CENTER AWARDS: Editors Choice: Melissa Kaseman
©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.
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
©Melissa Kaseman
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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)
