THE CENTER AWARDS: Me&Eve Grant: Heather Evans Smith
©Heather Evans Smith, Blue
Congratulations to Heather Evans Smith for being selected for CENTER’s Me&Eve Grant recognizing her project, Blue. The Me&Eve Grant provides financial support to a woman, female-identified, non-binary, transgender, gender non-conforming, or two-spirited photographer, 40 years of age and over in its fourth year. This grant is made possible by Review Santa Fe alumna, Dorie Hagler, whose project Me&Eve amplifies the voices of women. Initiated in 2016 on International Women’s Day, this project was inspired after seeing the transformative effects of witnessing women share their stories. The Grant includes a $1,000 cash award, Mentorship, Professional Development Workshop Admission, Complimentary participation and presentation at Review Santa Fe, Group Exhibition of Award & Grant Winners at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Project Publication in Lenscratch & Feature Shoot, and inclusion in the CENTER Image Library & Archive. Also, new in 2022, and in alignment with CENTER’s response for recognition of equity and representation in the field, all Me&Eve applicants will be invited to contribute to SHOTBYWOMEN – an Image Bank platform for license and distribution of content created exclusively by women and female-identifying photographers from around the world.
JUROR: Sarah Leen, Founder & Editor, Visual Thinking Collective shares her thoughts on this selection:
For many, this has been a very difficult year. As I read the Artist Statements and looked at the images submitted for the Me&Eve Grant, I was struck by how often the words depression, loss, grief, heartbreak, and time were repeated to describe the work. Some wonderful projects did celebrate nature, childhood, the body, and the peace that comes with acceptance, but overwhelmingly the submitted work was about struggle.
I feel privileged to have been allowed to see the bearing of so many souls and how making the images were often the antidote. It was an intimate experience.
It was not an easy task to choose only one project to receive this Grant. I was very impressed to see the diverse ways the photographers chose to tell their stories and to create images that reflected states of being that are often more felt than seen.
For this fourth Me&Eve grant I have chosen Blue by Heather Evans Smith.
Blue is a poetic essay that explores the personal experience of depression in mid-life. Smith created a melancholic yet tender essay that explores the complex feelings around aging and the death of her father as a way to help her find “a new place amongst the loss.” These images were also a comfort to me as they so gently embraced the sadness that can arise during the very universal changes that mid-life can bring to us all.
I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to spend time with all of the artists who shared their images and their hearts. Thank you.
©Heather Evans Smith, Navigator
Sarah Leen became the first female Director of Photography at National Geographic Partners in 2013. In late 2019 she founded the Visual Thinking Collective, a community for independent women photo editors, teachers, and curators dedicated to visual storytelling.
Leen works with individual photographers and agencies consulting and editing projects and books including the 2020 FotoEvidence and World Press Photo Book Award winner HABIBI by Antonio Faccilongo, Anders Wo by Petra Barth, and Like a Bird by Johanna-Maria Fritz.
Heather Evans Smith is a photo-based artist whose work reflects her southern roots, motherhood, womanhood and a whimsical imagination she relied on as an only child in a rural town. Her photographic imagery explores the ideas of memory, loss and family in conceptual settings. Smith’s work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, England, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, NC and Leica Galerie Milano in Milan, Italy. She is a Critical Mass 2014, 2018 and 2021 Top 50 recipient as well as a 2022 Silver List artist. Her first monograph, Seen Not Heard, was published by Flash Powder Projects in 2016 followed by her self-published monograph, Alterations, in 2020. She resides with her family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Follow Heather on Instagram: @heatherevanssmith
Portrait of the photographer Heather Evans Smith
©Heather Evans Smith, The Air in the Room
Blue
Some say my dad’s death was the spark that ignited my depression, but this feeling has been brewing for a while. I started to notice a sadness creep in a few years into my 40s. I searched “depression in women” and stumbled across articles stating women are the most depressed at age 44. I was, at that very moment, 44.
Loss during this time in a woman’s life can weigh heavily. Children are getting older and need the comfort of a parent less; the health of one’s own parent(s) is starting to fail, and hormonal shifts begin.
By using the color blue, which for hundreds of years has been associated with melancholy and sadness, these images evoke this period in my life and how it affects those around me. A mid-point, as I am stripping down, taking stock, and finding a new place amongst the loss.
©Heather Evans Smith, Veneer
©Heather Evans Smith, Conservatory
©Heather Evans Smith, Paint it Blue
©Heather Evans Smith, Vessel
©Heather Evans Smith, If You Sit Still Too Long
©Heather Evans Smith, Until There’s Time Left
©Heather Evans Smith, Timekeeper
©Heather Evans Smith, Maybe Its Been There All Along
©Heather Evans Smith, Heavy is the Lightest Thing
©Heather Evans Smith, Keeping it All Together
©Heather Evans Smith, Soak
©Heather Evans Smith, You Are Not the Only One
©Heather Evans Smith, This Too Shall Pass
Heather Evans Smith recently opened an exhibition of Blue at Cassilhaus, that runs through August, 2022 and she will also be releasing an artist’s book in August.
Viewing for Therapeutic and Mental Health Professionals – July 29, 2022, 2-4:30PM
Read more here. RSVP to bluetheraphyforum@cassilhaus.com
Book Signing and Straggler’s Closing – Thursday, August 11, 2022, 7-9PM
RSVP to HESBookSigningClosing@cassilhaus.com
©Heather Evans Smith, Cassilhaus installation
©Heather Evans Smith, Cassilhaus installation
©Heather Evans Smith, Cassilhaus installation
©Heather Evans Smith, Cassilhaus installation
©Heather Evan Smith, Installation at Cassilhaus Exhiibtion
Posts on Lenscratch may not be reproduced without the permission of the Lenscratch staff and the photographer.
Recommended
-
The Museum of Fine Arts Announces Establishment of $50,000 Edelman Impact Award in PhotographyMay 31st, 2026
-
Donna Gordon: 2025 Denis Roussel Award WinnerMay 16th, 2026
-
Zanele Muholi: 2026 Hasselblad Award LaureateMarch 13th, 2026
-
Shane Hallinan: The 2025 Salon Jane Award WinnerFebruary 12th, 2026
-
Greg Constantine: 7 Doors: An American GulagJanuary 17th, 2026
![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)
