each submission worked as a whole in order to narrow the field. It was difficult to choose just three.
Editor’s Choice winner,
Jennifer McClure is a fine art and documentary photographer based in New York City. She uses the camera to ask and answer questions. Most importantly, she wants to know why anyone ever gets out of bed in the morning. Jennifer turned the camera on herself after a long illness limited her access to other people. The self-portraits have become for her a way to stay in one piece, a way to be able to collect herself. She is interested in appearances and absences, short stories, poetry, and daydreaming. She loves quotes. Jennifer was born in Virginia and raised all over the Southeast. The child of a Marine, she moved frequently and traumatically. Photographs were the proof that she lived in this place, was friends with those people. She decorated her walls with traces of her past. Pictures became anchor points. After acquiring a B.A. in English Theory and Literature, Jennifer began a long career in restaurants. She returned to photography in 2001, taking classes at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography.
Music From a Farther Room
I love the water but I am afraid of it. Water constantly changes and has the power to soothe, sustain, or destroy. I love people but I am afraid of them for the same reasons. Involving other people in my life means embracing the unknown, and I tend to see only the dangerous aspects of the unfamiliar. The guiding principle of my life so far has been one of self-preservation and control. We moved frequently when I was a child, so I have no hometown or sense of place. I have not done anything to create that for myself.
I watch my friends get married and have children and wonder why I never felt that pull. This project is about my search for what is important in my own life. I have more questions than answers, and I am sometimes exhausted by the effort. I am afraid that I am getting lost in the questions, that I am holding myself back from an uncertain future that is probably not as frightening as I imagine it to be. “
And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of the fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.” Joseph Campbell Pathways to Bliss
![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](http://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
