The CENTER Awards: Project Launch Winner: Clare Carter
For the next two weeks, Lenscratch will be celebrating the 2014 CENTER Award Winners. We are thrilled to align with such a wonderful organization that honors, supports, and provides opportunities to gifted and committed photographers. For 20 years, CENTER has launched careers, provided incredible exposure and inspired photographers to create work that excites and challenges the photographic dialogue.
Today we celebrate Clare Carter’s Project Launch Place Award, starting with juror, Patrick Witty’s, statement.
PROJECT LAUNCH: Juror’s Statement
JUROR: PATRICK WITTY, formerly International Photo Editor, TIME Magazine; currently Director of Photography, Wired Magazine
The Project Launch grant submissions represented a diverse cross-section of contemporary documentary and fine art photography dealing with a broad range of subject matter. The work submitted was beautifully divergent – ranging from highly personal, emotionally-compelling stories to hard-hitting, impactful documentary projects and beyond. As a juror, it was deeply inspiring.
All of these qualities and more were elegantly combined in Guy Martin’s project, “City of Dreams”. Beautiful, formal, impactful and revealing, Martin’s project is a true reflection of modern documentary work. The photos are a compelling mixture of cinematic surreality and intense reportage, asking more questions than they answer.
My juror’s choice went to Clare Carter’s provocative series, “Corrective Rape,” exploring hate crimes against the LGBTI community in South Africa. Unflinching and intimate, Carter’s work demands attention – and action.
It was an honor to be part of the jury.
Clare Carter’s Project Statement
South Africa has one of the world’s highest rates of sexual assault. According to a 2009 government survey, one in four men admit to having sex with a woman who did not consent to intercourse, and nearly half of these men admitted to raping more than once. An earlier government study found that a majority of rapes were committed by friends and acquaintances of the victim. “Corrective rape” is a disturbing practice whereby men are raping lesbians and gay men in an attempt to “cure” them of their sexuality.
In one of the few cases to attract press attention, in 2008, Eudy Simelane, a lesbian, was gang-raped and stabbed to death before her naked body was dumped in a stream in the Kwa Thema township outside Johannesburg. A soccer player training to be a referee for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, she was targeted because of her sexual orientation. I read of this murder and I began my research of corrective rape.
South Africa’s law was the fifth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. With horrific apartheid in recent memory, the country’s 1996 Constitution committed itself to equality for the entire nation. But the new constitution could not erase deeply held biases and even hatred toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. If anything, the extension of formal legal protections exacerbated some people’s worst homophobic inclinations.
Over two years, it became evident to me that multiple layers of South African society were responsible for the epidemic of corrective rape and that bias, apathy and culpability ran deeper than I could have imagined: in educational and religious institutions, the criminal justice system, and even within families.
Portraits of the corrective rape survivors and their family members are the central focus of my project. Collecting cell phone pictures, death certificates, medical documents, crime scene images, interview footage with those that perpetrate homophobic ideologies was an essential aspect to learning more on the subject of corrective rape. Photographing these items became a key feature in the project as the information collected was from those directly affected by corrective rape. The additional imagery and footage act as “evidence” in a time when a photograph’s authenticity is greatly questioned. This imagery connects the audience to the subject’s reality through a different channel to that of the portrait. It enabled me to create a comprehensive study of this hate crime that would let the viewer generate an opinion.
Clare Carter was born in London, UK in 1985 and currently resides in New York. She earned a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2009. Carter assisted artists Taryn Simon and Nan Goldin before pursuing her own documentary projects. Carter’s work investigates human rights and social issues around the world. Her projects have been exhibited internationally and featured in The New York Times, The Independent Magazine, Vanity Fair, Slate among others. Her project Corrective Rape was the runner-up for 2013 Aperture Portfolio Prize.
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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)
