Melissa Kreider: You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Grew Up Here, 2014, from You Can’t Go Home Again
Childhood is often a blur of memories–it’s not until adulthood that where and how we grow up comes into sharp focus. Melissa Kreider explores this terrain with her project, You Can’t Go Home Again, allowing her to understand the America of her youth. Her series looks at small details–an overgrown lawn, homes is disrepair, the backyards of her youth–allowing her to witness the profound reality of the small town she once called home.
Melissa Kreider (b.1993) is an MFA student at the University of Iowa and holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Akron. Melissa’s work examines sites of sexual violence against women and how the justice system archives these reports as well as the evidence that is collected. Melissa explores these subjects by traveling to the addresses pulled from public police logs across the United States and steadily gaining access to police evidence rooms where backlogged rape kits are stored. Melissa is the founder and curator of Don’t Smile, an online space dedicated to showcasing photography by women artists.
©Melissa Kreider, For Sale, 2014, from You Can’t Go Home Again
You Can’t Go Home Again
There are 38 towns, townships, or cities named Springfield in the nation. You Can’t Go Home Again is made in Springfield Township in Northeast Ohio. This examination of the small town in which I was raised is cathartic and allows me to understand how, as an adult, I relate to the environment with which I was once familiar and can now barely recognize.
You Can’t Go Home Again not only documents the place I grew up feeling an urge to leave, but it questions whether important symbols of suburbia and North American Identity exist in the way that most North Americans perceive them. The images explore the re-shaping of the suburban landscape as I know it and the small details that manifest themselves in signage, windows, even something as simple as someone’s yard become more vital than ever in understanding a township that went red this election season.
©Melissa Kreider, Stripped, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, 2678, Ohio, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Construction Halted, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Short Street, 2014, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Zza’s, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Small Business, 2014, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Church Street, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Memorial, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Dave’s Darn Near Anything, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Dee Street 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Chappy’s, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, Keep Out, 2015, from You Can’t Go Home Again
©Melissa Kreider, From Lake Road from You Can’t Go Home Again
Posts on Lenscratch may not be reproduced without the permission of the Lenscratch staff and the photographer.
Recommended
-
Arnold Newman Prize: C. Rose Smith: Scenes of Self: Redressing PatriarchyNovember 24th, 2025
-
Celebrating 20 Years of Critical Mass: Cathy Cone (2023) and Takeisha Jefferson (2024)October 1st, 2025
-
Celebrating 20 Years of Critical Mass: George Nobechi (2021) and Ingrid Weyland (2022)September 30th, 2025
-
Celebrating 20 Years of Critical Mass: Amy Friend (2019) and Andrew Feiler (2020)September 29th, 2025
-
Celebrating 20 Years of Critical Mass: Jennifer McClure (2017) and JP Terlizzi (2018)September 28th, 2025
![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](http://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
