CENTER AWARDS: Editors Choice: Eva Fazzari

CENTER AWARDS: Editors Choice: Eva Fazzari by Aline SmithsonMay 9, 2016

©Eva Fazzari

This week Lenscratch will be sharing the CENTER Awards winners and the statements by the jurors to help understand their choices.

Congratulations to Eva Fazzari for her First Place win in the Editor’s Choice Awards. Eva’s compelling and poignant series on abandoned dogs shares hopeful stories about their futures.

Eve is a New Jersey-based artist and educator. Past group exhibitions include Some Place Like Home at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, Pause at Foley Gallery, and Photography Sampler, Ramapo at Ramapo College of New Jersey where she works as Photography Lab Supervisor & Adjunct Professor of Photography. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in 2009 and participated in Pratt’s 29^th Annual Graduate Symposium where her work was critiqued by Joao Ribas, Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Eleanor Heartney and Lia Gangitano. She was the recipient of the Pratt Circle Award for Distinction and Excellence in Academic Achievement. In 2016, her series, Freeway, documenting canine freedom transport, received 1^st Place in Editor’s Choice Awards at CENTER in New Mexico and Director’s Choice Award at Midwest Center for Photography in Kansas.

©Eva Fazzari

EDITOR’S CHOICE: Juror’s Statement
Chris McGonigal, Photo Editor, The Huffington Post

It’s not easy going one-by-one through beautiful images and being the one to make the hard choices on who has to go and who has to get left behind, but we all know in editing you have to make those hard decisions. It was such a pleasure to go through these entries. I based my decisions on those submissions on which I would think to myself “This would be really great for our site.” These images offer a view of something different, compelling and a series that just make us want to see more from their creator.
The first place prize goes to Eva Fazzari’s images of a rescue dog group traveling the country uniting dogs with new owners. It is a really special piece and once I saw it, I knew it would end up at the top of the list. It’s one thing to document a journey, it’s another to document a life changing experience for an animal and a human. Both of these situations combined make this a wonderful winner.

©Eva Fazzari

FREEWAY

Freeway chronicles the 3-day, 3,000-mile journey of rescue dogs and people between Alabama and Maine. Northern rescue groups employ Grateful Doggies – Canine Freedom Transport to safely deliver dogs previously abandoned, seized or surrendered, some from shelters practicing gas chamber euthanasia. Once quarantined and vetted, up to 100 dogs are transported to rescue groups and adoptive homes each week.

During transit I photograph at approximately 20 pickup and drop-off points, including fast-food parking lots, gas stations, freeway Welcome Centers, vacant parking lots and other places unfamiliar to these dogs. At each stop the dogs bark anxiously as outside a group forms, some are fosters reluctantly facing goodbye and others excited to welcome their newest rescue. Anxiety, fear and joy in both people and dogs fill the air. How emotions play out in these unusual places is at the heart of my work.

©Eva Fazzari

Grateful Doggies began Christmas Eve 2013, Alabama-bound in a 15-foot box truck with crates of dogs secured to both sides and two men taking turns sleeping on the truck floor in the narrow passageway between. I met Grateful Doggies in March 2014 when I brought four puppies, a husky and a cat in my 2-door Honda Civic to a Pet Smart parking lot for a local rescue. Two months later I boarded the Grateful Doggies truck for the first time, offering to care for dogs in exchange for permission to photograph on their trips. On my first transport, I captured a portrait of Wally, tail-tucked and licking his lips, as he approached a red line in the pavement separating him from his new family. Since then I have photographed many other emotional exchanges between rescue dogs and people to create my project, Freeway. To date, Grateful Doggies has saved approximately 10,000 animals. Here are a few of these stories.