Winner of the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letter Award for
Photography
Love, Daddy: Letters from My Father examines the complexities of
father-and-son relationships through letters and photographs. Willie
Morris wrote scores of letters to his only son, David Rae Morris, from
the mid-1970s until Willie's death in 1999. From David Rae's
perspective, his father was often emotionally disconnected and lived a
peculiar lifestyle, often staying out carousing well into the night. But
Willie was an eloquent and accomplished writer and began to write his
son long, loving, and supportive letters when David Rae was still in
high school. An aspiring photographer, David Rae was confused and
befuddled by his father's warring personalities and began photographing
Willie using the camera as a buffer to protect him and his emotions.
The collection begins in early 1976 and continues for more than twenty
years as David Rae moved about the country, living in New York,
Massachusetts, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Minnesota, before
finally settling in Louisiana. "All the while my father was writing to
me I somehow managed to save his letters," David Rae writes. "I left
them in storage and in boxes and in piles of clutter on desks and in
basements. They were kind, offering a love that he found difficult to
express openly and directly. He simply was more comfortable
communicating through letters."
The letters cover topics ranging from writing, the weather, Willie's
return to Mississippi in 1980, the Ole Miss football season, and local
town gossip to the fleas on the dog to just life and how it's lived.
Likewise, the photographs are portraits, documentary images of daily
life, dinners, outings, and private moments. Together they narrate and
illuminate the complexities of one family relationship, and how, for
better or worse, that love endures the passage of time.