The CENTER Awards: The Curator’s Choice Award 2nd Place Winner: Rafael Soldi
©Rafael Soldi,Imagined Futures,” 50 unique photobooth gelatin silver prints, 2″ x 1.5″, installation view at Oxbow Seattle
Congratulations to Rafael Soldi for his Second Place win in CENTER’S Curator’s Choice Award for his project, Imagined Futures. The Choice Awards recognize outstanding photographers working in all processes and subject matter. Images can be singular or part of a series. Winners receive admission to Review Santa Fe portfolio reviews, participation in a winner’s exhibition at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe,
Juror Marina Chao – Assistant Curator, International Center of Photography shares her insights:
It was a tremendous honor to be invited to judge the CENTER Curator’s Choice award, but I had no way of anticipating just how much of a privilege it would be to review this year’s submissions. In the midst of a pandemic, we are all learning to cope with new realities and are grappling with dizzying feelings of fear, compassion, grief, and gratitude. In the face of so much turbulence and uncertainty, it was a gift to spend time with the work of over 250 artists and see such a wide variety of approaches to photography, ranging from projects that confronted the most pressing social issues of our time to others that explored the most enduring of human emotions to those that took the medium itself as material and conceptual inspiration. In the end I was left more in awe than ever of the intelligence, vulnerability, and generosity of artists. Thank you to everyone who shared their work.
The strength and diversity of the projects made it difficult to select just three finalists, but as the impact of the pandemic and experience of social distancing were naturally never far from my mind, the projects below stood out and stayed with me.
Imagined Futures is composed of photo booth self-portraits made by the artist over the course of two years. In an elegiac ritual akin to confession, Soldi steps into the empty booth, acknowledges a possible future lost to his decision to leave his home country, and releases it. He appears in each photograph with his eyes closed, the camera catching him in an instant that is simultaneously mournful and rapturous.
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” 50 unique photobooth gelatin silver prints, 2″ x 1.5″, installation view at ClampArt, NYC
Marina Chao is an assistant curator at the International Center of Photography. Most recently she curated the exhibition Multiply, Identify, Her (2018), which featured the work of ten contemporary women artists, and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018). She is currently working on a project exploring various intersections between image, language, and technology, for which she was awarded a 2019 Curatorial Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Prior to joining ICP, she was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” 50 unique photobooth gelatin silver prints, 2″ x 1.5″, Detail view”
Imagined Futures
Imagined Futures addresses a concern that is universal to most queer immigrants: How do we mourn the futures we left behind in order to live this one? Over the course of two years I utilized photo booths as a stage for performative ritual and a witness to a farewell. Like the Catholic confessionals of my youth, the photo booth became a space to record a private sacrament. As each never-realized, imagined future drifted to the surface unannounced, I found an empty cabin in which to close my eyes, acknowledge its presence, thank it, and give it permission to leave.
©Rafael Soldi,Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped clamshell box, limited edition of 200. Essay by Miguel A. Lopez, introduction by Rafael Soldi.
Rafael Soldi is a Peruvian-born, Seattle-based artist and curator. He holds a BFA in Photography & Curatorial Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His practice centers on how queerness and masculinity intersect with larger topics of our time such as immigration, memory, and loss.
He has exhibited internationally at the Frye Art Museum, American University Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, ClampArt, The Print Center, Museo MATE, Filter Space, and Burrard Arts Foundation, among others. Rafael has received grants and awards from the Magenta Foundation, Puffin Foundation, smART Ventures, Artist Trust, 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and Center Santa Fe. He has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, PICTURE BERLIN, Oxbow Space, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Museum, King County Public Art Collection, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Rafael’s work has been reviewed on ARTFORUM, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, Photograph Magazine, The Seen, Art Nexus, and PDN. He is the co-founder of the Strange Fire Collective, a project dedicated to highlighting work made by women, people of color, and queer and trans artists; and co-curator of the High Wall, a yearly outdoor video projection program that invites immigrant artists and artists working on themes of diaspora and borderlands to transform the facade of a former immigration center building in the heart of Seattle.
©Rafael Soldi,Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped clamshell box, limited edition of 200. Essay by Miguel A. Lopez, introduction by Rafael Soldi.
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped clamshell box, limited edition of 200. Essay by Miguel A. Lopez, introduction by Rafael Soldi.
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped clamshell box, limited edition of 200. Essay by Miguel A. Lopez, introduction by Rafael Soldi.
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped clamshell box, limited edition of 200. Essay by Miguel A. Lopez, introduction by Rafael Soldi.
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped clamshell box, limited edition of 200. Essay by Miguel A. Lopez, introduction by Rafael Soldi.
©Rafael Soldi, I”Imagined Futures,” 50 unique photobooth gelatin silver prints, 2″ x 1.5″, Detail view”
©Rafael Soldi, “Imagined Futures,” 50 unique photobooth gelatin silver prints, 2″ x 1.5″, installation view at ClampArt, NYC
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” 50 unique photobooth gelatin silver prints, 2″ x 1.5″, installation view at Oxbow Seattle
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped clamshell box, limited edition of 200. Essay by Miguel A. Lopez, introduction by Rafael Soldi.
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped
©Rafael Soldi, Imagined Futures,” published by Candor Arts, April 2020. Handmade, foil-stamped clamshell box, limited edition of 200. Essay by Miguel A. Lopez, introduction by Rafael Soldi.
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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)
