The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography [1 ed.] 9780367543402, 9780367544058, 9781003089148

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The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography

By carefully conceptualising the domestic in relation to the self and the photographic, this book offers a unique contribution to both photography theory and criticism, and life-narrative studies. Jane Simon brings together two critical practices into a new conversation, arguing that artists who harness domestic photography can advance a more expansive understanding of the autobiographical. Exploring the idea that self-representation need not equate to self-portraiture or involve the human form, artists from around the globe are examined, including Rinko Kawauchi, Catherine Opie, Dayanita Singh, Moyra Davey, and Elina Brotherus, who maintain a personal gaze at domestic detail. By treating the representation of interiors, domestic objects, and the very practice of photographic seeing and framing as autobiographical gestures, this book reframes the relationship between interiors and exteriors, public and private, and insists on the importance of domestic interiors to understandings of the self and photography. The book will be of interest to scholars working in photographic history and theory, art history, and visual studies. Jane Simon is a senior lecturer in photography and film at Macquarie University, Australia.

Routledge History of Photography

This series publishes research monographs and edited collections focusing on the history and theory of photography. These original, scholarly books may take an art historical, visual studies, or material studies approach. Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia Defacing the Enemy Denis Skopin Diverse Voices in Photographic Albums “These Are Our Stories” Edited by Mary Trent and Kris Belden-Adams How Photography Changed Philosophy Daniel Rubinstein Eroticism and Photography in 1930s French Magazines Risqué Shop Windows Alix Agret Photographing, Exploring and Exhibiting Russian Turkestan Central Asia on Display Inessa Kouteinikova Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement Rotem Rozental The Photographic Invention of Whiteness The Visual Cultures of White Atlantic Worlds Stephanie Polsky The Market Photo Workshop in South Africa and the ‘Born Free’ Generation Remaking Histories Julie Bonzon For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-History-of-Photography/ book-series/RHOP

The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography Jane Simon

Designed cover image: My Mother at Home Watching Television (2001) From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . . ©Takahiro Kaneyama, Courtesy of the artist First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Jane Simon The right of Jane Simon to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-0-367-54340-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54405-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08914-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003089148 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: photography, domesticity, interiors

vi viii 1

2 Domestic things: animating domestic objects and the still life

18

3 Domestic time: diaries, habits, durations

56

4 Domestic selves: relationality and slow portraiture

88

5 Domestic display: proximity and the handheld

119



150

Conclusion: windows, doorways, footpaths

Index157

Figures

1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 .7 3 3.8

Catherine Opie, Eleanor & Megan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1998, C-print, 40 × 50 inches (101.6 × 127 cm) 2 Sian Bonnell, Groundings #1, 1995–1997 19 Sian Bonnell Beachclean from when the domestic meets the wild, 1999 23 Sian Bonnell, Glowing #33, 2003–2005 24 Sian Bonnell, Disciplines #18, 2014 26 Elaine Campaner, Viewing Lounge, 2017, original in colour, pigment ink print 28 Elaine Campaner, Stockmarket (Small), 2008, original in colour, pigment ink print 29 Elaine Campaner, Water Cooling Towers (Autumn), 2017, original in colour, pigment ink print 30 Motoyuki Daifu, Still Life, 2012–2015 33 Motoyuki Daifu, Still Life, 2012–2015, original in colour 34 Motoyuki Daifu, Still Life, 2012–2015, original in colour 35 Hong Hao, My Things Book Keeping of 07B, 2008, scanned objects, digital c-print, 120 × 210 cm (47–1/4” × 82–11/16”) 38 Hong Hao, My Things No. 5, 2002, scanned objects, digital c-print, 120 × 210 cm (47–1/4” × 82–11/16”) 39 Zoe Leonard, Analogue, 1998–2009 (detail), 412 C-prints + gelatin silver prints, each print 11 × 11 in. (28 × 28 cm) 42 Zoe Leonard, Habitation Is a Habit45 Moyra Davey, Paw, 2003, C-print 61 Moyra Davey, Dictionaries, 1996, C-print 62 Elina Brotherus, Annonciation 10, 2011, 30 × 42 cm, pigment ink print, from the series Annonciation, 2009–2013 65 Elina Brotherus, 2012, Calendar page facsimile, pigment ink print, from the series Annonciation, 2009–2013, original in colour 66 Elina Brotherus, Annonciation 19, 2012, 50 × 59 cm, pigment ink print, from the series Annonciation, 2009–2013 68 Elina Brotherus, Annonciation 25, Medication, 2012, 30 × 45 cm, pigment ink print, from the series Annonciation, 2009–2013, original in colour 69 Anna Fox, Untitled from the series Cockroach Diary 1996–9974 Anna Fox, Untitled from the series 41 Hewitt Road, 1996–1999 76

