The photographs mediate between the house as an architectural entity and the author/artist of the house as lived. The front is labeled 'FRONT,' shown looming above us, putting us in the boy's shoes; FRONT ENTRY is in heavy shadows, and hardly welcomes a further approach. But ELECTRICAL BOX designates a detail that tells us something about the photographer: it is not labeled STAIRWAY or WINDOW, which the photograph more obviously shows. DINING ROOM shows us where the eyes went at meal-time, to the wallpaper that represents an Italianate park, with feathery trees, classical statuary, and distant vistas. The electrical box and the classical garden form a portrait of the artist as a young boy. What ordinary house contains a laboratory? We see an image of its ceiling, with vintage pipes and electrical conduits; and looking down from a staircase at its closed door, suggesting a forbidden space. The most interesting image is of GAS DRYERS, a domestic archaism in an age of automatic dryers, which could just be a curiosity until it is brought to life by the text. What the text underscores is the dangerousness of the house to a restless boy, dreaming of distant vistas in the DINING ROOM, wondering, in LABORATORY, at what would happen if ...

In an email, Tom Rose writes: 'The house has haunted me all my life.' That is part of the truth. The other part is this: Tom Rose has haunted the house all his life. What he has achieved in this work is the certainty that he will go on haunting the house for as long as the work exists, whatever happens to the house. The boy will survive the man, but the man will live on, through the art, in the memorialized boy whom the house transformed into the man he became. The house on West Scott Street, for better or worse, is part of what he is.

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