I keep thinking about photography and place and belonging and the ways those connect and diverge— the way we take photos the same scenes over and over over the course of a life in a family album— growth marks on door frames of rented apartments. How this makes us feel like we belong but landlords but also would we really want to have the moral burden of ownership? Is that even possible?? So here’s a view of these thoughts in my grubby bed as I recover from a surgery that removed a chunk of my arm to eradicate cancer brought on pretty directly by climate change. I’m missing Eula Biss’s “Having and Being Had” which is exactly relavent (my sister is reading it off my shelf while she’s here helping me recover). Doris Lessing’s title “Walking in the Shade” for her autobiography of reverse “immigration”—-colonizer of South Africa returning to England—-largely in principle and in protest against apartheid. The rates of skin cancer in northern white people who are the primary colonizers of warmer climates—- bringers of capitalism which literally fuels climate change which directly increases skin cancers… these are still fragments of thought.
“Autobiography of Red” by Anne Carson
“Tinisima” by Elena Poniatowska
“Belonging” by bell hooks
“Hold Still” by Sally Mann
“Q’s Legacy” by Helene Hanff
“Working it Out” edited by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels
“Lost Children Archive” by Valeria Luiselli
“On Photography” by Susan Sontag
“River” by Esther Kinsky
“Grove” by Esther Kinsky
“Living by the Word” by Alice Walker
“Walking in the Shade” by Doris Lessing
“Having and Being Had” by Eula Biss
“The Yellow House” by Sarah Broom
“A House of my Own” by Sandra Ciserno
