THe CENTER AWARDS: Editor’s Choice 2nd Place Winner: Kitra Cahana
©Kitra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, A group of migrants wait before being transferred to a different temporary shelter in Tijuana, Mexico on November 30, 2018. Mexican officials required all the migrants to leave the Benito Juarez encampment due to safety and hygienic concerns and move instead to the outskirts of Tijuana .
Congratulations to Kitra Cahana, for her Second Place win in CENTER’S Editor’s Choice Award for his project, Caravana Migrante. The Choice Awards recognize outstanding photographers working in all processes and subject matter. Images can be singular or part of a series. Winners receive admission to Review Santa Fe portfolio reviews and participation in a winner’s exhibition at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, IN.
Juror, MaryAnne Golon, Director of Photography, The Washington Post shares her insights:
The 2019 Editor’s Choice projects were as diverse and varied as the photography field itself. There are so many fantastic projects underway that I viewed during the judging process. I have a renewed faith in the future of our medium.
©Kitra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, Portrait of Maryuri Celeste,18, from Santa Rosa Honduras in Tijuana Mexico on November 30, 2018. Photo by Kitra Cahana / MAPS
The Juror of the Editor’s Choice Award was MaryAnne Golon, Director of Photography, The Washington Post. She is a key member of the senior management team overseeing all aspects of photography across all platforms. She manages 17 staff photojournalists, 18 photography editors, and hires dozens of freelance photojournalists. Golon was previously Time magazine’s director of photography and co-managed the international newsmagazine’s photography department for more than 15 years. She was twice selected for American Photo magazine’s list of the 100 most important people in photography.
©Kitra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, Migrants, journalists and U.S. activists run from tear gas on January 1, 2019 after US authorities fired tear gas over the border wall in Tijuana, Mexico. A group of approximately 150 migrants attempted to cross the border but their attempt was thwarted when CBP discovered where they were hiding and used several crowd control techniques to disperse the group. Photo by Kitra Cahana / MAPS
Caravana Migrante
A caravan of thousands of asylum seekers reached Tijuana in Mexico in November 2018, hoping to gain asylum in the US. The caravan was self-organized and swelled in numbers along the way as it made its way from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, heading toward the Californian border. This particular caravan has become a symbol of the Central American migration crisis. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans, many of them unaccompanied minors, have arrived in the US in recent years, seeking asylum from the region’s skyrocketing violence, political instability, poverty and many other factors. This region known as the Northern Triangle was rocked by civil wars in the 1980s and decades of U.S. intervention, leaving a legacy of violence and fragile institutions.
©Kitra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, Migrants scope out and try to find a place to cross the U.S. – Mexican border wall near the beach in Tijuana, Mexico on December 15, 2018. Some attempt to dig under the wall, while others pass over it. Photo by Kitra Cahana / MAPS
Kitra Cahana (b.1987) is a freelance documentary photographer, videographer, a photo/video artist and a TED speaker. She is a contributing photographer to National Geographic Magazine. She has a B.A. in philosophy from McGill University and a M.A. in Visual and Media anthropology from the Freie Universitat in Berlin.
Kitra is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including two Canada Council Grants for the Visual Arts, a 2016 TED Senior Fellowship, a 2015 Pulitzer Center for Investigative Reporting grant, a 2014-2015 artist residency at Prim Centre, the 2013 International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, first prize for the 2010 World Press Photo, a scholarship at FABRICA in Italy and the Thomas Morgan internship at the New York Times.
©Kitra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, Detail of the U.S. – Mexico border wall near Friendship Park on December 23, 2018 in Tijuana, Mexico. Artists and activists are frequently painting, and putting up sculptures and installations along the border wall. In this image the cardboard cutout of a little girl is photographed from the back of the drawing/sculpture that was placed between the slats of the wall.
©Kitra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, A migrant whose numbers was called waits to board a van that will bring him and his family to US immigration authorities where they will present their cases for asylum at the Chaparral pedestrian crossing on the US-Mexican border in Tijuana, Mexico on December 8, 2018. Migrants return daily to the plaza by the crossing to see if their number is called from the list ‘La Lista’, a self-organized, migrant-run system that determines who gets to present their cases to US immigration authorities each day. Photo by Kitra Cahana / MAPS
©Kitra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, Migrants scope out and try to find a place to cross the U.S. – Mexican border wall near the beach in Tijuana, Mexico on December 16, 2018. The group was unsuccessful in their attempt. Photo by Kitra Cahana / MAPS
itra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, Migrants scope out and try to find a place to cross the U.S. – Mexican border wall near the beach in Tijuana, Mexico on December 16, 2018. Some attempt to dig under the wall, while others pass over it. Photo by Kitra Cahana / MAPS
itra Cahana, from Caravana Migrante, The U.S. – Mexico border wall on December 29, 2018 in Tijuana, Mexico. Photo by Kitra Cahana / MAPS
Instagram: @kitracahana
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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)
