The Center Awards: Me&Eve Award: Mitsu Maeda
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
Congratulations to Mitsu Maeda for being selected for CENTER’s Me&Eve Grant recognizing her project, The Shining Lady a series of photos of her grandmother Tsuyajyo’s last 10 years. Her name Tsuyajyo means “the Shining Lady” in Japanese. The Me&Eve Grant provides financial support to a woman, female-identified, non-binary, transgender, gender non-conforming, or two-spirited photographer, 40 years of age and over. This grant is made possible by Review Santa Fe alumna, Dorie Hagler, whose project Me&Eve amplifies the voices of women. Initiated in 2016 on International Women’s Day, this project was inspired after seeing the transformative effects of witnessing women share their stories. The Grant includes a $1,000 cash award, Review Santa Fe participation, Publication in LENSCRATCH, Professional Development Seminars access, Inclusion in the printed Program Guide, and Inclusion in the CENTER Winners Gallery & Archive.
JUROR: Leonor Mamanna • Deputy Photo Director, Bloomberg Businessweek / Pursuits shares her thoughts on this selection:
I was moved by many of the submissions for this year’s Me&Eve Award, photographers across the board excavated from the depths of emotion to put forth deeply personal and complex projects and where families of all kinds was one of the more common themes.
I kept returning to The Shining Lady’s compelling photographs because Mitsu Maeda brought forth so much dignity, love, and humanity to her photos of their grandmother’s final years. This project touches on memory and elder care with a respectful tone and highlights end-of-life rituals with a keen artistic eye. The tenderness of these photographs will stick with me for a long time.
JUROR BIO: Leonor Mamanna is the Deputy Photo Director at Bloomberg Businessweek. In addition to the magazine, she is the Photo Editor for the Pursuits and Weekend brands. Previously, she worked at New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, Men’s Vogue, Money Magazine and More. She was the photo director of the all-female magazine Mary Review. Her work in these magazines has won her awards from The Society of Publication Designers, American Photography, Photo District News, American Society of Magazine Editors, Art Directors Club, Communication Arts, POYi and more. She has served on juries for PDN Photo Annual, Photoville, Daylight Photo, Overseas Press Club, National Press Photographers Association, Latin American Fotografía and ASME. Leonor is a born-and-raised New Yorker from the Upper West Side who lives in Brooklyn with her daughter.
Portrait of Mitsu Maeda
The Shining Lady
Memories of my grandmother, Tsuyajyo, kindly stay with me all the time; A small purse in which Tsuyajyo collected 500 yen coins to give me and my sister when we visited her. Hide-and-seek in a morning after I stayed a night at their house.
My grandfather became sick and started staying in the hospital when I was a student. On one of his last days, I visited him and found him tied to the bed in a sterilization room after he had tried to remove a tube attached to his throat. He was still trying to move and staring at us, even though he could no longer make a sound. “He is not the grandpa you know; maybe you shouldn’t see him anymore.” Tsuyajyo told me.
Tsuyajyo began showing symptoms of dementia around 2009. It was the first time my mother experienced having a family member with dementia. She took care of her mother, who could hardly perform basic tasks like eating or taking a bath. Tsuyajyo would often get angry irrationally and became someone my mother no longer recognized as her mother. These days lasted for about two years.
In 2012, Tsuyajyo moved to a care home where she would stay for the next seven years. I started photographing this series around that time as well. While my mother passed her responsibilities to the caregivers, she would visit her mother every few days to spend half an hour there, as if it were her duty, saying, “I just wish for her to laugh once a day.” Tsuyajyo gradually became calmer, and singing her original lines became her favorite activity. I was often amazed by her laughter. I was surprised when she gripped my hand more strongly than I expected, saying, “I want to grip your hand tightly until my blood vessels burst!”
I took pictures and made notes of her unique lines so that I could remember these small moments.
In 2018, Tsuyajyo moved to the hospital where her husband spent his last days. She started receiving intravenous fluids, as she could no longer eat. She also stopped singing. She could hardly move and was there until her organs slowly stopped working on a night in January 2020, at the age of 100. My mother, father, and I were there with her. I started to feel her absence, but we all smiled, seeing her face.
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
Mitsu Maeda is a photographer based in Kochi, Japan. After graduating from Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, she worked at the Consulate General of Japan in Penang, Malaysia.
Following her time there, she engaged in the creation of documentary pieces in both domestic and international contexts.
Since moving back to her native Kochi in 2014, she has specialized in both commercial and editorial photography while also creating personal image-based works.
Instagram: @mitsu_maeda
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
©Mitsu Maeda, from The Shining Lady
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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)
