Emanuele Amighetti: 2017 LENSCRATCH Student Prize Honorable Mention Winner
© Emanuele Amighetti
I am very pleased to feature our next honorable mention whose work highlights an important world issue. Emanuele Amighetti‘s photojournalistic photographs remind his viewers of a world mostly unseen, that of oversees wars. These strong dynamic images represent a place caught between hostility, border issues and loss. Amighetti’s photographs show the life of people who have been displaced through the tragedies of war for over two decades.
Emanuele Amighetti is a freelance documentary photographer and photojournalist. His work focuses on social issues and the aftermath of war. He is graduating in Persian and Arabic language, literature and history of the Islamic countries at Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy). His works have been published on WIRED, VICE, POLITICO Europe, Open Society Foundations, PDN, Panorama, Pagina 99, The Towner, OpenMigration, Ejo/European Journalism Observatory and Lettera 43 among the others. His photographs have been exhibited in Italy, Greece, Australia and the UK.
In 2017, Emanuele was a winner in the PDN Photo Annual, Shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival, a Finalist in the Head On Photo Festival, and received the Award of Excellence from The Society for News Design. He has exhibited at the Millepiani Art Gallery, Rome (IT), the Head On Photo Festival, NSW Parliament House, Sydney (AUS), Reclaim Photo Festival, Light House Media Centre, Wolverhampton (UK), and the Blank Wall Gallery, Monochrome Exhibition, Athens (GR).
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
Unrecognized Nation, Forgotten War
Unrecognized nation, forgotten war Nagorno-Karabakh’s young soldiers and cadets’ lives in limbo. “All men and women of Nagorno-Karabakh Republic are part of the army, but we cannot say how many soldiers are now operative over the frontline” explains me an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stepanakert. Almost one year after the April War a supposed-to-be ordinary life is going on among villages and streets of the Armenia backed unrecognized nation. All the aspiring republic’s inhabitants clearly remember the destructive violence of the decades-old conflict. Some of them aspire for a resolution. They believe in a better future to live for the next generations.
The conflict started in 1988 and escalated into full-scale war when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Armenians went to war with Azerbaijan, with backing from Armenia. The conflict left 65,000 ethnic Armenians and 40,000 ethnic Azeris displaced. While a cease-fire was declared in May 1994 and the violence abated, soldiers are still engaged in defending their positions over the frontline and required training in military bases. Final negotiations are taking place in Moscow but the ceasefire is regularly broken with casualties on both sides. Few days before I was there one of the Artsakh young soldiers was shot by Azeri snipers and injured. Transferred to the hospital in Yerevan, his life is still on risk.
Clashes between the Azerbaijani and ethnic Armenian forces over the breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh last year were the worst violence the region has seen since the ethnic war over the territory ended in 1994. Azerbaijan boasted of “destroying” 170 opposing troops, while sources from the Armenian Karabakhi forces estimated they had killed 300 Azeri soldiers.
© Emanuele Amighetti
In the village of Talish, Azeris forces entered houses killing four old-men. Their ears were brutally cut off. Traces of those raids are still visible walking through bombed-out houses, shops and destroyed schools. Locals were transferred to near villages, where they found relatives and neighbours. The border territory is now full of military camps and bases proving how military life is not over.
In Stepanakert, the capital, a military academy substituted the traditional high-school. Male and female teenagers aged 13-18 are learning maths, history and english after physical exercises and marches. Unemployment is high, salaries are low, opportunities are few; the young continue to leave in search of better futures abroad. When Artsakh men reach 18 years-old they are whisked away for two years of military national service. That’s what it means living in a region stalked by conflict: security measures trump most other considerations.
Unrecognized Nation, Forgotten War is a visual journey through the everyday lives of those young soldiers. They seems to be stuck in a frozen limbo. They can’t to anything to escape from that.
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
© Emanuele Amighetti
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)
