CENTER’s Director’s Choice Award 2nd Place Winner: Marcus DeSieno
©Marcus DeSieno, 33.509720, 126.521940 Medium:Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2017
Congratulations to Marcus DeSieno for his Second Place win in the CENTER’s Director’s Choice Awards acknowledging his project, No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State. The Choice Awards recognize outstanding photographers working in all processes and subject matter. Images can be singular or part of a series.
Juror Naomi Cass, Director, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Australia shares her thoughts on her selections:
Selecting work for the CENTER Awards has been both a challenge and an exciting process. In many respects the award shows something of where the camera is being pointed today, and has been a fabulous journey for me from Australia. Each of these series I have selected responds to an issue of current relevance: the personal cost of political repression in the winning series; the ubiquitous presence of surveillance, even of the uninhabited landscape, in the second place winner, and the surge of young people seeking recognition for their identity as the third place winner.
No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State is a remarkable project, where surveillance footage, nefariously obtained, is re-presented for its traditional pictorial values, hearkening back to earlier modes of photography and the picturesque landscape. I have selected these curiously beautiful and enigmatic landscapes as my second place winner. The disjuncture between this origin and reference to landscape traditions becomes apparent and insightful on knowing the source of the images, namely surveillance footage. This series opens up many questions, not least of which what is the existential function of this material?
©Marcus DeSieno, 35.996611, -78.899080 Medium: Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2016
Naomi Cass, Director, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Australia
Naomi Cass has worked in the fields of contemporary art, craft, design and music since completing her honours degree at the University of Melbourne. In 2009 she initiated Flash, a quarterly journal of reviews interviews and comment on photography and video, published by the Centre for Contemporary Photography.
©Marcus DeSieno, 36.112764, -113.996069 Medium: Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2015
Marcus DeSieno is a lens-based artist who is interested in how the advancement of visual technology continually changes and mediates our understanding of the world. DeSieno often combines antiquated and obsolescent photographic processes with contemporary imaging technologies in his work to engage in a critical dialog on the evolution of the photographic medium in relation to seeing. He received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida and is currently the Assistant Professor of Photography at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington.
DeSieno’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Aperture Foundation, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Candela Gallery, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Rayko Photo Center, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and various other galleries and museums. His work has also been featured in a variety of publications including The Boston Globe, FeatureShoot, GUP Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, National Geographic’s Proof, PDN, Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, and Wired. DeSieno was named a selection for Photolucida’s Critical Mass 50 and an Emerging Talent by Lensculture for 2016. His first monograph, No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State, was recently published by Daylight Books in 2018 and is available now.
©Marcus DeSieno, 36.887900, -118.555100 Medium:Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2015
No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State
In our increasingly intrusive electronic culture, how do we delineate the boundaries between public and private? No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State is a body of work that interrogates how surveillance technology has changed our relationship to—and understanding of—landscape and place in the current geopolitical climate.
To produce this work, I hack and tap into surveillance cameras and CCTV feeds in pursuit of the “classical” picturesque landscape and the sublime. The resulting visual product becomes dislocated from its automated origins and leads to an investigation of land, of borders, and power. The very act of surveying a site through these photographic systems implies a dominating relationship between man and place.
How can we move forward as global community to address issues of clandestine surveillance and government abuse? Questioning the pervasive nature of surveillance is an essential conversation in our post-Edward Snowden society. Ultimately, in No Man’s Land, I hope to undermine these schemes of social control through these photographs—found while exploiting the technological mechanisms of power in our surveillance society.
©Marcus DeSieno, 37.874720, 127.734170 Medium:Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2016
©Marcus DeSieno, 41.997000, -73.997400 Medium: Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2017
©Marcus DeSieno, 46.979000, -103.538700 Medium: Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2016
©Marcus DeSieno, 47.183820, 7.373710 Medium:Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2017
©Marcus DeSieno, 47.710900, -124.415400 Medium:Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2016
©Marcus DeSieno, 48.294685, -113.241478 Medium: Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2015
©Marcus DeSieno, 48.306390, 14.286110 Medium:Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2015
©Marcus DeSieno, 52.143200, -4.394850 Medium:Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2015
©Marcus DeSieno, 59.332580, 18.064900 Medium:Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2017
©Marcus DeSieno, 62.009730, -6.771640 Medium: Archival Pigment Print of a Still from a Surveillance Camera Feed Year: 2015
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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)
