Author: DezLong

“Distraction”

This is a photo of my sophomore year studio desk at my previous college in Delhi, NY. It was the first project of the first semester of my second year and had quickly claimed the corner desk in front of the window. My hope was to be in the corner so I could hone in on my work without getting distracted too much by conversing with my peers, however, the beauty of the window in front of me and watching the seasons change as time went on proved otherwise.

“Commute”

This is the White Plains Metro North Station that I take to get from where I was raised to where my foreseeable future shall be. I only started taking the train by myself after I had graduated high school and it was always intimidating coming from such a small area. Taking this train is now such a regular thing as I come and go from seeing my parents of the weekend to going to school in Brooklyn and I am interested to see where this new way of life takes me. Transferring from a small campus in the middle of nowhere upstate New York to now Brooklyn is a huge change and I think about it constantly on the trains I take to class.

“Passenger’

This photo has the dominant impression of the two skeleton animals in the moving box. The bear one I gifted to my boyfriend around Halloween last year and the dog we found in the basement of the house he grew up in. I was helping him pack his stuff from Vermont as we were about to take a five hour drive down to Brooklyn with his father. We were both ready for a new chapter in our lives, him starting a new job and me starting at a new school, and pretty nervous about it. The good thing was that we had each other through it though. Having each other’s support through big changes and “riding” it out together made it easier on each other, and while there have been bumps through it its nice to have a passenger sticking along.

My favorite photo from Teju Coles’ essay is “A young Haitian man grieving at the funeral of his mother in Port-au-Prince, Haiti”, captured by Maggie Steber.  It is a documentary photo capturing the grief of a son calling out to his mother for one last time with the support of his community holding him up, not just the men physically holding him up but the sea of people walking with him. The photo being a wave of black, blue, white and grey, it represents a mix of death, hope, and security within this single photo. The dominant impression being the group of men in the forefront of the image. The men in the lower half of the picture are all in lighter colored dress shirts which make the son in all black stand out. The grieving young man has his arms stretched out a parallel to Jesus on the cross behind him and there are three crosses on the right side of the photo. The decisive moment was when suddenly the son shot up toward the sky and the last rays from the sunset catch his face. It gives a tragic story that as he has to deal with the death of his mother, an obviously difficult thing, he has to face the sunset of the day, possible the first one he has spent without her.