Figures vii 3.9 4.1 .2 4 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12

5.1 5.2 5.3 .4 5 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2

Anna Fox, Untitled from the series My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words, 1999 78 Nigel Shafran, 4 January, 2000 Three bean soup, cauliflower vegetable cheese. Morning coffee and croissants, from the Washing-up series, 2000, original in colour 91 Nigel Shafran, From Ruthbook, 1992–2004, original in colour 93 Nigel Shafran, From Ruthbook, 1992–200494 Nigel Shafran, From Ruth on the Phone, 1995–2004, original in colour 94 Nigel Shafran, From Dark Rooms, 201697 Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from Cui Cui, 2005 100 Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from Cui Cui, 2005 100 Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from as it is, 2020 102 Takahiro Kaneyama, My Family in Our House, 2007, original in colour, From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . .106 Takahiro Kaneyama, My Mother at Home Watching Television, 2001, From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . .108 Takahiro Kaneyama, My Mother at Home, 2013, original in colour, From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . .109 Takahiro Kaneyama, My Mother with my Grandmother’s Daily Tear-off Calendar Showing The Last Day My Grandmother Was Home, 2009, original in colour, From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . .111 Photograph of Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan exhibited on a kitchen table in a Sydney home, 2022 127 Photograph of Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan exhibited on a kitchen table in a Sydney home, 2022 128 Emilia Hesse/Steidl, Dayanita Singh wearing her “Pocket Museum,” 2021, original in colour 130 Simryn Gill, Selection from Inland, 2009, original in colour 132 Moyra Davey, Detail from Empties, 2017, 55 archival inkjet prints on epson enhanced matte paper, aluminium tape, postage, ink Each 30.5 × 45.7 cm, overall dimensions 155 × 508 cm (variable) 136 Moyra Davey, Cut Books, 2014, C-print with tape, postage, ink (original in colour) 137 Catherine Opie, Me and Nika by Julie, 2005, C-print, 24 × 20 inches (61 × 50.8 cm) original in colour 151 Catherine Opie, Sunday Morning Breakfast, 2004, C-print, 20 × 16 inches (50.8 × 40.6 cm) 153

Acknowledgements

The Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University has provided a wonderful environment for me to complete the research and writing of this book. The intellectual kinship of the Interiors Research Group at Macquarie University has provided steady feedback, inspiration, and laughter, thanks to Nicole Matthews, Jeannine Baker, Peter Doyle, Joanne Faulkner, Michelle Hamadache, Jessica Kirkness, Jillian Kramer, Julie-Anne Long, Willa McDonald, Karen Pearlman, Kate Rossmanith, and Helen Wolfenden. I’m also particularly grateful to Julie MacKenzie, Nicole Matthews, Krystal Seigerman, and Kate Manlik for their generous feedback and insights on drafts. I am grateful to Meenaatchi Saverimuttu for research assistance in the early stages of this research. Conversations and collaborations with Mio Bryce have been invaluable. I am thankful for the Faculty of Arts publication subsidy grant and the expert advice of Bridget Griffen-Foley. Part of the research and writing of this book was supported by the Macquarie University Outside Studies Programme. A period as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Comparative Culture at Sophia University in Tokyo provided the space and time to develop some of the key ideas in this book. Macquarie University’s Faculty of Arts Research Office has provided excellent support, and I’m particularly appreciative of the vital feedback Christine Boman has provided over many years. I am especially thankful to the artists who have agreed to let me reproduce their photographs in this book: Sian Bonnell, Elina Brotherus, Elaine Campaner’s estate, Motoyuki Daifu, Moyra Davey, Anna Fox, Simryn Gill, Hong Hao, Takahiro Kaneyama, Rinko Kawauchi, Zoe Leonard, Catherine Opie, Nigel Shafran, Dayanita Singh, and Emilia Hesse/Steidl. Thank you also to the gallerists and studio assistants who have patiently answered my many emails: Nao Amino, Jonas Schenk (Galerie Gisela Capitain), Nicolas Linnert, Dannie Andrews, Allan Cooley (Gallery 9), Vincent Wilcke (Pace Gallery), and Elizabeth Gartner and Angel Alvarado (Regen Projects). I am very grateful to Isabella Vitti, who offered thoughtful feedback and unfailing guidance as editor, and to Loredana Zeddita, who provided expert assistance in the final stages of preparing the manuscript. I also owe deep gratitude to the peer reviewers for their encouragement and their advice, which helped me sharpen the scope of this project. A few pages in Chapter 3 rework a section of an earlier publication, ‘Domestic Details in the Photographic Artist’s Book’, The Blue Notebook: Journal for Artists’ Books 6, no. 2 (2012): 7–14. A  small section of Chapter  4 draws on earlier published material in “Contemplating Life: Rinko Kawauchi’s Autobiography of Seeing,” in Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, ed. Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty (New York:

Acknowledgements ix Routledge, 2018), 119–31. I thank the publishers for permission to rework this material. I am also grateful for the earlier editorial guidance on these two publications from Sarah Bodman, Natalya Lusty, and Donna West Brett. I thank my parents, family, and friends for their unfailing encouragement, which has had a profound role in enabling the writing of this book. I am deeply grateful for your support. Finally, this book is dedicated with much love to Julie, Willa, and Alice, who have provided a warm, joyful, and sustaining domestic space from which to write this book.

