Eva Stenram: Cord Prize Winner for Drape
©Eva Stenram
Eva Stenram is the 1st Place recipient of the Cord Prize, an annual international contemporary art award established to support and acknowledge the practice of early and mid-career visual artists. The award comprises an individual first prize of $10,000, second prize of $1,000 and third prize of $500. Additionally, twenty-two artists will be selected for online exhibition. The inaugural prize, is focused on contemporary art photography, with future awards continuing a photo-based thread. The jurors for 2013 were Diana Edkins and Charlotte Cotton.
Charlotte Cotton states: “If I had to characterize the final selection of twenty five photographers that Diana and I made, I think it is a sense of photographers whose contemporary art practices clearly respond to the current image-making climate. The first general trend that we have seen in contemporary art photography in light of Web 2.0 (and phenomenal growth in image-led social media) has been to reinforce the notion of photography as a material form. What has happened in the 2010s is that the inherent ‘objecthood’ of the photographic print – a physical form rather than a neutral or invisible framing of a real moment – has become pronounced and I would argue that all of the photographers that we selected seem to be contemplating this contemporary fact, and creatively working with the idea that photography is an active process of choices and decisions of the maker who renders a photograph.”
©Eva Stenram
Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Eva currently lives and works in London. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2003, Eva has exhibited internationally; she has been included in shows at the V&A Museum (UK), Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea), Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (India) and Zendai Museum of Modern Art (China).
In 2012, she was nominated for the Les Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award. In 2013, Eva has solo exhibitions at Ravestijn Gallery (Amsterdam), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), and Pobeda Gallery (Moscow) and was selected as a finalist in the Hyeres International Photography Competition as well as the Aperture Portfolio Prize and is the first prize winner of the inaugural Cord Prize.
©Eva Stenram
Eva Stenram brings together analogical archival material and digital manipulation, creating scenarios where the uncanny takes centre stage. Stenram often uses found images, such as negatives, magazines and images from the Internet, as her source of inspiration and working material. These are scanned or downloaded to digital files that the artist manipulates, reinterpreting at each time the image anew.
©Eva Stenram
Drape uses vintage pin-up photographs as its source material. Stenram sought out images, mainly from the 1960s, in which women are posed in interior (semi-) domestic sets in front of curtains or drapes. Manipulating these, she extended the curtains to partially obscure the women, re-enforcing the former’s role as a marker between public and private. The curtain vacillates between striptease-drape and blind or shutter. The background, meanwhile, envelopes the focal point and the foreground slips into the background.
©Eva Stenram
The square images all derive from original medium format negatives by unknown photographers; the rest of the (rectangular) images are derived from the 1960s men’s magazine Cavalcade and retain their original size and layout in relation to the magazine page, with blank areas standing in for excised text.
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
©Eva Stenram
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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)
