Please, Don't Leave Me

By Kelsey Smith

Please, Don't Leave Me is the first photo book from Middle Georgia film photographer Kelsey Smith. Over three years he photographed his hometown of Macon, Georgia on film, mostly Lomography Color Negative 800, building a documentary series about childhood, memory, and the quiet disappearance of ordinary Southern life. Smith shoots the suburban American landscape the way it gets remembered rather than the way it actually looked. Carnival lights at night, hard midday sun, the gold hour right before something ends. Fifty of those photographs are collected here, printed in saturated, cinematic pastel and threaded with short passages of his own writing. The work caught the eye of filmmaker and photographer Peter McKinnon, who featured it on his YouTube channel and said of one frame, "This shot is so sick. I would put it in my office." Lomography ran a feature interview on the project, "Magic in the Mundane," and the series has shown in New York galleries. Available in softcover and hardcover. Please, don't leave me. The title is what every frame is asking of the place it was taken in.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0C8C56VZH
• ISBN13: 9798211148772
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Blurb
• Length: 60 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 8.0" x 10.0"