GLENDORA: SING ABOUT ME

Glendora: Sing About Me is a documentary project using analog photography and interviews. It explores the connection between poverty and memory. Glendora, Mississippi Delta, population 160, has become a memory desert. Ways of life and skills have fallen into oblivion. The transmission of individual and collective memories within families and communities seems to have withered under duress. Research on poverty trauma intensified by racial bias show that when brain capacity is used up on survival issues, there isn’t much bandwidth for anything else. Mississippi is the poorest state in the U.S. and one of its most racially inequitable. While working there, I noticed that families passed little down in way of verbal and pictorial transmission. There is little documentation of these communities. Throughout the years, they were entirely looked over because of their social and economic status. This heritage will soon be lost to time, and few oral histories will survive.