PhotoNOLA Review Prize: Elizabeth Stone
Each year after the PhotoNOLA reviews wind down, the reviewers remain behind and vote for projects that they were intrigued by, moved by, that felt unique and of great quality. This year, the PhotoNOLA Review Prizes went to three photographers and first prize was awarded to Elizabeth Stone for her two projects, Making Tracks from 2011/12 and Skin, Shells, and Meats stared in 2013 and still in progress.. The 2013 PhotoNOLA Review Prize includes a solo exhibition at the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery, a cash award, and a marketing consultation with Mary Virginia Swanson.
Elizabeth’s work explores identity and mark making. She combines her study of photography and drawing with digital technology. Before becoming full time artist, Elizabeth earned a BS in Biology. The duality of art and science strongly influences her work and she frequently uses the natural world as a point of departure when considering her own place in the world and the marks she makes. Elizabeth’s photography has been exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, the Newport Art Museum, the Museum of the Rockies and the Missoula Art Museum in Montana, as well as in galleries around the Western United States. Elizabeth is also an educator having taught workshops and for the Rocky Mountain School of Photography in Missoula, Montana for 18 years. At the beginning of 2012, Elizabeth formed her own photography education company,
Photographer’s Breakthrough, with fellow instructor Tony Rizzuto.
Animal welfare is important to Elizabeth. To raise awareness and funds for homeless animals around the country, she created a collection of artist books called Small Lives with writers Rita Mae Brown, Sissy Spacek and Humane Society of the U.S. President Wayne Pacelle.Elizabeth spends her days and nights in the country outside of Missoula, Montana. Her husband tolerates her obsession with the family animals: three horses, three dogs and one cat.
Making Tracks
This work centers around the idea of making tracks, leaving marks, and what is left behind. What is disturbed along the way? Does the grass bend or break? Does the snow reveal a lonely animal or a veritable highway of activity? Which path do we take?
I was drawn to these prints in snow or grass. They became the simplest form of the story of the animal’s existence, their life, the things they leave behind. I print them with heavy black ink and thick cotton paper. I begin to consider my own tracks. What marks do I make? What marks do I hope to make? 
Skins, Shells and Meats
Skins, Shells and Meats is an ongoing examination of my materials as a photographer from 1994 to 2007. I had thousands of 35mm slides sitting in a file cabinet. They were taking up a space and held no interest for me. I was surprised how easy it was for me to detach from them, from my past. I dropped all the slides in their sleeves into a box to take to Wyoming for a month long artist in residence program in February, 2013. I didn’t know what I would do with them light them on fire and sweep the ashes into the dirt?
I disassembled them on the second day of my residency. I pulled the slides from the sleeves (skins), sweetly ripped the slide mounts apart, yanked out the film and made two piles; mounts (shells) and film (meats). I stared at the piles for a day and then began lining up all the shells. I started photographing. The only light is from two old crappy slide viewing light boxes that I had brought with me. Colors appeared out of nowhere from the varying age of the bulbs inside the boxes. I am transfixed with the possibilities of using remnants and bones from my past to create anew.
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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)
