CENTER Awards: Curators Choice: Judy Gelles
©Judy Gelles, Fourth Grade Girl, China School For Migrant Children
This week and next, Lenscratch will be sharing the CENTER Award winners and the statements by the jurors to help understand their choices.
Congratulations to Judy Gelles for her Second Place win in CENTER’s Curator’s Choice Awards. She has had a long time focus on themes of family and children. For her project, Fourth Grade, she has traveled the world to capture children at a pivotal age. Judy has a solo exhibition, Front-Stage, Backstage, at the Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, PA that runs through May 28, 2016.
Judy Gelles received her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her Masters in Counseling from the University of Miami. Her work is in major collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Visual Studies Workshop, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Awards include a grant from the Lomax Family Foundation, an Individual Artist Grant from the Rhode Island state Council On The Arts, an Independence Foundation Fellowship in The Arts, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Artist as Catalyst Grant, a grant from WYBE Public Television, a Philadelphia Stories New Program Grant, and a Fleisher Challenge Artist Exhibition. In 2013, Critical Mass listed her as one of the top 50 photographers in the US. In 2015, she presented her latest project, Fourth Grade as a TEDx talk. Her work has been featured in Ms. Magazine; Vision Magazine, Beijing, China; Camerawork; New Art Examiner; Artweek, and Photography Now.
©Judy Gelles, Fourth Grade Girl, Italy Public School
CURATOR’S CHOICE: Juror’s Statement
Jeff Rosenheim, Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artists accepted the necessary consequences of exposing themselves and their work in public and submitted over 3,500 photographs to this year’s CENTER Awards in the “Curator’s Choice” category. I had the great pleasure of looking at them all. It was a life affirming process from start to finish. Not because every picture maker convinced me that they were the true inheritor of the pictorial tradition of Daguerre, Fox Talbot, and Brady; or a worthy descendant of Nadar, Sander, and Arbus; or an expander of the experimental graphic practices of Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray; or an able disciple of the poignant social realism seen in the work of Hine or Lange. Some applied their understanding of these historical models; others carefully avoided them. A few were blissfully unaware of anything but their desire to add a new image to a world already brimming full of them. Collectively, the CENTER’s applicants prove once again that the medium of photography, both analog and digital, is alive and well and a corrective to those who might believe otherwise.
The second prize winner, Judy Gelles, has traveled even further to find her subjects, fourth-grade students in schools across the world from India and Italy to South Korea and the United States. The portraits are remarkably well seen, minimal in their use of props, and a salutary celebration of things as they are. In each, Gelles asked the kids “what they wish for and what they worry about.” The clarity of the project is beguiling.
©Judy Gelles, Fourth Grade Girl, St. Lucia Public School
Fourth Grade
Fourth Graders from around the world answer three questions: Who do you live with? What do you wish for? and What do you worry about? I began the Fourth Grade Project in 2008 from a prototype born during my volunteer work at a Philadelphia inner-city school not far from where I live. Over the past eight years I have interviewed and photographed over 300 fourth grade students from the USA, China, India, Italy, England, St. Lucia, South Africa, and South Korea. Told in their own words, their stories touch on common human experiences and urgent social issues. The goals of the project are to bridge cultural differences and to foster a strong, tolerant student community. We live in a global society where interconnectedness is everywhere in this digital era. Yet the schools that I have been visiting are more homogeneous now than in the past. A notable commonality across all schools is that every group of fourth-graders has very little contact with or knowledge of people from cultural or socioeconomic backgrounds different than their own. Nine-year-old children are on the cusp of adolescence. They are able to think critically and consider relationships to be very important. They are socially conscious, interested in helping others, and openly curious about the world. It is also a moment in children’s development when worldviews start to become entrenched and paths for the future start to become more set. The Fourth Grade Project allows students to learn about others’ lives in a uniquely personal way and to use the project as a catalyst for their own explorations.
©Judy Gelles, Fourth Grade Boy, England Preparatory School
©Judy Gelles, Fourth Grade Boy, USA Jewish Day School
©Judy Gelles, Fourth Grade Boy, USA Public School
©Judy Gelles, China, Medical Treatment
©Judy Gelles, China, Visit Shanghai
©Judy Gelles, Italy, My Parents
©Judy Gelles, Italy, Or Worries
©Judy Gelles, South Africa, Be Murdered
©Judy Gelles, South Africa, With Me
©Judy Gelles, St. Lucia, Grade Teacher
©Judy Gelles, St. Lucia, To Me
©Judy Gelles, USA, Get Shot
©Judy Gelles, USA, Wait to Go
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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)