1 Introduction Photography, domesticity, interiors

Domesticity, life narratives, photography In 1991, Peter Galassi curated a major exhibition called Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.1 This exhibition was positioned by MoMA as representing a diverse cross section of American life at home. It included artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, James Casebere, PhilipLorca diCorcia, Tina Barney, and William Eggleston. In the accompanying book, Galassi proposes that artists began to photograph at home not because it was important, in the sense that political issues are important, but because it was there – the one place that is easier to get to than the street. After they had worked for a while, many also realized that the overlooked opportunity was also a rich one, full of uncharted mysteries.2 This comment that artists focused on home life “because it was there” and “not because it was important” [my emphasis added] fails to appreciate interior spaces as potent visual sites ready to mine and crucial to observe and document. This type of framing, as well as the elision of queer home life in Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, fuelled Catherine Opie (US, b. 1961) to head out on a road trip. She set forth with her dog and a large format 8 × 10 camera. The result of this road trip was a series called Domestic (1995–1998). This series focused attention on lesbian couples and families in their interior settings and homes. In these pictures, Opie focuses on the daily domestic: her subjects are in lived-in spaces, and Opie’s photographs document personal moments with great care. Couples hug, sometimes gazing intently into Opie’s camera; parents watch over their children; housemates sit around; and cats and dogs hang about. In one photograph, Miggi  & Ilene, Los Angeles, California (1995), a couple is in a large pool. One holds the other who floats, pregnant belly emerging from the blue water. In Emily, Sts & Becky, Durham, North Carolina (1998), the three subjects relax around a table with a bottle of Jim Beam in the centre, one eating take-away out of a plastic container. These are portraits of families in an expansive sense. Opie isn’t just picturing domesticity in terms of couples or a couple with a child, but lesbian households of various configurations. Couches, kitchen tables, children’s toys, coffee mugs, and other domestic paraphernalia surround Opie’s lesbian subjects. Coffee tables, washing machines, a list of household rules bulldog clipped to a window, and a corner of a bed are also included in the series as a set of still lifes.3 These portraits and still lifes, taken together, document a diverse range of lesbian DOI: 10.4324/9781003089148-1

2  Introduction subjects in terms of age, race, and class, with each household represented in their own home setting, living their lives. In one photograph, which evokes a feeling of longing for intimacy and domestic comfort, Opie takes the photograph through a window smudged with fingerprints, gazing at a couple who are gazing at each other (see Figure 1.1).4 There are multiple frames in this photograph: the photograph is taken through one windowpane and captures the interior of the room as well as the exterior through the window on the other side of the room. This means that the photograph enables the viewer to both look in and look out at the same time. Instead of the window operating as a threshold between inside and outside, here the windows are used to show multiple layers of inside and outside. These ambiguities of interior and exterior are shrouded in warm light. This is a scene of reverence and a version of queer domestic life that remained invisible in Galassi’s exhibition. Opie’s Domestic series and her series In and Around Home (2004–2005), which I turn to later in this book, are both implicitly speaking back to Galassi’s figuring of political spaces as outside of the home as well as the gaps in the exhibition’s depictions of domestic life in America.5 Opie’s photography makes clear the imbrications of the political in

Figure 1.1 Catherine Opie, Eleanor & Megan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1998, C-print, 40 × 50 inches (101.6 × 127  cm) © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples

Introduction 3 the domestic realm, using photography to visualise the messy divisions between interior and exterior worlds and the ever-shifting boundaries of where the outside ends and the inside begins. I bring the domestic to the fore in this book to show that it was never merely background. Like the multiple layers of interiority and exteriority made visible in Opie’s Eleanor and Megan, Minneapolis, Minnesota (see Figure 1.1), I show how the domestic complicates the distinction between background and foreground, the inside and outside, the private and public. At the heart of this book is an insistence that domestic moments and spaces play a key role in photographic histories and contemporary photographic art practice. And, in conjunction, that photography has played a key role in challenging many of the divisions between inside and outside, private and public, individual and collective.6 I shift focus away from public spaces and dramatic spectacle towards the equally complex realm of the domestic: a contradictory site that is a crucial component of selfrepresentation in photography. The photographic works in this book, when considered together, function as a set of visual prompts to think differently about what counts as life narrative, what constitutes the personal, and how domestic photography can ask us to think differently about both the self and the domestic interior. As Anna Poletti has observed, the tools used to produce stories of one’s life – the camera, the shoebox, the mobile phone – are not mediators that simply reflect the inner life story of the storyteller but rather are part of an assemblage that has agency in enabling, limiting, and shaping the telling of stories. To put it another way, media forms are part of the process of making life, not just recording it.7 Photography and the camera don’t capture or represent a life. Rather, as I show in this book, the very practice of photography unsettles understandings of what constitutes a life story and what constitutes life more broadly.8 Photography also has a key role not only in influencing understandings of the self but also in constituting the self. As the examples discussed in the following chapters demonstrate, the gaze of the camera can shift our usual patterns of recognition, and unsettle or expand our understanding of self-narrative. Defining the domestic In this book, I position the domestic as both a site of possibilities and constraints. My approach to the domestic extends upon work done by scholars who refuse to position domesticity and the domestic either as inherently conservative and oppressive or as space of radical potential and freedom.9 The domestic is an unstable zone of gestures, traces, things, and objects, which is shaped by social and material relations both within and beyond home spaces.10 And photography is uniquely placed to recalibrate ways of thinking about this zone and its connection to the self and self-representation. Almost a decade ago, I attended a conference about interiors. I’d given a paper about domestic interiors in the photographs of Takashi Yasumura.11 This paper marked the beginnings of my puzzling over why I felt the domestic in photography deserved close attention. Sitting in the audience of a subsequent plenary discussion, surrounded by architecture and interior design academics and other interdisciplinary types like myself, a discussion began about the word domestic. “I  hate that word,” the person next to me said loudly, “it implies tame-ness and docility.” No one in the room disputed him; the conversation moved on, and I sat there mulling over his claim and why it provoked me.12 The domestic is many things, but it is neither tame nor docile.13 The domestic is not cut off from politics, from emotion, from the eventful, nor from the violent or the

