THE CENTER AWARDS: Social Award: Hannah Altman
©Hannah Altman, Shabbat Candles, 2019
Congratulations to Hannah Altman for being selected for CENTER’s Social Award recognizing her project, A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun. The Social Awards recognize work engaged in social issues. All projects exploring social topics or themes were eligible.
JUROR: Jess T. Dugan, Artist & Co-Founder, Strange Fire Collective shares their thoughts on this selection:
I was impressed by the quality and diversity of the work submitted to the Social Awards. Seeing projects from around the world that address a variety of meaningful social issues, such as climate change, immigration, activism, systemic racism, socioeconomic inequity, chronic illness, neurodivergence, aging, family systems, the effects of the pandemic, and LGBTQ+ rights was very moving. In addition to the subject matter, the formal and technical execution of each project was critical to my selection; I was looking for cohesive bodies of work comprised of strong individual images and was most drawn to projects where the artists spoke about social issues from a highly personal vantage point, using their own stories as a point of departure. As I was
viewing all of the submitted work, one of my favorite quotes by Diane Arbus came to mind: “The more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.”
The two Honorable Mentions, one, one thousand by Debe Arlook and A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun by Hannah Altman also embody a combination of personal storytelling and socially-engaged content. one, one thousand tells the story of Arlook’s 28-year-old nephew, David, who has Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, an incurable seizure disorder, and severe autism, rendering him non-verbal and in need of full-time care. Arlook’s images show David and his mother, Lori, alongside her handwritten text describing aspects of their lives and relationship. A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun explores Jewish diaspora, world building, and sacred time through photographic narratives that build from interpreted rituals and motifs in Yiddish folklore. Using herself, her friends, and her family, Altman creates formally compelling photographs that explore themes of time, ritual, memory, and ancestry through the lens of her own experiences with Jewish identity and culture.
©Hannah Altman, Blowing A Glass Bubble to Make Permanent Something Temporary, 2021
Jess T. Dugan is the co-founder of the Strange Fire Collective, a group of interdisciplinary artists, curators, and writers focused on work that engages with current social and political forces. Strange Fire’s collective practice is centered around increasing the visibility of meaningful work made by women, people of color, and queer and trans artists and creating dialogue and community through publications, exhibitions, and events. Jess is an artist whose work explores issues of identity through photographic portraiture.
Their work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of over 40 museums throughout the United States. Their monographs include Look at me like you love me (MACK, 2022), To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015). They are the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, and were selected by the Obama White House as an LGBT Artist Champion of Change.
Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her photographs interpret relationships between gestures, the body, lineage, and interior space.
Her work has been featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Huffington Post, and British Journal of Photography. She received the 2021 Lensculture Critics’ Choice Award and the 2022 first prize for the Portraits Hellerau Photography Award. Her first monograph, Kavana, published by Kris Graves Projects, is in the permanent collections of the MoMa Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library.
Portrait of Hannah Altman
A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun
A Permanent Home in the Mouth of the Sun explores Jewish diaspora, world building, and sacred time through photographic narratives that build from interpreted ritual and motifs in Yiddish folklore. Judaic stories often consider the polarity of exile; with one hand we tend to ancestral wounds that compel the notion to shield and assimilate, with the other we knead an ancestral resilience that allows us to continually revisit actions, places, and objects as they fit into new spaces of care and translation. The Jewish ritualization of time is similarly elastic. Through repeated cycles of practice sanctified by the setting sun, the past weaves through the arteries of the present, encouraging photographs born from Jewish memories to perform time in open-ended worlds.
©Hannah Altman, Blowing Passover Births, 2021
©Hannah Altman, Braid Tug, 2021
©Hannah Altman, Shin (Body as Mezuzah), 2021
©Hannah Altman, Afternoon in North Carolina, 2019
©Hannah Altman, Reflecting Light, 2021
©Hannah Altman, Shofar (Voice Instruments), 2021
©Hannah Altman, Interruption
©Hannah Altman, Keeping Time, 2019
©Hannah Altman, Arrow
©Hannah Altman, Hamsa, 2021
©Hannah Altman, Old Births, New Deaths, 2020
©Hannah Altman, Indirect Sunlight, 2021
©Hannah Altman, Priestly Blessing, 2021
©Hannah Altman, Honey Fists, 2018
©Hannah Altman, Pressed Into Flesh, 2018
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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)
