Patricia Houghton Clarke is thinking about what an exhibition could be.
Not a gallery with white walls and tasteful distance. Something rawer: a place that once held industry, the residue of work, the logic of production. A place that remembers bodies even after the bodies have gone home. Built and run by people who came here for a better life and then spent that life inside rooms like this, doing the unseen work that makes other lives look clean.
The visitor won’t be allowed the usual posture: stand back, interpret, leave unchanged. She is moving toward experience. Toward making the viewer enter the material instead of simply viewing it. Toward an environment where the work lands in the body, not just in the mind.
Mostly, she uses a Holga.
The kind of inexpensive plastic camera people dismiss as a toy, and she does it on purpose.
You can tell when an artist has chosen a tool because it helps her behave.
The Holga behaves in its own way. It softens what you thought would be sharp. It lets the edges fall away. It does not pretend the world is clean. The frame can feel like a memory feels: partial, luminous in places, imperfect where the mind refused to hold everything. That imperfection is not a style. It’s a truth about looking.
And then Patricia does something even more disarming. She turns the camera toward her own house.
Not house as in address. House as in lineage. Family. The private network of blood and marriage and accident that most of us treat as unphotographable because we are afraid of what will be revealed if we look too long.
The work insists: the personal archive is also a national archive. Not poetically. Practically. It contains the bargains and exclusions that made the present possible. It contains who was welcomed, who was managed, who was punished for being present.
In An American Girl, the subject is a child, but the material is a country.
© Patricia Houghton Clarke, Edie Rei from An American Girl
I imagine Patricia with Edie Rei the way I imagine her with anyone she photographs: patient, direct, refusing the easy story. A grandchild is not a concept, not a metaphor, not an emblem. She is a person with a gaze that will eventually look back at all of this. A person who will live inside these narratives, whether she wants to or not. The pictures, in that sense, are not only portraits. They are a form of inheritance made visible.
It would be easy to make a sentimental book from this premise — the kind of family project that collapses into nostalgia, the kind of American story that polishes itself until it can be displayed without friction.
Patricia does the opposite. She puts the family on the worktable.
A worktable is where you make things and mend things. A worktable is where you lay out the pieces without pretending they were never broken. On a worktable you can rearrange. You can re-see. You can hold two contradictory facts at once: love and harm, belonging and exclusion, pride and shame. But you cannot wish the materials into different materials.
©Patricia Houghton Clarke, An American Girl
On this particular worktable: Irish Catholic famine refugees. Pre-colonial English settlers, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Native lineage reaching back to the Mohawk and Pequot tribes, and an Indian school in the 1850s co-founded by a government agent and his wife. And then the present, where the family reconfigures again: mixed race Black, Native American, white European, Chinese American stepfather.
The quilt metaphor is used so often it starts to sound cozy. But quilts are made of scraps. They warm you, but they also show you what had to be cut up. What had to be pieced together because whole cloth was never offered.
What moves me is not that she knows these stories.
What moves me is that she is willing to lay them out without turning them into a verdict.
The ethics are in the posture: the photographer is not outside the family, reporting on it. She is inside it, and she is also the audience. She does not tell the story that implicates the fewest people. She tells the story knowing she is one of the people it implicates. The teller is inside the material. That is the only position from which this kind of truth is possible.
That is what the space needs to be. A room that remembers labor. A room where the work arrives without protection, and the viewer arrives without permission to stay comfortable.
The exhibition is not finished yet. But the worktable is already covered. A country that won't do the same work doesn't stop having the materials. It just stops being able to see them.
Editing is legitimate. Exclusion is a lie.