4  Introduction unpredictable. It has elements of all those things; at the same time, it is filled with the habitual, the banal, and the minor hum of everyday life. Western histories and imaginings of the domestic interior have tended to idealise the home as a static and recognisable site, one that operates as a space of safety and protection from exterior dangers.14 This ubiquitous image of home as a safe, knowable, fixed space does not align with the variable range of experiences ranging from the supportive to the oppressive, and which may elicit, as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling describe, “spatialized feelings of belonging and alienation, desire and fear.”15 At the same time, the transnational flow of people, due to displacement and migration, challenges fixed or static conceptions of domestic home life.16 A wealth of literature on the relationship between home and homelessness – and experiences of “homelessness at home” – also positions the domestic as a complex and heterogeneous realm, again offering insight into the diverse meanings and experiences attached to home and domestic life.17 Writers from the disciplines of architecture, critical geography, literary studies, media studies, gender studies, and queer studies have contributed much to the idea of the domestic interior and the home as porous, neither neatly private nor public.18 As Blunt and Dowling articulate, “[h]ome is not separated from public, political worlds but is constituted through them: the domestic is created through the extradomestic and vice versa.”19 These understandings of domestic space as porous, as rippling outwards, or as a permeable portal, extend upon decades of feminist and postcolonial thought that have contributed to complex understandings of the domestic as entangled with ideas, expectations, performances, and practices around gender, class, and race. For example, while the domestic has been understood as a site of subjugation in feminist thought focused on the specific experiences of white, western, middle-class women, by contrast, Patricia Hill Collins has argued that motherhood and personal domestic space provided a realm for African-American women to challenge racist ideas and to teach children about everyday practices of resistance.20 bell hooks, in a related vein, insists that having access to a space away from the racism and aggression of more public realms locates domestic space for African-Americans as “a crucial site for organising, for forming political solidarity.”21 Both hooks and Collins highlight the political affordances of the domestic as a space of respite and potential through caring and everyday resistance. Like hooks and Collins, Stephen Vider, writing about the history of queer experiences of home and domesticity in the United States, articulates the home as a crucial site for community and political formation. However, Vider also emphasises that, while vital, the domestic home has also been a complicated and contradictory site for queer lives. He describes home as “a site of constraints and a site of self-expression, a site of isolation and a site of deep connection, a site of secrecy and a site of recognition.”22 The experience of home and domestic life is a variable one in this view: home space can enable the development of kinship networks and provide a stage for experimentation with, and resistance of, sexual and gender norms. At the same time, these experiences of home unfold in negotiation with social scripts that draw from cultural norms, hierarchies, and normative visions. With this approach, Vider joins other researchers who offer a queer perspective on domestic space as a key site of meaning-making, shifting attention from public space as the main site of community formation and political activity to attend to the connections, politics, and everyday practices of the queer interior.23 Other scholarly work has addressed counter-knowledges produced in the domestic. The domestic, for example, has been increasingly recognised as a crucial site for historical knowledge.24 The importance of domestic spaces and objects both as and for archival

Introduction 5 practices has also received attention. The dense connections between domesticity, media history, and practices have been laid out.26 And, most recently, in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of domesticity and home life has received revived attention as people navigate changing work conditions and periods of isolation at home.27 25

