The Center Awards: EXCELLENCE IN MULTIMEDIA AWARD 2nd Place Winner: Annette Fournet
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Persephone
Congratulations to Annette Fournet for being selected for The Excellence in Multimedia Award recognizing her project, The Goddess Series. The Excellence in Multimedia Award recognizes outstanding photo-media artists and storytellers working in a variety of media processes and subject matter. Supports a project that utilizes photography, video, installation, or other elements that expand on traditional methods of displaying and experiencing photography. Winners receive admission to Review Santa Fe portfolio reviews and participation in a winner’s exhibition at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, IN.
Juror Josh Raab, Director of Instagram, National Geographic; formerly Multimedia Editor, TIME Magazine shares his thoughts on juroring:
This year brought a multitude of impressive submissions ranging from still photography to Augmented Reality. There were strong projects across the board that pushed the boundaries of traditional media from collage that challenged the depictions of women in traditional photography, to video montages that challenged the perception of time itself.
In The Goddess Series, Annette Elizabeth Fournet used collage to redefine old imagery informed by Victorian values to make the women in them into “goddesses”. This brilliant use of mixed media brings modern life to the photographs and with it the much needed celebration of the subjects.
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Daphne
Josh Raab is Director of Instagram at National Geographic. He was formerly a Senior Multimedia Editor at TIME where he produced The Drone Issue and led coverage of the Parkland shooting. He is also an adjunct professor at the International Center of Photography.
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Three Muses
The Goddess Series
The Goddess Series evolved from my previous project, Anima/Persona. The Anima / Persona series began as an exploration of the persona (external projection of self) and the anima (inner soul). These digital collage portraits of women were influenced in part by Symbolist paintings. As a young art student, the symbolist and Decadent paintings fascinated me. In these images I admired their reaction against the mundane, the banal, and bourgeoisie normalcy of the late 19th century. I later learned that many of these artists worked from misogynist fears stemming from their discovery that the Victorian notion that women did not have a sexual nature was untrue, and of their fear of the nascent women’s movement for equality.
In the Goddess Series I am using vintage photographic portraits of women. Utilizing Photoshop, scanning objects, fabric, etc. I transform each individual with digital collage into a particular mythological goddess. Disturbed and concerned by the regressive and repressive attitudes towards women found in current in political and religious groups today, I am moved to create images of women who can wield power in positive and/or sometimes in negative behaviors. I am expressing the power, exotic, spiritual, and esoteric qualities of women. It is my small way of fighting back.
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Invidia the Goddess of Envy
Annette Elizabeth Fournet has exhibited her photography at galleries and museums in France, Denmark, Spain, Greece, Korea, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Kyrgzstan Republic, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States.
Her work is included in public and corporate collections such as the Bibliotheque Nationale, San Diego Museum of Photographic Art, Houston Museum of Fine Art, Prague House of Photography, New Orleans Museum of Art, and others.
Annette Fournet lives and teaches photography in Memphis, Tennessee and in Prague, Czech Republic.
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Hera is Tired of Zeus’ Shit
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: The Goddesses Morna and Vesnaese
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Marie LaVeaux the Goddess of Voodou
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Atropos the Goddess Who Determines the Length of Life
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Eos
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Diana
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Apate the Goddess of Revenge
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: The Goddesses Zorya Utrennyaya and Zorya Vechernyaya
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Fortuna
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Oizys the Goddess of Grief and Depression
©Annette Elizabeth Fournet, The Goddess Series: Selene the Goddess of the Moon
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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)
