Leslie A. Lindsay Writer | Designer | Photographer
This is the story of my great-grandmother, Cora Bell Compton.
But it’s also about the importance of familial belonging, survival, and how the passage of time is portrayed. Not only was I enthralled by Cora Bell’s journey–motherhood, poverty, and loss–but I became obsessed with her grit, her imperfect character, her secrets. I wanted to delve into the concepts of absence and inheritance.
I write about home and ancestry through the lens of photography, art, and memory.
Leslie Lindsay combines her overlapping roles of writer, poet, photographer, traveler, and family historian in This Is Where We Live, a searing, decades-spanning work in which she explores the landscape of her imagined and inherited ancestry through her Kentucky-born great-grandmother, Cora Bell Compton.
From the Kentucky hills to a bustling railroad town in the 1920s and 1930s, Leslie Lindsay knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Cora Bell: that she was widowed during the Great Depression and raised six children in a dirt-floor home.
When a photograph of Cora Bell arrived unbidden from Leslie’s father, she saw it not exactly a plea, but a portal to her world.
Just who was Cora Bell Compton? What secrets and worries did she carry?
Desperate to learn more about her great-grandmother, Leslie turned first to the census records, then deep into family archives. She analyzed the few surviving photographs of Cora Bell and her children. Finally, she set out for Kentucky and Missouri to unearth what she could of the past.
When she begins to uncover secrets—some unexpectedly wonderful, and others darker and more violent than she ever imagined. Lindsay writes into the void, imagining responses to unanswerable questions. What makes a home? What does it mean to be ‘rich?’ Can we learn from the past? Are future generations inherently ‘better’ than the previous ones, shining a blazing light on the parallels of past and present amidst our chaotic world.
Weaving between Cora Bell’s past and the present, Lindsay explores her great-grandmother’s struggles and joys, while simultaneously examining her own familial estrangement, her mother’s mental illness, the recession of 2008, the pandemic, and DOGE. More than just a family story, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE begs the question: can the past and present, ever truly meet? Is the past bound to repeat or merely rhyme?
Nimbly tackling themes of art and photography, against the constructs of time and place, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE reveals that legacy is more than what you leave behind, or where you’re from, it’s who you are.
“You have distilled this story so beautifully. I am in awe of your ability to take your own experiences and shape them into such a readable, cohesive story.”
Over the course of 18 months, I traveled to South Central Kentucky on five separate occasions. Traversing backroads and hollers, creeks and woods, I found not only Cora Bell, but my own roots.
Who is a woman from another generation who has influenced the way you move throughout the world? What did she teach you?
I traveled to Adair County, Kentucky and drove along the winding lanes of Cora Bell’s birthplace. I met with long-lost relatives. I walked the land. I slept in a cabin. I wrote and wrote until I wrote her home.
What do you hope women of future generations will understand–or do differently–because of the conversations we are having now?
Leslie Lindsay| Writer | Designer | Photographer
Leslie A. Lindsay 