Michele Mobley: 2016 Lenscratch Student Prize, Honorable Mention
©Michele Mobley
Michele Mobley is another one of our honorable mentions for the 2016 LENSCRATCH Student Prize. In her body of work Empty Love, I cannot help but think about the inner workings of Michele’s mind when she was a young girl. Limbo has always been an interesting construct to me, and while literature describes purgatory as a lavish punishment of fire and brimstone, I find less comfort in the subtle nuances of quietness and a sterile-like ordinary. Michele’s body of work isolates figurative woman in uncomfortable circumstances that speak to domesticity and roles within a home, like a doll in a dollhouse. Her manipulation of these figures is disguised in a lovely atmosphere, flourished in white light, when in actuality each scenario is shrouded in darkness.
Michele Mobley (b. 1993) is an American photographer currently pursuing a BFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, Georgia. Her works revolve around a façade of femininity, very rarely allowing the glances of the subjects in the frame. Michele prefers whispering to talking out loud and hopes that her photographs feel like a quiet secret you are meant to look away from, but don’t.
©Michele Mobley
Empty Love
The breadth of my work relies on lyrical body language (typically of the female form) juxtaposed with like symbols and objects as metaphor. Concealment of facial expression demands for an analyzed physique of lone subjects. Limbs stay still in limbo, fragile bodies waiting to be watched. The work shown here, entitled Empty Love, encapsulates a girl to a room, but not one with a view. White-on-white pigmentation of a domestic space confides each girl between four walls. Each photograph is like a scene in a doll house, the childlike figures coveted by a theme of supposed marriage, in absence of the other lover.
©Michele Mobley
©Michele Mobley
©Michele Mobley
©Michele Mobley
©Michele Mobley
©Michele Mobley
©Michele Mobley
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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)
