CENTER AWARDS: Exhibitors Choice: Brittany M. Powell
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #1, San Francisco, CA
This week Lenscratch will be sharing the CENTER Awards winners and the statements by the jurors to help understand their choices.
Congratulations to Brittany M. Powell for her Second Place win in CENTER’s Exhibitor’s Choice Awards.
Brittany was born in Naples, Italy and grew up in the Washington DC area and New Orleans, LA. She moved to San Francisco in 1999 to study photography at the California College of the Arts. Since then, she has worked as a freelance and fine art photographer and filmmaker (www.brittanyMpowell.com), most notably on a two year project for National Geographic TV entitled the Voyage of the Plastiki. She was a regular contributor to the now defunct SF Bay Guardian, and her work has been published in the Washington Post, Slate Magazine, Fast Company, Featureshoot, Hyperallergic, USA Today, the Huffington Post, National Geographic, the San Francisco Chronicle, Yoga Journal, Chronicle Books, and Edible San Francisco.
Brittany earned an MFA from San Francisco State University and is presently an adjunct professor of photography and video at Napa Valley College. She has exhibited work at SF Camerawork, Root Division, SOMArts, Secession Gallery, California College of the Arts, San Francisco State University, Lobot Gallery, and has upcoming shows at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Flux Factory, and Smack Mellon Gallery in New York. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, gifted by the San Francisco Foundation. In 2015, Brittany was a finalist for the Dorothea Lange Prize in documentary and was awarded fellowships from both the Vermont Studio Center and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Most recently, Brittany was the second place winner of the Exhibitor’s Choice Award at Review Santa Fe Photo Festival.
Brittany’s current project, The Debt Project, is a multi-media exploration of the role debt plays in both personal identity and the social structure in America.
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #8, Oakland, CA
EXHIBITOR’S CHOICE: Juror’s Statement
Rixon Reed, Director & Founder, Photo-eye Gallery, Photo-eye Bookstore
The overall quality of the submissions to Center’s Awards this year made it extremely challenging to choose only three bodies of work for the new Exhibitions Choice Awards. Each of the following projects could easily capture a viewer’s attention and spark their imagination when shown in galleries or on museum walls.
Brittany M. Powell’s, The Debt Project simply, but powerfully illuminates the reality of the current personal financial state of many individuals in our culture.
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #11
The Debt Project
The Debt Project is a photographic and multimedia exploration of the role Debt plays in personal identity and the social structure in America.
In 2012, after struggling with a significant loss of income from my photography business following the 2008 economic decline, my debt skyrocketed, and I made the difficult decision to file for bankruptcy. This spurred my interest in investigating the role debt can play in our identity and how we relate to the world. The theme of debt is a loaded one — one that explores issues of identity, morality, class, politics and even subconscious psychology. Debt is publicly enforced and highly stigmatized, but is almost always privately experienced. It is, in many ways, an abstract form without material weight or structure, yet with heavy physicality and burden in a person’s everyday life.
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #12
I began this body of work by asking subjects to sit for a formal portrait in their own homes surrounded by their belongings, inspired by early Flemish portrait painting. I asked each person to answer a series of questions on camera about their debts and to hand write the amount of debt they are in and the story behind it. These “stories of debt” are included in the viewing of the work as documents that serve as a physical representation of the abstracted form of debt and its invisible role in our lives.
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #10
My goal is to photograph and interview 99 subjects around the US to tell their stories of how Debt affects them in both their personal and social identities. To date, I have photographed and interviewed 45 subjects, in the San Francisco, New York City, Portland, Detroit and New Orleans metro areas. My goal is to encourage viewers to re-contextualize an abstract, often shamed experience, and raise cultural awareness and understanding about an issue that is largely American, but is also spreading internationally. It is my hope that by having a platform to openly discuss the issue of Debt, my project will encourage the questioning and reframing of our universal perception of Debt and how we contribute to its power and role in our social structure.
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #4
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #38
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #42
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #43
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #14
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #22
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #26
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #32
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #33
©Brittany M. Powell, Debt Portrait #39
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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)
