Elise Kirk: 2015 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention
© Elise Kirk
The work of Elise Kirk looks into the places and people that reside in the least populous and yet the largest portion of our country. She captures the essence of what it’s like to live here, the hilarity, the inactivity and, at times, the overwhelming quietness.
Elise Kirk studied documentary film at Columbia College Chicago (BA ’00), investigated representations of the family in Spanish cinema on a Fulbright grant in Madrid (’01), and graduated with an MFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design (’15), where she received a Graduate Studies Grant to make much of the work seen here. She was also the recent recipient of a Student Award for Innovations in Imaging from the Society for Photographic Education. Elise is fascinated with familial relationships (both inherited and constructed), mythologies of place, and the impermanence of all of the above.
© Elise Kirk
Mid
I come from the middle of the country, down my own inner road between two households, where I grew up surrounded by a groundedness I couldn’t quite touch. Now I lap the nation in pursuit of an unreachable landing pad, and the middle stays with me like an anchor — a secure attachment to a Midwest myth of agrarian rootedness. Yet in my travels I encounter a different view of the region. For many, the middle states are no potential rooting ground but a place to be passed through on the way to another in our restless search for greatness.
© Elise Kirk
Mid— resides in this intersection: between pulling up stakes and putting down roots, between desire and hesitation, staying and going. Here, interstate highways speed travelers and truckers past the homesteads and farm towns that have sustained kinships for time immemorial. A billboard alongside this interior stretch cries for the passerby’s attention. It’s more than an exit. It’s a trip.
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
© Elise Kirk
Posts on Lenscratch may not be reproduced without the permission of the Lenscratch staff and the photographer.
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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)
