Charlotte Woolf: 2018 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention
©Charlotte Woolf, Honey Davidson, 2018
Congratulations to Charlotte Woolf for her Honorable Mention nod in the 2018 Lenscratch Student Prize Awards and for receiving her MFA from Purchase College, State University New York. I have had the privilege of following Charlotte’s trajectory over the past years and am so happy to celebrate her project, More Water Under the Bridge. Since graduation, Charlotte has been assisting Eric Gottesman with his studio practice in addition to running social media for Eric and Hank Willis Thomas’ collaborative project For Freedoms, during their 50 State Initiative campaign. This summer, Charlotte will be attending the Catskills Creative residency run by EcoPracticum in August, follow by the Wassaic Project residency for the month of September.
©Charlotte Woolf, JA Jones Drive, 2018
Charlotte Woolf (b. Greenwich 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with a focus on photography raised in Charlotte, North Carolina and based in Rye Brook, New York. She received her BA in Studio Art and Women’s & Gender Studies from Kenyon College and her MFA at SUNY-Purchase College of Art+Design.
Woolf has worked as a photographer around the country, including Chicago, IL, Park City, UT, Charlotte, NC, and New York, NY. She has also worked on farms in Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio – experiences which inspired her to attend ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) in rural Wisconsin in 2013. In summer 2017 Woolf attended SOMA’s Summer Residency in Mexico City based around the theme of notions of authority in the art world. In September 2018 she will be in residence at the Wassaic Project in upstate New York. Woolf’s work has been exhibited in Chicago (ACRE Projects, Johalla Projects) and New York City (AIR Gallery, Local Projects, Equity Gallery).
Characterized by an acute attention to gender, Woolf aspires to continue her work not only through her camera lens, but also through radical politics and community based projects.
Woolf’s documentary style project Women in Agriculture (2011-2013), observed the livelihood family farms in Ohio and Wisconsin. The IUD Project (2015-current), focuses on women’s health and bodily autonomy during the Trump era through online community. Woolf’s long-term project More Water Under the Bridge (2014-current) is a response to her father’s death, interweaving her personal patriarchal legacy in construction of the United States in the 20th century. Through dealing with themes of family and power, her work reflects parallels between the failing infrastructure of the United States both physically and politically.
©Charlotte Woolf, Under the Bridge, 2018
More Water Under the Bridge
The subject on my mind in 2018 is: when great men fall, what is left behind? What will happen when the men who ruled the world are gone? Enter my work … In our contemporary version of culture wars, I examine the rubble of my family’s construction company which was an industry giant in the 1900s and went defunct in 2003. From my perspective as a queer woman who grew up with traditional values in North Carolina, I know what it’s like to not fit in, putting on a mask to play the part – I am critical of existing social norms. My interests in gender, power, and infrastructure has lead me to be a photographer, combining my photographs with archival sources, video and objects related to my family’s legacy in construction.
©Charlotte Woolf, All them Joneses, 2017
When my father passed away in 2014, his final piece of advice was to “let more water run under the bridge.” My father was a civil engineer, working between New York and North Carolina for over thirty years. Cryptic as it was, this has stuck with me as I have moved through the waves of grief and onward in my life finding meaning. Like a detective looking for clues, I have found the symbols in my life to place meaning on the advice through my work: making photographs and digging in the archive.
©Charlotte Woolf, Excavator, 2018
In my photographs, I am a seeking mystical solutions to unanswered questions about my life and family, a history just out of reach. I am searching for clues, following the light towards symbols (circles, flowers, books, chairs, hands) and connecting the dots. My questions become more complicated as I reach the center and realize there may never be an answer to death and decay. In a way, these questions link together like stars in a constellation. You can’t see the whole sky at once. In Eduardo Cadava’s Words of Light, Cadava aligns Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre with the history of photography, writing, “Photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification. Even though it still remains to be thought, the essential relation between death and language flashes up before us in the photographic image.” Cadava continues” The history of photography can be said to begin with an interpretation of the stars.” Thus, in my work I often am looking through translucent layers, like a magnifying glass, window, mirror, and even water. Shooting through the camera lens adds another layer of glass, all creating distance between myself and the narrative as I rewrite my own interpretations of the family story by examining what remains.
©Charlotte Woolf, Jim Cotton, 2018
By combining digital and archival materials, I create a sense of multiple generations going on at once in a room – something I always felt growing up with a father born in 1933 and a mother born in 1958. Furthermore, as a child of the nineties, I grew up during the teetering out of analog and the bitter takeover of digital photography. Questioning the originally of photography – thus the appropriated pictures are just as mine as Sherrie Levine’s Walker Evans was hers, my sizing, enlargements through scanning, and contextualization reclaims them into my own history giving them new meanings. Through this process of selection and enlargement, I am dealing with the presence or absence of the original source. In so doing, I weave the web of my family history from my own perspective. – Charlotte Woolf
©Charlotte Woolf, Georgia-Pacific Tower, 2017
©Charlotte Woolf, Me, Age 3, 2018
©Charlotte Woolf, Joanne Davidson, 2017
©Charlotte Woolf, Grandma’s Bathroom, 2018
©Charlotte Woolf, Calvary, 2017
©Charlotte Woolf, Skylight, 2018
©Charlotte Woolf, Executives, 2017
©Charlotte Woolf, Defunct, 2018
©Charlotte Woolf, From the Desk Of, 2018
©Charlotte Woolf, Vacancy, 2018
©Charlotte Woolf, Charlie Davidson, 2018
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)
