This photographic series weaves together archival family photographs, screenprinted textures, and the searing prose of Richard Wright to interrogate memory, lineage, and the architecture of Black life. The work moves between personal history and collective memory, where the “thin blue line” becomes both a literal and symbolic boundary—between safety and surveillance, past and present, visibility and erasure.

Threaded throughout the series is the haunting presence of blue eyes—not as a feature, but as an aspiration. They function as an unreachable symbol of whiteness, embedded deep within the American psyche—a visual marker of power, desirability, and social belonging. In invoking this gaze, the work asks: What does it mean to see and be seen through a lens never made for you?