The House I Once Called Home.

Photographs and text by Duane Michals.

Enitharmon Editions, London, 2003. 60 pp., numerous black-and-white illustrations, 8½x10¾".

Duane Michals (born 1932) was seventy when, soon after the death of his mother, he returned to his native Pittsburgh to revisit the house in which he was born and brought up. Its deteriorated state proved a poignant focus for his memories, prompting reveries on mortality and the succession of generations that found form as a sequence of photographs and poetic texts. In The House I Once Called Home, the interaction of words and images provides a sensitive and moving account of one man's journey through life. Michals creates a highly affecting layering of time by superimposing new photographs onto much older images taken in the same location during his earlier life there. Michals is one of America's most consistently individual and original voices in photography. He rejected the documentary emphasis of much of the work that preceded him, instead using the camera to explore the workings of the mind. Michals sought to overcome what he deemed to be the limitations of the single photographic image, both by writing directly onto his prints and by creating narrative sequences of images; these innovative techniques proved immensely influential. Powerfully intimate in its focus, The House I Once Called Home demonstrates conclusively the possibility of exposing universal truths through the most personal events. It is a work to which every reader will be able to relate through the filter of his or her own experience, and which will undoubtedly accrue new meanings as we ourselves return to it at different stages in our lives.

Michals' genius at combining photographs and text in service of a very personal narrative is wonderfully evident in this rare little find from a London publisher. The book is a reflection on a return trip to the house of his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, where he was born seventy years ago. "The spirits of my saint and sinner kin, spin around me like dervish dancers in a circle, happy the sight of me again, and that I had not forgotten them." And also, "Something is finished, the shadows of these empty rooms have bequeathed me the reality of death. This legacy has left me diminished and bereft in a way I cannot express. Although Sonny has gone with all the rest, he still lives with every breah I breathe."—Duane Michals.

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