Photographer of the Year, Local: Erin Clark
This premier category is open to all photographers -- independent, agency, wire service, or newspaper photographers.
The spirit of this category is to honor a photographer who documents their own community. At least 60% of their portfolio must consist of local or regional coverage from their home or organization’s primary geographic market.
Only one national or international story is allowed. A portfolio must include at least two narrative picture stories (5 or more images).
Nightmare in Mission Hill
It has been more than three decades since Charles placed the 911 call claiming he and his pregnant wife had been shot and carjacked in Mission Hill, identifying a Black male as the alleged attacker. The 1989 Charles and Carol Stuart shootings set off an intense police investigation and media frenzy that still haunts the city of Boston. Ultimately, Matthew Stuart confessed in 1990 that he helped his brother Charles hide the gun used to murder Carol, but the wounds inflicted on Black residents of the Mission Hill community are still fresh. The photographs created for this project incorporate historical images through projections that are relevant to the Stuart case at the time of the investigation. The images intend to illustrate the trauma of the past and the imprint that this case had, and continues to have, on Boston’s identity. The projections were created in-camera with a portable projector. No post-manipulation was used.
A Community Recovers
The mass shootings that tore through Lewiston, Maine on October 25, 2023 left 18 dead, at least a dozen wounded, and a city shattered. It sent residents into a multi-day lockdown, as the chief suspect, Robert Card, remained at large, and obliterated any assumptions that a place like this — calm, quiet, removed from big-city crowds — was immune to this kind of violence. The shootings nearly matched the total number of homicides that the state typically sees in an entire year. And here — in a city so close-knit that some workers at Central Maine Medical Center knew the victims they were caring for in the shooting’s aftermath — the damage has been profoundly personal. The deadliest shooting in 2023 and one of the worst in recent US history, it left Lewiston, a community of 37,000, left to pick up the pieces.
