The International Women in Photo Association Awards: Rayito Flores Pelcastre: Chirping of Crickets
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
This week Lenscratch is featuring the work of the 2023 winners of the The International Women in Photo Association (IWPA), a French non profit aiming to create global change and reach gender equality and women empowerment, awards prizes to visual storytellers from around the world.
Today is Rayito Flores Pelcastre, a Mexican photographer whose series Chirping of Crickets, was one of four finalists in the Professional Category. Her subtle and dream-like work highlights the hideousness of violence against children within the family home.
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
Chirping of Crickets
When I was 8 years old, Aarón a classmate from elementary school hid his scars under his sweater while he wrote in the class, he had suffered abuse from his father. After that, he eventually stopped going to school. The event stayed with me like an echo a long time. Now as a mother, that moment started in me a profound concern for children who experience the physical and psychological abuse of their (relatives) covered by the impossibility of the child not being able to communicate it, and which in many cases escalates to repeated torture and death of the infant. Filicide -the intentional death of an infant- has been an atrocious practice that has existed since the beginning of humanity and currently, unfortunately, there is not a country in the world where frequent cases do not occur.
Even more so when violence is normalized under the false “family environments”, and they are only visible when it is too late. In the last 5 years, its impact on society has generated citizen initiatives to modify laws for the protection of children, such as the Lucio Law (Argentina). That is why this project tries to be a call and support to make visible this problem that remains hidden and ignored, either due to social shame or because it shows a dark side of the family concept. I’m interested in building a layered narrative based on portraits of victims on bioplastic, which materializes the vulnerability of the image between the documents and objects associated with the cases. This visual archive is built from real cases collected by working in collaboration with LAE in Mexico, a civil organization in charge of child survivors of family violence, group I have been working in recent years to expand my initial project. –Rayito Flores Pelcastre
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
Rayito Flores Pelcastre (b. 1983) is a photographer and architect. Her work questions human vulnerability, especially in childhood. She is interested in establishing a connection between the image and materiality, exploring the tension of this vulnerability. Through the photographic process, Rayito aims to develop an understanding of the fragility that takes shape in the dynamics of modern life, often remaining unnoticed within us.
She has participated in various exhibitions, including the XIX Photography Biennale of Mexico and the New York Latin American Art Triennial 2022, among others. She was commissioned by the Supreme Court of Justice Institute and the Centro de la Imagen Museum for the exhibition and book Out of Focus: Photography and Human Rights. Her projects have garnered support from various institutions and cultural programs. Currently, she serves as the coordinator of Catako Espacio de Creación in Morelia. Since 2022, Rayito has collaborated with LAE, a civil organization dedicated to girls and boys who are survivors of family violence in Michoacán, México. In 2023, she received the National System of Art Creators (SNCA).
Follow Rayito on Instagram: @rayitoflorespelcastre
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
© Rayito Flores Pelcastre, from the series Chirping of Crickets, México, 2023
International Women in Photo, IWPA, is a French non profit association that pursues two major MISSIONS on a global scale:
- work for equality through photography in the world.
- The promotion of women photographers and visual storytellers of all origins and nationalities.
The roots for IWPA’s goals lie in the under representation of women photographers. Unfortunately, women photographers still do not receive sufficient recognition nor assignments and only make up for a small percentage of all the photographs we see every day in the press, social media, museums or art fairs. IWPA fulfills a social role by drawing attention to social issues that are often ignored or simply not covered by the male dominated perspective of our world.
How do they fulfill these missions? IWPA wants to make women’s vision count by
- Increasing the visibility and diversity of women photographers in the field of photography
- Proposing actions around education and training in photography for women and students, enhancing their skills and reinforcing capacity buildin
- Promote photography as an empowerment tool for girls and women
- Using photography as a tool to promote tolerant and non-sexist values
In order to give more visibility to women photographers, IWPA acts as a platform and organizes the annual IWPA Award, a photography competition that is followed by exhibitions in major cities and capitals across the Middle East, Asia and Europe showing the work of the laureate and finalists to a large and international audience.
Instagram: @IWPA_photo
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)
