Where London Stood: The House I Once Called Home

The House I Once Called Home: A Photographic Memoir with Verse by Duane Michals (London, 2003).

From the title page:

"This abandoned wooden box is the cabinet where my family's curiosities are stored. I now reopen all its shuttered windows and unlock all its boarded doors. Sonny returns to the house of ghosts, where he was born seventy years ago."

Image removed, permissions pending.

The book's pages are not numbered, so it's a little difficult to say exactly where this picture comes from -- I think that it's on page 7. There are several sets of images like this, in which Michals fades pictures from Sonny's visit into pictures from the past. The one that I chose to put up here was easiest to put online with only a little formatting.

It's a slim volume but I still haven't digested it entirely. I'll post comments as they occur to me.

Posted at Oct 25/2006 07:22PM:
David Platt: It's been a while now, since I first posted this page, and I've only just now had the opportunity to revisit the book.

My initial impulse was to skip over the poetry. One of my colleagues says that she gets everything she needs from the photographs alone. At first, I agreed. However, the words do add something very real to the pictures -- often they make explicit an undercurrent of regret that one might read into the pictures of people sitting by themselves.

Oddly, I think that the closing lines of the book are optimistic. From pages near the end:

When I indulge the whims of nostalgia,
And daydream bittersweet scenarios
Of what might have been,
These foolish phantoms of regret vanish in the clear light of reality,
and everything is as it should be.
Our little lives are thus --
Perfect in their pain and happiness.