CENTER’s Project Launch Grant Honorable Mention: Mike Williams
©Mike Williams, Mouthpiece, 2016
Congratulations to Mike Williams who has garnered an Honorable Mention in CENTER’s 2018 Project Launch Grant for his project, Eschaton. The Project Launch is granted to an outstanding photographer working on a fine art series or documentary project. The grant includes a cash award to help complete or disseminate the works, as well as providing a platform for exposure and professional development opportunities.
Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art shares her thoughts on the selections:
Photography is—simultaneously and paradoxically—one of the easiest and most difficult means of artistic expression. And the distinction between those projects that offer original insight and enduring value and those that simply reveal an unknown corner of our common physical or emotional landscape can be both subtle and, admittedly, subjective. I was certainly curious to encounter aspects of the world that had been previously invisible to me, and touched to see photographs that poignantly captured the vulnerability of the artist and/or subject, yet the strongest portfolios managed to weave into their compelling images a sense of urgency, so that what might have begun as a private inquiry could assume broader significance in our current moment. This is an exceedingly difficult thing to do, and I am in awe whenever I encounter a body of work that seems to open up new paths towards understanding the world around us.
©Mike Williams, Representative A, 2016
Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art
Meister’s recent exhibitions include From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (2015; co-curator), Nicholas Nixon: Forty Years of The Brown Sisters (2014). On photography she writes “my travel across South America has piqued my interest in a broader view of photography’s history and its future.”
©Mike Williams, Threshold, 2016
Mike Williams was born in 1970 at Fort Rucker Army Base in Alabama. The military bases where he grew up are approximations of small American towns; self-contained government versions of suburban living permeated by warfare readiness. This slippage has informed his study of uniquely American realities where he developed an enigmatic and darkly humorous brand of snapshot photography that ranges across various photographic modes from the vernacular to the documentary in an exploration of the paradoxical and overlapping complexities of the medium.
Central to his approach is asserting a semiotics of photography and language, specifically through sequencing and visual puns. His work was included in Snapshot, organized by the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore and was exhibited at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His photographic sequence, Inherent Vice, was exhibited as part of Modernity and its Discontents at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and his self-published book, Camera Infractus, is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art Library.
©Mike Williams, Dissolve 2016
Eschaton
The Protestant theologian Charles Harold Dodd coined the term eschaton in 1935 to describe the end of the world as a “divinely ordained climax of history.” The end has defined us from the beginning. (I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.) The plutocratic end times of a mock republic are strategically saturated in eschatology, one that twists war, natural disaster, man-made catastrophe, pestilence and poverty into welcome equalizers. The pallor of a new gilded age, envisioned in our darkest instincts, forces an anomalous concoction of hallucinatory revelation – a land of paradox, where pictures will do.
These photographs are from a sequence of images made traveling across the United States. They’re a surreal investigation of social and political anxiety. I’m interested in the intersection of photography and language and see my work as a kind of experimental fiction or image fiction. Photographs are dangerous. Lens based imagery is at its core a paradox. The scientific exactitude of photographic realism is inevitably transformative. An uncanny group of pictures is like an alternate universe best taken sitting down. Embracing the artifice is my best advice. – Mike Williams
©Mike Williams, Frame 2016
©Mike Williams, Home, 2017
©Mike Williams, Threshold, 2015
©Mike Williams, Station, 2016
©Mike Williams, White Sand, 2016
©Mike Williams, Bleed, 2015
©Mike Williams, Station, 2016
©Mike Williams, Station, 2017
©Mike Williams, Mug, 2016
©Mike Williams, Bank, 2016
©Mike Williams, Verso, 2017
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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)
