Alec Soth

When I was a kid, Chanhassen, Minnesota still felt like the county. We lived in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse surrounded by cornfields on one side and woods on the other. In the years since, those forests and fields have been turned into suburban developments — but not our home. The people who bought our house when I was a teenager eventually sold it to our nearest neighbor: Prince. (No, I never met him. All I ever saw was his security guards on snowmobiles.)

Prince eventually tore down the house. But last summer, when I went out there with my five-year-old son, I was happy to discover that our old barn was still standing. When I was a five-year-old, that barn was my castle, my retreat. In the years since, it’s still a place I go when I close my eyes. I cannot tell you how weird and wonderful it was to see my own son standing there, like he’d walked right into the kingdom of my imagination.