CENTER AWARDS: Project Launch Winner David Favrod
Swiss photographer, David Favrod, is the 2013 Project Launch Winner in CENTER’s Awards program. The prizes include a $10,000 cash award, and exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Arts, complimentary participation in Review Santa Fe, A workshop at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, a Photographer’s Showcase through Photo-Eye, an invitation to participate in the Art Photo Index, a portfolio review through the Eyeist, an online exhibition at VisitCenter, and today’s feature on Lenscratch.
David was born in Kobe, Japan, and now lives and works in Switzerland and Spain. He received a Master’s Degree in Art Direction and a Bachelor’s in photography from the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne. David’s work has been well celebrated, winning the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2010, the Work in Progress Award at Les recontres del la Photographie in Arles, France in 2009, and shortlisted for the FOAM Paul Huf Award, 2012, in Amsterdam. He has had solo and group exhibitions around the globe and his work is held in numerous public and private collections. He recently opened They are More Things at the EXP12 Gallery in Berlin, Germany that runs through May 5th.
The image of the window with the paper birds is about the woman Sadako who at her home close to Ground Zero when the atom bomb was dropped in Hiroshima in 1945. Years later, she developed leukemia and was hospitalized in 1955 and given a year to live. She died in 1955 aged 12. During a hospital visit Sadako’s best friend folds an origami crane as an old Japanese story says that who folds 1,000 origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. As Sadako didn’t manage to fold all 1,000 cranes, her friends folded the remaining ones and buried them with her. With this image I want to speak about the war, the memory and the atomic bomb.
The sound is a very important part of the war memories of my grandparents (the explosions, the holings, the sound of the B-29,…) Baoummm is the onomatopoeia of an explosion. The onomatopoeias are painted on the print. 
Mishiko was the sister of my grandfather. She fell ill during the second war, doctors diagnosed him a poor hydration. In Japan, watermelon is a fruit very popular and holds much water. So his parents gave him regularly. But the diagnosis was wrong and it was a salt deficiency and she died shortly after. 
I asked David a couple of questions about this terrific award:
Has creating this project allowed you to feel more rooted in your Japanese heritage?
I’m 30 but I still have many parts of myself to be illuminated. There is still misunderstanding. For this research, I am trying to reduce them. I’m making some efforts on my way. I try to understand my motivations, what bothers me or on the contrary makes me dream. Despite this, I’ll always be a gaijin.
Any advice for emerging photographers?
Just be persevering, loving what you do and sharing your work.
What’s next?
A lot of new pictures 😉
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![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)
