The 2012 PhotoNOLA Review Prize Winner: Deb Schwedhelm
Today I want to celebrate Deb Schwedhelm and her outstanding portfolio which garnered her the 2012 PhotoNOLA Review Prize . Debora Schwedhelm, Brandon Thibodeaux and Sandi Haber Fifield were selected from among sixty-five photographers who attended the 2012 PhotoNOLA Portfolio Review.
For one weekend photographers had one-on-one meetings with influential editors, curators and gallerists assembled from throughout the U.S. and abroad. After the portfolio reviews concluded, each reviewer was asked to select three outstanding projects. Debora Schwedhelm received the most votes, earning her the PhotoNOLA Review Prize, which includes a solo exhibition at the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery during the eighth annual PhotoNOLA, a cash award of $1000, and a marketing consultation with Mary Virginia Swanson. 2nd Place winner, Brandon Thibodeaux, and 3rd Place winner, Sandi Haber Fifield, are recognized with image galleries on the PhotoNOLA website.
I will be featuring the work of photographers seen at PhotoNOLA after the holidays.
I met Deb many years ago, when she lived in Southern California and took a class with me. We’ve stayed in touch as her life took her to various parts of the country and she has never stopped exploring her world through photography. She spent 10 years as an Air Force Nurse and is married to a Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal Officer based in Tampa, FL. It’s not always an easy life raising three children in a world of uncertainty, being transferred to new cities and needing to put down new roots with each move. When I saw Deb in New Orleans, she spoke about sometimes feeling untethered and without anchor, but she had also begun to feel a sense of peace and rootedness within the waters near her home in Florida. Her new work is a celebration of that sense of place and being. Though she is photographing her children, in a sense, she is photographing herself, moving in and out of focus, allowing the liquid world to welcome her home. There is a great interview with Deb in the new issue of SHOTS Magazine.
Deb’s photographs have been exhibited widely and featured in numerous publications throughout the world. She has received awards from MPLS Photo Center, Minneapolis, MN; The Perfect Exposures Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; A. Smith Gallery, Johnson City, TX; Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, Santa Fe, NM; and The Art of Photography Show, San Diego, CA. Her photographs have also been selected for the permanent collection of The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO.
My love for underwater photography began in my backyard pool, capturing the everyday riot of my children – swimming, playing with friends, relaxing in the sun, splashing, laughter, combat. But as I continued to photograph in the water, unexpected images began to surface. Shimmering fragments. Dark profiles. Murky truths. Whispering poetry. From the pool to rivers, lakes, springs, bay inlets and the expansive sea, this poetry speaks again and again. I am endlessly taken by surprise and I listen. The images in this series aren’t forced or posed; instead, each is it’s own revelation – a milepost on an unexpected voyage to an unknowable destination. While the making of these photographs in the water is often chaotic, I am simultaneously offered a sense of home, comfort and peace.
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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.](https://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
