PhotoNOLA: Meg Griffiths: Somewhere Within and Without
©Meg Griffiths, Magnet of an Invisible Circle, 2017
Getting to spend time with Meg Griffiths is always a treat and to have that time at PhotoNOLA focused on her new project, Somewhere Within and Without, was truly special. The work is unlike her other narrative projects about Cuba or the South or the West–the photographs are internal, conceptual, and personal. Created during an artist residency, the time and quiet allowed Meg to contemplate her life and place in it. Working with conceptual still lifes, where light and ephemera shimmer into new incarnations, she reveals that there is a beauty in the transitory nature of life, in those liminal spaces between the spectrum of emotions and events that come with being human.
Somewhere Within and Without received the Second Place nod in the 2018 PhotoNOLA Review Award. Meg will receive a Santa Fe Photo Workshops gift certificate. Some of this work was featured in a previous post where artist Cig Harvey and Meg interview each other for our series, Photographers on Photographers.
©Meg Griffiths, Cloud of an Endless Self, 2018
Meg Griffiths is a Texas based artist. Her photographic research currently deals with the domestic, personal historical identity and cultural relationships. Her work has been shown internationally, including: PhotoZurich Germany, Barcelona Biennial for Fine Art and Documentary Photography, Pingyao International Festival of Photography, Chaing Mai Photo Festival, at venues within the United States such as Columbia Museum of Art, Center for Fine Art Photography, Museum of Living Artists in San Diego, Griffin Museum in Boston, Houston Center for Photography, Candela Gallery in Richmond.
She was recently published on the cover of Oxford American and Focal Plane Journal. Her work has also been shared in the Boston Globe, Photo District News, Fisheye (FR). Her work is a part of many private collections as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Middle Tennessee University, and the Capitol One Collection.
Her first monograph Casa de fruta y pan was published in 2015 with Aint Bad. In 2018 she recently published two collaborative projects: Nothing that Falls Away with fellow photographer Eliot Dudik through Zatara Press, “And light followed the flight of sound” with One Day Projects. By virtue of recognition, many of these books have been collected by institutions across the country such as MOMA, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Duke Archive of Documentary Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art.
Meg was recently honored in 2019 to receive 2nd Place Prize at PhotoNOLA, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Best Fine Art Series in 2017, selected as on of Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s One’s to watch in 2016, 2nd Place Prize at PhotoNOLA in 2015, and named one of PDN 30’s: New and Emerging Photographers in 2012.
She currently lives in Denton, Texas where she is the Area Head and an Assistant Professor of Photography at Texas Woman’s University.
©Meg Griffiths, Sieve of the Universe, 2017
Somewhere Within and Without
Somewhere within and without, attempts to subtly shift and deconstruct the ways in which we engage with space, time and perception—being and not being. It draws upon personal historical identity to raise questions about the self before and after a traumatic event such as a birth of a child or the death of a loved one. There is a strangeness in this liminal place. Waking each morning, to the familiar, coming into who you are now versus who you were before—feeling only an echo of the former self. These images are distillations of these senses and experiences. Using everyday household objects as a point of departure from what we think we know, the work offers a surface to meditate and contemplate these discordant and poignant transitions. – Meg Griffiths
©Meg Griffiths, Echo, 2018
©Meg Griffiths, Motion forward in time is motion toward smaller, 2018
©Meg Griffiths, Never Remembered, 2018
©Meg Griffiths, Veiled Dimension, 2018
©Meg Griffiths, Fracal Dissonance, 2018
©Meg Griffiths, Tongues of Waterfalls, 2018
©Meg Griffiths, Compression of Meaning, 2018
©Meg Griffiths, Between I was and I am, 2017
©Meg Griffiths, That I think was happiness, 2018
©Meg Griffiths, Of the flesh, 2017
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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)
