The International Women in Photo Association Awards: Lorraine Turci: The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
This week Lenscratch is featuring the work of the 2023 winners of The International Women in Photo Association (IWPA) Awards, a French non profit aiming to create global change and reach gender equality and women empowerment, awards prizes to visual storytellers from around the world.
Today is Lorraine Turci, a photographer from France whose series The Resilience of the Crow received an Honorable Mention. Her absolutely stunning images make your senses feel alive (no Apple Vision Pro needed!).
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
The Resilience of the Crow
Hokkaido is a vast territory of wintry forests, volcanoes, lakes and rugged coastlines. Before Japanese colonization, it was inhabited by the Ainu people. After a century and a half of assimilation and discrimination, the situation in the country has gradually evolved. The Resilience of the Crow reflects on what it means to be an Ainu today, between demands and compromises, in the practices of everyday life; it addresses the sense of belonging within a community in the dual process of preserving and reinventing its own culture, following prolonged assimilation that has all but erased its society and language. Stories of activists, artists… and above all, ordinary people. After all, aren’t we all in search of our own identity? – Lorraine Turci
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
Lorraine Turci, a graduate in photography from the Fine Arts school in Nantes and Paris 8, is an independent photographer and member of Hans Lucas since 2019. Her work explores the interactions between territory, identity, transmission, human rights, nature, evolution, and preservation. By surpassing appearances and social conditioning, it gives substance to narratives where the world’s plurality reveals its ambiguous beauty. Lorraine collaborates with various media outlets, institutions, and NGOs like Géo magazine, Le Figaro magazine, French Culture Ministry, Gambian Alliance Française, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International. Her work has been exhibited in France and internationally as at the Festival de La Gacilly, Belfast Photo Festival, Visa pour l’Image, the French National Library. “The Resilience of the Crow,” received support from the Scam’s “Brouillon d’un rêve” grant, the Tenjinyama Art Studio artist residency in Sapporo, Japan, and the Sasakawa Franco-Japanese Foundation.
Follow Lorraine on Instagram: @lorraineturci
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
© Lorraine Turci, from the series The Resilience of the Crow
International Women in Photo, IWPA, is a French non profit association that pursues two major MISSIONS on a global scale:
- work for equality through photography in the world.
- The promotion of women photographers and visual storytellers of all origins and nationalities.
The roots for IWPA’s goals lie in the under representation of women photographers. Unfortunately, women photographers still do not receive sufficient recognition nor assignments and only make up for a small percentage of all the photographs we see every day in the press, social media, museums or art fairs. IWPA fulfills a social role by drawing attention to social issues that are often ignored or simply not covered by the male dominated perspective of our world.
How do they fulfill these missions? IWPA wants to make women’s vision count by
- Increasing the visibility and diversity of women photographers in the field of photography
- Proposing actions around education and training in photography for women and students, enhancing their skills and reinforcing capacity buildin
- Promote photography as an empowerment tool for girls and women
- Using photography as a tool to promote tolerant and non-sexist values
In order to give more visibility to women photographers, IWPA acts as a platform and organizes the annual IWPA Award, a photography competition that is followed by exhibitions in major cities and capitals across the Middle East, Asia and Europe showing the work of the laureate and finalists to a large and international audience.
Instagram: @IWPA_photo
Posts on Lenscratch may not be reproduced without the permission of the Lenscratch staff and the photographer.
Recommended
-
Arnold Newman Prize: C. Rose Smith: Scenes of Self: Redressing PatriarchyNovember 24th, 2025
-
Celebrating 20 Years of Critical Mass: Cathy Cone (2023) and Takeisha Jefferson (2024)October 1st, 2025
-
Celebrating 20 Years of Critical Mass: George Nobechi (2021) and Ingrid Weyland (2022)September 30th, 2025
-
Celebrating 20 Years of Critical Mass: Amy Friend (2019) and Andrew Feiler (2020)September 29th, 2025
-
Celebrating 20 Years of Critical Mass: Jennifer McClure (2017) and JP Terlizzi (2018)September 28th, 2025
![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)