Forming domestic selves Much has also been written about the complicated and sometimes antagonistic relationship between art and the domestic. Christopher Reed’s edited collection Not at Home: the suppression of domesticity in modern art and architecture, published in 1996, outlines how modern art critics and artists writing about avant-garde practices repeatedly positioned domesticity as “the antithesis of art.”28 This contempt is at least in part, according to Susan Fraiman, an effect of the coding of domestic spaces, habits, and routines as feminine and associated with women.29 However, particularly in the past ten years, there has been increasing attention to the importance of home within visual art practices.30 Ideas about domesticity and home life have become a key focus in visual art and, in broader terms, the tension between everyday life and art has also become a more central focus.31 Critical approaches to domestic craft and the use of craft techniques (typically associated with home life) such as cross-stitch and knitting have been utilised for political messaging.32 There has also been important work done that revisits feminist art practices from the 1970s and 1980s with a refocused attention on art that engages with interior spaces, issues of domestic labour, and home life.33 In this book, I extend upon these connections between domestic life and art. I suggest that the domestic, as a space of both comfort and conflict that is invariably laced with the tensions of everyday life, is significant for practices of self-representation. Photographic representations of the domestic help to constitute selves. Photographs of domestic interiors don’t merely reflect reality but actively produce new conceptions of domestic interiority. Similarly, bodies and selves are not only mediated through photographic technology but rather photographic technology produces us as subjects.34 My own arguments about the domestic interior and the self in photographic art place emphasis on images as productive, as constituting – not just reflecting – ideas about the self and the domestic. While I argue for the importance of domestic spaces in photographic self-representation, I do not position the domestic interior as inherently connected to individual selfhood.35 The domestic interior is connected to subjective interiority, but this is not a straightforward relationship; I  do not see the domestic interior as a reflection of psychological interiority.36 In other words, the domestic doesn’t necessarily represent a symbiotic relationship between the home and the self. While the human subject leaves a “subtle imprint” on the domestic interior within which they live, the interior is more than a straightforward reflection of that human life: it “also follows a life-cycle of its own that can be discussed independently of its inhabitant/s.”37 In other words, the significance of the domestic interior, while rich in what it can reveal about its human occupants, also has a significance beyond the individual human subject: it also plays a key role in the life stories of objects.38 I extend upon debates about domesticity and ideas about the self by putting them into conversation with debates about photography and examples of contemporary photographic art. While there is increasing attention to the complexity of family photography, the role of domestic space in photography more broadly is often seen as less crucial

6  Introduction than the role of public spaces in photography. While there have been many scholarly forays into domestic photography, these discussions, insightful as they are, tend to focus on family photography and vernacular snapshots rather than the realm of art practice, which is my concern here.39 I show, through a series of close readings of contemporary art photography, that the contradictions, ambiguities, and intensities of the domestic have much to offer understandings of life narrative, self-representation, and everyday life. Critical proximity A central argument of this book is that photographs that engage with the domestic generate ideas about domestic spaces and selves, the role of photography in reframing attention to domestic spaces and selves, and the relationality between the self, objects, the domestic, and photography. The methodological approach that underpins my writing about photographs is that, as I’ve written elsewhere, “words can respond to the visual most productively when visual texts are considered, on their own terms, as sites of knowledge.”40 My reading of domestic interiors in photographs is informed by writing about photography, studies of everyday life, and feminist art historical writing. But the ideas that have shaped my approach in these pages can all be traced back to triggers in specific photographs or sequences of photographs. My writing about photography rests upon the premise that photographic art cultivates ideas: it is a critical practice. The photographers and artists that I consider in this book have undertaken work to challenge how we look, what we look at, and our habits of seeing. Artworks have a role, as Ben Highmore explains in his discussion of everyday aesthetics, in “alerting us to different kinds of alertness.”41 Photographic artworks don’t need to be explained, but rather taken seriously as objects of knowledge that create thought and prompt us to pay attention and look anew. In this book, I practice a mode of critical writing about the visual, which responds to texts on their own terms and which attends to the “variable degrees of nearness between criticism and its object.”42 I describe this practice as critical proximity, borrowing from Meaghan Morris’ description of her own critical project of “embracing a critical proximity to our objects of study rather than seeking a distance from them.”43 My specific interest when I first wrote about critical proximity was focused on art and art criticism. Writing about how to write and respond to images, I argued that “embracing a critical proximity to visual objects of study requires attention to the relationship between words and images,” insisting that this relationship need not be about words “drowning out, covering over, or interpreting the ‘muteness’ of the visual.”44 This resonates with W.J.T. Mitchell’s exploration of what pictures want, where he answers his own question with the following: [p]ictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language. They want neither to be levelled into a “history of images” nor elevated into a “history of art,” but to be seen as complex individuals occupying multiple subject positions and identities.45 Looking back at my earlier piece of writing about critical proximity, I’m reminded that this approach remains implicit in how I  engage with and write about photography. I remain invested in a model of critical proximity, that understands description as productive, that describing a scene or a view is more than a transcription of the visual:

