visibility

heaven holford | Spring 2023

My home is one room
With flowerpots in the windowsill,
A tick infested mattress
With a crazy quilt to cover it,
Bibles in lace and calico,
And magazine pictures on the wall.
With a roof that was a ‘stretch of urban beach’
And a busy hallway full of interactive neighbors
Lit by a flickering gaslight that casts dark shadows.
The photos don’t quite capture
All the love and light
That lives within these four walls.
Instead,
It focuses on the bad;
The black;
The poor.
We are forced to represent
The failure of the Negro class;
The segregation;
The embodiment of social problems.
These photographs coerce us into visibility
And make us bound to appear suffering
And carry the burden of representation.
We are forced into visibility
And made out to live in black and white.
This home is a representation of failure and diminution.
We are a representation of failure and diminution.