PHOTOESSAY: MY DORM ROOM IS A DARK ROOM

Words and Photos by Joelle de Poto

My dorm room is a vessel taking me through the school year. At the beginning of the year, I decorated my dorm room with colorful posters, part of my collection of books, fairy lights, faux vines, plants, drawings, and so on. My room was pristine yet whimsical, full of eclectic decor. I was bright-eyed and optimistic for my first year at college. Now, my room is cluttered with empty dining hall coffee cups, loose vitamin pills, worn clothes, and crumpled papers everywhere. I seem to have lost my enthusiasm for my new “home away from home.”

Every day I see the tall, looming presence of the building next to mine, it looks like a vertical take on a prison complex. I let this building and its surroundings project onto my room. I have created a camera obscura of sorts, essentially turning my room into a camera, with light peeking through a small hole and displaying the outside world onto my dorm room’s surfaces. I see the architecture appear in my room, and I feel like I am looking at projections of the outside world on a cave wall. As I exist in this liminal space, I absorb the light shining through the lens and try to think of a time when I have not felt, at least a little, alone at college — and I fail. So, I clean up my room, piece by piece, leaving some clutter behind, and I tear down the cardboard from my window, letting the light in. And as my eyes adjust, everything seems brighter than before.