CENTER AWARDS: Editors Choice: Melissa Kaseman

CENTER AWARDS: Editors Choice: Melissa Kaseman by Aline SmithsonMay 10, 2016

©Melissa Kaseman

This week Lenscratch will be sharing the CENTER Awards winners and the statements by the jurors to help understand their choices.

Congratulations to Melissa Kaseman for her Second Place win in the Editor’s Choice Awards. Her charming series reflects the contents of her son’s pockets each day that she turns into conceptual still lifes.

Melissa received her BFA in photography from the California College of the Arts in 2005, after studying Contemporary Photography at the Hogeschool Voor de Kunsten in Utrecht, Netherlands. She was named to the PDN30 in 2009. Since then her work has been included in numerous group shows at the NewSpace Center for Photography, SF Camerawork, Humble Art Foundation, and was an artist in residence at Minot State University in her home town of Minot, North Dakota. She currently lives and works in Oakland, California.

©Melissa Kaseman

EDITOR’S CHOICE: Juror’s Statement
Chris McGonigal, Photo Editor, The Huffington Post

It’s not easy going one-by-one through beautiful images and being the one to make the hard choices on who has to go and who has to get left behind, but we all know in editing you have to make those hard decisions. It was such a pleasure to go through these entries. I based my decisions on those submissions on which I would think to myself “This would be really great for our site.” These images offer a view of something different, compelling and a series that just make us want to see more from their creator.

In second place is Melissa Kaseman’s adorable series where she photographs the objects left over from her son’s pockets after a day at preschool. Without even seeing a photo of her son Calder, we can already get an image of this child in our minds. This project has such an innocence to it and is quite playful in its execution, I couldn’t help but include it in our winners.

©Melissa Kaseman

Preschool Pocket Treasures

Preschool Pocket Treasures is a photographic archive of the tiny magical objects found stuffed in the pockets of my son, Calder, after each day at preschool. I have always been drawn to photography’s capacity to suspend moments of transition and change. These occasions are often overlooked or forgotten, left only to be sensed when a memory is triggered. This project was born out of a desire to capture these magical moments of his boyhood and his development; creating a visual journey of his mind bringing to surface what is important at that exact moment of discovery . I aim to create an archive of this fleeting chapter through the use of color, object and order.