Next Up: The 2020 Lenscratch Top 25 to Watch
The Lenscratch Top 25 to Watch
Every year when the student prize submissions come around, our jurors are consistently blown away by the work that comes in. We’ve been having many conversations here at Lenscratch about our place in the photo community, and how this platform can be used to amplify the chorus of voices making incredible work right now. It was in this spirit that we came up with the idea for the Lenscratch Student Prize Top 25 to Watch. Selected by our jurors from the record setting number of submissions this year, we believe these 25 artists truly encapsulate the future of image making. We asked each of the artists included to select an image that best represented their portfolio, and write a brief statement about their work. You can find more of their work by clicking their name.
Shabbos Candles, Kavana, 2018, © Hannah Altman
Kavana explores Jewish action and photography. No place is a constant for the Jewish diaspora; time and the rituals that steep into it are centered as a mode of carrying on memory. Encountering an image in this way asks not only what it feels like, but asks: what does it remember like? – Hannah Atlman
Damn, I Can’t Go On This Side of the Park? 2020 © William Camargo
Origins & Displacements: Making Sense of Place, Histories, and Possibilities, is a long term research project, that includes performance, portrait/landscapes, and archived material from the city of Anaheim. It is reflective of a city that continues battles with the racist history and that has repacked it through police violence, gentrification, and other forms of policy that marginalizes its majority Latinx population. – William Camargo
How-To Sand a Bench with your Father, 2020, © Maximiliano Cervantes
The “How-To” aesthetic embodies my past experiences of working with my father on home renovations. Using the camera as my tool, I can capture his self-reliance, appreciation for tools, and the enduring tradition of labor tirelessly performed by the LatinX community. – Maximiliano Cervantes
If the Branch is Rotted, so are the Roots 2020 © Seth Adam Cook
What I Saw in the Water highlights the deterioration of the Gulf Coast, reflecting the grief and sorrows born from the environmental catastrophes that linger across the landscape. Through the process of image transfer, the photographic surface is exploited as though it were wet paint, allowing the surface area to build-up a grotesque-like texture. – Seth Adam Cook
Status III, Alba lux, 27/11/2019, © Noemi Comi
Alba lux is an artistic project that combines documentation and conceptual photography. The photographs become real symbolic images, reproducing idyllic atmospheres and ineffable realities. It’s a multidisciplinary journey between spirituality and science, which begins within the earthly reality and then takes off within the otherworldly one. – Noemi Comi
something speaking from the darkness, 2020, © Harlan Crichton
Untitled, from “Disidentifications” series, 2019 © Jesse Egner
Being a gay man who is fat and has an invisible disability has left me in a precarious relationship with my identity. Through my work, I utilize absurdity, humor, and uncanniness to explore this relationship as well as the unique relationships other queer people have with their identities. – Jesse Egner
A Woman’s Death, In A Darkened Room, 2020, © Amina Gingold
In A Darkened Room, focuses on views of oneself, body image, perception, and how we challenge our roles in these spaces. I collaborate with people whom I share similar viewpoints with and project their presence as an obscured form. – Amina Gingold
Dysphoria, 2019, © Harrison Huse
The Seed, 2020, © Joel Jimenez
My work is influenced by the conceptual analysis of space and its possibilities to convey human conditions, emotional and psychological states; how it correlates with social issues in our contemporary society. Throughout my projects, I reflect on the dynamics of identity and memory between people and the environment they inhabit. – Joel Jimenez
Squirt, 2017, © Alec Kaus
Forgetting Everything But You is a series of photographs created with my partner, exploring notions of love, home, and intimacy by tracing our life together indirectly across time and physical distance. – Alec Kaus
Mom and I + Dad, The Donor Sibling Laboratory, 2020, © Tommy Keith
Under the Spanish Moss, 2019, © Cassandra Klos
Leaning Left, 2019, © Tristan Martinez
Tristan creates scenes of ambiguity to address topics of isolation and representation. To understand his own placement as a multiracial transplant to the Midwest, Tristan focuses on work that transcends direct placement. Drawing the viewer in with oddities, Tristan challenges his audience to make sense of the ambiguous and satirical.
Three, 2019, © Lindley Warren Mickunas
Untitled, George, 2019, © Kevin Bennett Moore
© Nadiya Nacorda
Our Lady On Fire, House On Fire, 2019, © Kendall Pestana
My project House On Fire is a series of internal landscapes and domestic spaces intended to explore psychological and bodily space through the lenses of gendered violence, illness, and objectification. – Kendall Pestana
The untangled night, 2020, © Michelle Piergoelam
In Michelle Piergoelam’s photographic work, she consciously uses stories, fairytales and myths from different traditions and cultures to fathom her history and background. With her images she stimulates the imagination and the narrative culture to keep their transmission alive. – Michelle Piergoelam
Waikiki, 2018, © Leah Schretenthaler
The land of Hawaii is luxurious and idyllic, but past the wanderlust images, it is also very controversial. Its industrial growth destroys the historical records and spiritual places that have existed there for generations. The silver gelatin prints are laser cut, splicing man-made structures from the landscape. The removed spaces reveal what Hawaii would look like without these impositions. – Leah Schretenthaler
Mom with Rose of Sharon, 2018, © Amrita Stützle
In my work, titled Maiden, Mother, Crone, I have been photographing my relationship with my Wiccan mother through the lens of the history of witchcraft. I am interested in reimagining the ever-present horror deeply rooted in this history as a way of deconstructing the violence toward women therein––a demonization of women that continues to perpetuate within contemporary society. I create an imagined world alongside my mother where I reference this history while reclaiming the power of magic as a radical feminist and restorative act. – Amrita Stützle
Red Delicious, Pickled Herring, 2020, © Svava Tergesen.
By ornamenting, transforming and disguising every-day objects, Crudités stages a novel encounter with the familiar. Emphasizing the body as a tool for sensing, the series seeks to discover what happens when objects and perception are corrupted. – Svava Tergesen
The Dust #2, 2019, © Raymond Thompson Jr.
Amara and the Snake, Daughter and Mother, 2018 © Idalia Vasquez
This series explores my experience as a mother and how this experience is inevitably bound to my childhood memories. I am interested in how negative patterns are learned and concealed in the domestic space, and continued through generations. This work is a conceptual vision in between reality and fiction with some metaphoric religious components. – Idalia Vasquez
Boy with Rooster, 2019, © Zhidong Zhang
This body of work explores the construction of sexuality and identity through constructed scenes inflected with fantasy, trauma, fetish, and violence, which challenge the rigid and stereotypical codes of gender roles, identity construction, and traditional cultural values. – Zhidong Zhang
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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)