Introduction 7 it can make something visible and be generative. An essay by Chris Kraus about the photographer Moyra Davey – whose photographs I  discuss in Chapters  3 and 5 – is titled “Description Over Plot.”47 Kraus’ essay never directly explains her title, but it is implicit in her reading of Davey’s photographs and writing that “meaning occurs through accretion,” and that Davey’s mode of working highlights the value of description.48 In a similar manner but in the zone of cultural theory, Ben Highmore’s Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday often favours, to use his words, “description over evaluation.”49 This preference is connected to both literature and theory and what Highmore appreciates in both of them: “the ability to call forth an experience through (sometimes exorbitant) description.”50 I have an affinity with both Davey’s prioritisation of description over plot and with Highmore’s inclination for description over evaluation, and this inflects my own mode of writing both about and with images in this book: description here is both style and method. Description is a way of paying particular and close attention and not imposing an external theoretical framework onto images prior to noticing the breadth of gestures, prompts, and ideas that are already present. 46

A map of the chapters Each chapter of this book pivots around different questions related to the domestic, the self, and photography. In each chapter, I focus on a cluster of artists to explore themes including everyday objects, diary practices, domestic time, the relational self and family, and intimate modes of displaying photographs. While each chapter examines a different thematic approach to domestic interiors and the self in contemporary photography, there are a number of concerns that are implicit across the book as a whole: questions about privacy and what constitutes the personal, and the tension between emotions, affects, and experiences that may be “social, collective and exterior” yet are “experienced as deeply personal.”51 I argue for the critical utility of focusing closely on the unfolding of habits and gestures and objects, whereby intimacy, as Highmore explains in his work on ordinary lives, “suggests a form of attention that looks at the proximetrics of everyday life.”52 The proximities I focus on in this book are as much about spatial relations between objects as they are about human subjects. That is, I pay attention to the proximities between selves, as well as the proximities between objects and human subjects, and the role of the camera in these relationships. Equally, I also focus attention on the role of proximity and intimacy in how viewers experience photographs. This is a shift in focus from photographic intimacy as a register between photographer and subject, toward the relation between viewers and photographs.53 I discuss artists from Australia, Canada, China, Finland, India, Japan, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.54 This brings photographs and photographers from a range of cultural contexts into conversation. This is partly to highlight how the domestic intersects with photographic art practice in a range of settings, and because of the way in which photographs, photobooks, and contemporary photographic practice are not neatly held within national frameworks. In a discussion of Dayanita Singh’s approach to photography, Kajri Jain critiques the way: the contemporary concept of culture sets apart, as though in sealed off capsules, practices that are in fact part of global histories of exchange and circulation – the making and selling of saris as much as the technologies of photography or the traditions of modernism and contemporary art.55

8  Introduction Not only practices of constituting the self through photography transcend borders but also many of the artists I discuss are part of an expansive community of practice around photography and photobooks. This is what Iona Ferguson describes as a “loose-knit transnational community” which, through an ecosystem of residencies, public programming, international photography festivals, publishing platforms, and education, operates as a network of information exchange.56 I am influenced also by Aveek Sen, who provides a persuasive critique of the way cultural context is used to reduce photography from specific regions to a set of “prefabricated frames and perspective,” which then circulate in writing about photography, which also feeds back in to the making of photographs.57 Sen’s emphasis on the “ambivalent and complicated” role of national context in understanding photographic art forms the background to my approach.58 Without ignoring the inflections of locality in the photographs I discuss, my focus emphasises shared practices and ideas that travel through networks rather than practices neatly contained by region. This book brings together a range of contemporary photography that includes documentary, art photography (in its various iterations), works by artists who don’t identify as photographers but who deploy the photographic in their art, and photobooks made by artists who identify as bookmakers. I want to provide a glimpse into the way heterogeneous sets of photographs and artists, when held together, suggest the intricate connections between selfhood, interiority, and photography. My intention is not to provide an exhaustive survey of domestic life in photographic art. Nor is it supposed to be a comprehensive engagement with the entire oeuvre of each photographer or artist. Rather, I draw out examples of specific photographers whose photography has engaged with the domestic and whose work has provided insights into the construction of selves, objects, and relations through the frame of domestic life. In Chapter 2, “Domestic things: animating domestic objects and the still life,” I tease out five very different approaches to the juncture between domestic objects, the genre of the still life, and the animation of matter. I discuss the wilful amateurism of Sian Bonnell (UK, b. 1956) focusing on her displacement of domestic objects into exterior landscapes. I then turn to Elaine Campaner’s (Aust. 1969–2020) careful composed dioramas made using domestic kitchen items and figurines before discussing Motoyuki Daifu’s (Japan, b. 1985) Still Life series and book of photographs of his family’s kitchen table shot from above. I also discuss Hong Hao’s (China, b. 1965) collages made from everyday objects in his home that have been meticulously scanned. Finally, I turn to Zoe Leonard’s (US, b. 1961) approach to the found still life in Analogue, and then her very proximate photographs of domestic textures of washcloths, rugs, and towels. I suggest that these photographers each look anew at the genre of the still life to reframe the role of domestic objects in relation to the telling of life stories. In Chapter 3, “Domestic time: diaries, habits, durations,” I bring the work of Moyra Davey (Canada, b. 1958), Elina Brotherus (Finland, b. 1972), and Anna Fox (UK, b. 1961) together to think about domestic time and the diaristic. These three artists use photography to document periods of their lives, and each uses photography to explore different domestic temporalities. Davey’s photographs and writing in Long Life Cool White (2008) and several of her other essays and photographs document periods of waiting, long durations, and failures, and map the passing of time through material objects in domestic spaces. In her Annonciation (2009–213) series and her photobook Carpe Fucking Diem (2015) Brotherus creates domestic self-portraits awash with waiting and loss, documenting her experience of infertile time during five years of unsuccessful fertility treatments. Fox tracks the repetitious invasion of cockroaches into her London share

