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The CENTER Awards: The Editor’s Choice 2nd Place: Virgil DiBiase
©Virgil DiBiase, “When you stare at me and question me I go blind.
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The CENTER Awards: The Editor’s Choice 1st Place/Director’s Choice 2nd Place: Noelle Mason
©Noelle Mason, Backscatter Blueprint (Los Tristes)/ Cyanotype on Watercolor Paper (18″ x 24″)
Congratulations to Noelle Mason for her First Place win in CENTER’s Editors’s
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The CENTER Awards: The Director’s Choice Award 3rd Place Winner: Cody Bratt
©Cody Bratt, He Was a Labor Hero
Congratulations to Cody Bratt for his First Place win in CENTER’S Director’s Choice Award for his project, The Other Stories.
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The CENTER Awards: The Director’s Choice Award 1st Place Winner: Sandra Chen Weinstein
©Sandra Chen Weinstein, Barbara and Jess. Barb and Jess are going to get married after a few years of companionship in the Bay area.
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The CENTER Awards: The Curator’s Choice Award 3rd Place Winner: Stephanie Taiber
©Stephanie Taiber, Paper Cover Rock Triptych
Congratulations to Stephanie Taiber, for her Third Place win in CENTER’S Curator’s Choice Award for her project, Natural Order.
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The CENTER Awards: The Curator’s Choice Award 2nd Place Winner: Rafael Soldi
©Rafael Soldi,Imagined Futures,” 50 unique photobooth gelatin silver prints, 2″ x 1.
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The CENTER Awards: The Curator’s Choice Award 1st Place Winner: Brandy Trigueros
©Brandy Trigueros, Fragmentation.
Congratulations to Brandy Trigueros for her First Place win in CENTER’S Curator’s Choice Award for her project, The Dadabyte Theater.
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The CENTER Awards: The Me & Eve Award: Ada Trillo
©Ada Trillo
Starting Out, January 2020. The migrant caravan leaves Honduras and begins their trek to the Guatemalan-Mexican Border.
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The CENTER Awards: Project Launch Grant Honorable Mention: Kari Wehrs
©Kari Wehrs, Conor
Congratulations to Kari Wehrs for being selected for Runner-Up for CENTER’s Project launch Grant recognizing her project, Shot.
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The CENTER Awards: Project Launch Grant Honorable Mention: Kathleen Clark
©Kathleen Clark, George Washington
Congratulations to Kathleen Clark for being selected for Honorable Mention for CENTER’s Project launch Grant recognizing her project, The White House
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The CENTER Awards: Project Launch Grant Winner: Catherine Panebianco
©Catherine Panebianco, Racing Time
Congratulations to Catherine Panebianco for being selected for CENTER’s Project launch Grant recognizing her project, No Memory is Ever Alone .
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The CENTER Awards: Project Development Grant Winner: Justin Maxon
©Justin Maxon
Caption by Tim: [My aspiration is] being in business as an electrician. [My dream looks] powerful, sparkly, [with] stars and comets.
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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)
