The House with Round Windows  These images were taken in the mid-70s during several extended trips back to the house where I grew up in Beaver Falls, PA. The house plays a significant role in much of the poetry and poetics of W. D. Snodgrass. This series is the basis for a memoir in photographs and text I’ve completed of the family entitled ALBUM.

In the text of ALBUM, I note the following in regards to the house:

I grew up in the house with the round windows, as it was known in the town. Point of fact, the windows weren’t round at all, they were curved. As were the corners of the orange brick house. There was no question the house was unusual. In addition to the round -- or curved -- windows, there were the stained glass windows, the dormers, the stunted umbrella trees on the large corner lot. The very presence of the three-story house, in a neighborhood of small frame houses, was out of the ordinary. Accordingly, in the Beaver Falls , Pennsylvania , round was close enough.     

The following is an excerpt from the memoir about the photographs in relation to my brother's work.

In the beginning, to give credence and authority to what I was doing – maybe to justify it to myself, to make it seem worthwhile; maybe to make me seem worthwhile – I wanted to photograph the house in relation to my brother’s poetry. W. D. Snodgrass had won critical acclaim and public accolades for his intimate portrayals of the deadliness of his family -- the foundings of what came to be called Confessional poetry, influencing Lowell and Sexton and others. True, De had never lived in the house for any length of time. A few years in high school; a year or so after he came back from the Navy. But in W. D. Snodgrass’s poetry, the house embodied everything he deplored and condemned about his family, and the world in general – the root of his ethics and his poetics.

The Venetian blinds are drawn;

Inside, it is always dark and still.

Always upon some errand, one by one,

They go from room to room, vaguely, in the wan

Half-light, deprived of will.

In photographing the house, I hoped to reveal something of my brother’s torment and intent. But after working on the project for a couple of years, the series had grown into something more. The experience of exploring the imagery of the house had proven to be an object lesson of its own; though the premises were often the same as in my brother’s work, I found I reached different conclusions. Eventually I had to own up that it wasn’t his story at all, or rather, it wasn’t his alone. It was my story. Their story.

The photographs are approximately 10” x 10” carbon-pigment images, printed on 13” x 17” archival Somerset Velvet unenhanced watercolor paper.