Introduction 9 house in Cockroach Diary (2000) and documents the time of habit and life with young children in 41 Hewitt Rd 1996–1999 (2010) and the different rhythms of her parents’ domestic life in My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (2000). Taken together, I show how these three photographers use modes of the diaristic to highlight domestic temporalities that are constantly remade through domestic relations and practices. Chapter 4, “Domestic selves: relationality and slow portraiture,” focuses on photographic art that presents a relational mode of selfhood, considering the intertwining of life stories through photography. In this chapter, I  examine the work of three photographic artists whose photographs, I argue, tackle the questions of how the self is constructed through familial relationships framed by the domestic: Nigel Shafran (UK, b. 1964), Rinko Kawauchi (Japan, b. 1972), and Takahiro Kaneyama (Japan, b. 1971). Shafran’s work focuses on his photographs of daily life at home with his partner in his photobooks Ruthbook (1995), Ruth on the Phone (2012), and Dark Rooms (2016). Kawauchi’s photobook as it is (2020) and her earlier book Cui Cui (2005) sketch out the relationship between herself and her family members, through chains of looking produced through the camera’s everyday presence. Lastly, Kaneyama’s photobook While Leaves are Falling . . . (2016) is a cumulative relational family portrait centred around his mother and her experience of schizophrenia. These three photographers produce what I call “slow portraiture” and demonstrate how the self is always produced in flux and in relation to other selves. In Chapter 5, “Domestic display: proximity and the handheld,” I change tack to think about the relationship between the domestic and exhibition spaces. I use this chapter to bring together the work of Dayanita Singh (India, b. 1961), Simryn Gill (Singapore b. 1959), and Moyra Davey (Canada, b. 1958). I focus on these three artists to argue for the importance of the handheld and the proximate in creating and engaging meanings that are connected to the self and the domestic. I highlight how Singh, Gill, and Davey build into their artworks a particular approach to correspondence and exchange. Davey does this through her mailed photographs, Singh not only through her Sent a Letter (2008) but also through her encouragement for others to curate their own museum of her work in Museum Bhavan (2017). Gill’s approach in Inland (2009) also builds a collaborative correspondence with the people whose rooms she photographs during a road trip, as well as correspondence with visitors to the Inland exhibition who are able to handle and shuffle around her small photographs. Each of these artists uses the intimacy of the handheld as a structuring device, and their practices of correspondence create chains of proximity that are yoked to domestic practices and spaces. I conclude by drawing out how Catherine Opie’s (US, b. 1961) In and Around Home (1999) intersects with key themes explored in the rest of the book: how photography positions the domestic as a zone that can recalibrate our understandings of intimacy, privacy, and the public in surprising ways. Notes 1 Peter Galassi, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991). 2 Ibid., 14. 3 Domestic includes 13 portraits and seven still-life photographs, chromogenic prints taken with a large format 8 × 10 camera. 4 Opie herself comments in an interview: “Many of the images are suffused with longing. A lot of this is about my own desire. I’ve never really had a successful domestic relationship. I’ve always

