House Music project

In my twenties, during the late 1970s, I began an open-ended series of unposed portraits of the people around me. Inevitably, over time these began to coalesce loosely into a narrative. A long excerpt, from about 1987 to 2014, has become the basis for this series, some of which is shown here.

These images ultimately build a story that spans a generation: I marry, start a family, lose parents, watch my children grow up, and see them leave home. As it happened, however, those twenty-six years provided me with a remarkable cast of characters whose striking combination of anxiety, ferocity, and charisma ultimately gave this work its life.

House Music from Dewi Lewis Publishing with an essay by Alison Nordström

“House Music is a classic, more Tolstoy than Virginia Woolf, its scope broader, more philosophical than any photobook in recent memory. It’s a masterly portrayal of intimacy within a family as its members traverse through the unsettling and unsettled spaces of childhood and adolescence, the absurdities and doublethink of middle age and the tyranny of senescence.”

-Madhu Joseph John, Photobook Journal

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From the publisher:

Asked what he wished to convey in his poetry, Robert Lowell once said “I want to break your heart.” This book is nothing if not heart breaking, heartbreakingly wistful and poignant, heartbreaking in the way that the inexorable passage of time, with its inevitable losses and recuperations, can be heartbreaking.

Spanning almost thirty years, House Music chronicles seemingly quotidian moments in the lives of multiple generations of the photographer’s extended family. Training the camera on those closest to him, Charles Rozier brings the sensibility of a street photographer to his own domestic setting. This is a body of work that transcends convention and the particularities of Rozier’s own circumstances to create a story that speaks to universal experience.

House Music underscores the uncanny in the everyday, presenting a series of suddenly meaningful tableaux framed by the stage of ordinary surroundings. Circumstance and familiarity have made the photographer invisible – in very few images do we see any recognition of his actions by his subjects – but we are deeply aware of his presence. Though Rozier does not appear in these images, House Music is a self-portrait. It is also a book about beginnings and endings, over a long generation in which everything has changed, including the photographer himself.

Essay by Alison Nordström

124 pages, 28 duotone and 38 color plates 
245mm x 222mm
ISBN: 978-1-911306-55-9

House Music can be found at specialty bookstores, or ordered directly from

www.dewilewis-usa.com (North America)

www.dewilewis.com (UK/Europe)