A series of photographs, Within the Bittersweet, by Assistant Professor Allison Grant, won the 2019 Developed Work Fellowship Award. Her photograph from the series, “In the Vines,” was included in the exhibition Developed Work at the Midwest Center for Photography.
Grant’s artist statement about her series appears on her website:
“Within the Bittersweet” is a series of photographs made as I raise my children in and around our West Alabama home. This region has magnificent natural beauty and serene communities filled with lush gardens. Like many places, it is also interlaced with sites that emit toxic industrial pollution, which has a particularly acute impact on developing children. Climate change, too, is a looming threat to the health and wellbeing of all people, and particularly children who will navigate intensified environmental crises during their lifetime.
“Considering the possibility of visually representing the often hidden, yet entwined threats of toxic chemical pollution and climate change, my work draws on the depths of human connection found in familial bonds and the vulnerability of the human body to environmental contamination. The photographs ruminate on the brief, bittersweet period of parenthood spent with young children — and also the splendor of a life lived on a wonderous planet that pivots ever closer to environmental collapse.”
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