Photographer Missy Prince Documents a Visit to Her Homeland in the American South

Photographer: Missy Prince (missyprince.com; IG: @misssyprince)

Missy Prince is originally from Gulfport, Mississippi and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

To love a place from a distance is to embellish it with memory, desire, and myth. Why Don’t You Come Home is a fantasy, a lyric, and a document of one of several returns to the place where I grew up. It is part of an ongoing exploration of a South that is both familiar and strange, both real and imagined. There is a beautiful kind of darkness, a sad stillness that hangs in the Mississippi air which, though familiar and potent, defies literal explanation. I felt it as a child, and I feel it as an adult returning year after year. The series is an attempt to convey that presence through details of the land and the way people live.