Antonio Vazquez Lim
Description
About Antonio Vazquez Lim
Where coal tipples once roared above the cacophony of mules and men at work, there is now silence. It is difficult to explain how a veritable Eden became a land where streams run with water so toxic that nothing can live in or from it. So, instead, I explain it with pictures and describe that time many remember as “the good ol’ days.”
I do not create poverty porn nor is it meant to garner pity; my work is meant to evoke a deep sense of pride in one’s community for surviving the abandonment of industrial colonization—pride for continuing to fight for the betterment of our home and our resistance toward entropy and economic subjugation.
The Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest uprising in United States history second only to the Civil War—is reduced now to artifacts, mostly shell casings, that exist in boxes of a few museums. When I photographed even one of them, that was enough for everyone in the world to observe and understand what occurred there: the frustration of a people so exploited that they were brought to the point of war against their own countrymen.
I present my photography in a very raw sense—I do not always find it beautiful or stimulating, but I usually find it difficult and telling. In my photography, and in my writing, I want to remind people that the coalfields of West Virginia teaches the most difficult truth to accept: that no matter your importance or legacy, you will one day be forgotten by time.
I fear this truth myself and, in spite of it, my art attempts to keep those that have died very much alive in our thoughts and senses. We ought to carry the weight of our Appalachian past not as a sisyphean curse, but as a demonstration of our collective strength. The great labors of our ancestors have once again become a part of nature, and that is beautiful, but let us continue to preserve these connections to the past through our art.
Biography
I am a self-taught photographer and writer. Broadly, I photograph and write about the decaying, restless bones of Appalachia—capturing West Virginia as it was, West Virginia as it is, and what delivered us to our current state of affairs. It is historical work, surely, but I attempt to describe the visceral pangs of grief and pride I feel at once in the context of our history and the struggles we battle today.
When I began my undergraduate schooling at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio—my first experience living in another state—I discovered my identity as not only a West Virginian, but as an Appalachian. I was an enigma to my peers as an ethnic minority that talked with a twang, but I did not see my identity as a disjointed, scrambled puzzle to solve: I knew my home and every curve it takes to get there, the love that exists here, the pain we have experienced for generations, and the wars we’ve waged to be treated as somebody rather than a mule.
After graduating, I decided to make it a point to teach as many people as possible our story through the artifacts that remain of our past—coal scrip, shuttered company stores, collapsing coal company houses, bottles, and more. My non-fiction writing focuses on the history of West Virginia, my poetry revolves around the Appalachian identity and social issues.
While from and currently living in Charleston, I am a Ph.D. student in Cincinnati, though my location may change as I pursue a transition to clinical psychology to research the role of Appalachian society and culture in determining the presentation and outcomes of psychological disorders.
antoniolim304@gmail.com
