The Homeplace


  • Photographer
    Sarah Hoskins
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2014
  • Technical Info
    gelatin silver prints

The Homeplace is comfort. The place you can go back to no matter how many years have passed. It will always hold something familiar something safe.

Story

The Homeplace is comfort. The place you can go back to no matter how many years have passed. It will always hold something familiar something safe.

The sky passes in blurs, fleeting and fast moments. It began as I stood looking through a machine of glass and mirrors trying in an instant to capture all that was. I now feel the blur of lives that have left and I have lost. I am left with those static moments. Wishing those moments would move and bring me back to all that was.

I am strapped down and can’t move. I know I have something running through my veins, as the pain is less. The florescent lights over head are all that I can see. They blur as I am wheeled quickly through the halls. I am the patient that they make way for. The captain of the medivac is still pushing me. Numbers are called out, stats of heart rate and blood pressure. What is my name? What is my birthday? Do I remember what happened? I feel the tears run down my cheeks. I don’t. I know my daughter is alive and safe. I know that the medivac team was like the cavalry coming to take me out of the small ill equipped and scary hospital that I was in. I have always been afraid of helicopters, today in my morphine haze I have never been so grateful to have been in one.

I am being wheeled through the in the emergency room of UK hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. I am brought into yet another emergency room I can still only look up. I see the eyes that are Derek’s, the same eyes his daddy had. He strokes my hair that is matted and covered in dried blood. His warm coal colored hand holds my cold pasty white one. The nurse says, “Only relatives are allowed in here how are you two related?” I hear the smile in Derek’s voice, “ It’s a long story”.

Fourteen years ago I stood in the middle of Frogtown Lane with a map in hand. I didn’t know a soul. Now 14 years later I know everyone on that lane and those who have passed away. I have been to basket meetings, funerals and family reunions. Even when I am not there in the communities they are always right here with me.





Over the years like so many other documentary photographers I apply for grants to help me fund my work. More often then not I receive the letter that starts out. Thank you, but ends up with no. I would love to be rewarded with funding it would certainly help, but I have learned rewards come in different forms.

I feel Derek squeeze my hand, I breath shallow and painful breaths, but I breath. I realize that I am not done yet, that I am back home to The Homeplace and I am rewarded yet again.

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