10  Introduction wanted one, but so far I’ve never lived successfully with anyone. So in the Domestic series, I was traveling around trying to figure out what it was all about.” Reilly, Maura, “The Drive to Describe: An Interview with Catherine Opie,” Art Journal 60, no. 2 (June 2001): 82–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2001.10792066. 5 The full series is published as part of the following publication: Catherine Opie, Catherine Opie: 1999: In and Around Home (Ridgefield, CT: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2006). 6 Sarah Parson, for example, insists that “notions of public and private are constantly and importantly constructed and dismantled by photographers and viewers.” Sarah Parsons, “Public/Private Tensions in the Photography of Sally Mann,” History of Photography 32, no. 2 (June 2008): 124, https://doi.org/10.1080/03087290801895720; See also, Charlotte Cotton, Public, Private, Secret: On Photography & the Configuration of Self (New York: Aperture and International Center of Photography, 2018). 7 Anna Poletti, Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book (New York: NYU Press, 2020), 19. 8 This book expands upon these ideas which I first made in the following: Jane Simon, “Contemplating Life: Rinko Kawauchi’s Autobiography of Seeing,” in Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, eds. Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty (New York: Routledge, 2018), 119–31. 9 Stephen Vider, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality & the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Stephen Vider, “Public Disclosures of Private Realities: HIV/AIDS and the Domestic Archive,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (May  2019): 163–89, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2019.41.2.163; Kate Manlik, Jane Simon, and Nicole Matthews, “The Fabric of Resistance,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no. 3 (2023): 683–707. https://doi-org.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/10.1086/723269 10 Jane Simon, “Interior Matter: Photography, Spaces, Selves,” Life Writing 17, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 441–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2020.1770473. 11 This paper was later published as a book chapter; see Jane Simon, “Ordinary Things, Domestic Space and Photography: Takashi Yasumura’s Interiors,” in Occupation: Ruin, Repudiation, Revolution: Constructed Space Conceptualized, eds. Lynn Churchill and Dianne Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 83–98. 12 This book, in some ways, is my response to his outburst, as well as a rejoinder to those who position the street and other public spaces as the locus of photography. 13 A 2023 article by Jingru Cheng considers the concept of “untamed domesticity.” Cheng writes about the “rippling effect of domesticity” that is one of the consequences of the movement of a middle generation of family members moving from rural China to urban China to find work, and the subsequent domestic arrangements or ripples that complicate clear-cut boundaries between individual homes. Discussing local household practices in Shigushan village in Wuhan, Cheng describes how “family houses are like pebbles dropped in water, and the spreading ripples are the realm of domesticity.” This emphasis on the untamed and unfixed domestic counteracts the ideas of domesticity and home life as a site of containment and fixed thresholds. Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, “Rippling: Towards Untamed Domesticity,” The Journal of Architecture (January 4, 2023): 10, https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2022.2129730. 14 Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 4; Maria Kaika, “Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 2 (2004): 270, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.0309-1317.2004.00519.x. 15 Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 10, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203401354. 16 Cheng, “Rippling,” 24; Blunt and Dowling, Home, 30; Lilian Chee, “The Domestic Residue: Feminist Mobility and Space in Simryn Gill’s Art,” Gender, Place & Culture 19, no. 6 (December 2012): 763, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2012.674924. 17 Katy Bennett, “Homeless at Home in East Durham,” Antipode 43, no. 4 (2011): 960–85, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00788.x; Lindsey McCarthy, “(Re)Conceptualising the Boundaries between Home and Homelessness: The Unheimlich,” Housing Studies 33, no. 6 (August 18, 2018): 960–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2017.1408780; Craig Willse,

Introduction 11 The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States, Difference Incorporated (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt17572nx. 18 While there are too many to list here, see, for example, Bennett, “Homeless at Home in East Durham”; Blunt and Dowling, Home; Lilian Chee, “The Public Private Interior: Constructing the Modern Domestic Interior in Singapore’s Public Housing,” in The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, eds. Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 199–212, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474294096; Ben Harper and Hollie Price, eds., Domestic Imaginaries: Navigating the Home in Global Literary and Visual Cultures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Kaika, “Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar”; Justine Lloyd and Ellie Vasta, “Reimagining Home in the 21st Century,” in Reimagining Home in the 21st Century, eds. Justine Lloyd and Ellie Vasta (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2017), 1–18, www.elgaronline.com/display/edcoll/9781786432926/9781786432926.00006.xml; McCarthy, “(Re)Conceptualising the Boundaries between Home and Homelessness”; Terence Riley, The Un-Private House (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999); Henriette Steiner, “On the Unhomely Home: Porous and Permeable Interiors from Kierkegaard to Adorno,” Interiors 1, no. 1 (July 2010): 133–48, https://doi.org/10.2752/204191210791602212. 19 Blunt and Dowling, Home, 27. 20 See especially her chapter “Work, Family, and Black Women’s Oppression,” in Patri cia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed., Perspectives on Gender (New York: Routledge, 2000), https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203900055. 21 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 82. 22 Vider, The Queerness of Home, 7. 23 See, for example, Matt Cook, “Queer Domesticities,” in The Domestic Space Reader, eds. Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2012), 173–79; Andrew Gorman-Murray, “Gay and Lesbian Couples at Home: Identity Work in Domestic Space,” Home Cultures 3, no. 2 (July 2006): 145–67, https://doi.org/10.2752/174063106778053200; Andrew Gorman-Murray and Matt Cook, Queering the Interior (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Brent Pilkey, “Queering Heteronormativity at Home: Older Gay Londoners and the Negotiation of Domestic Materiality,” Gender, Place  & Culture 21, no. 9 (October  21, 2014): 1142–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2013.832659; Manlik, Simon, and Matthews, “The Fabric of Resistance.” 24 Antoinette Burton, for example, emphasises “the importance of home as both a material archive for history and a very real political figure in an extended moment of historical crisis.” Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5. 25 See, for example, Paul Ashmore, Ruth Craggs, and Hannah Neate, “Working-with: Talking and Sorting in Personal Archives,” Journal of Historical Geography 38, no. 1 (January 2012): 81–89, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2011.06.002; Burton, Dwelling in the Archive; Rachel Hurdley, “Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materializing Culture in the Home,” Sociology 40, no. 4 (August  2006): 717–33, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038506065157; Jane Simon, “Documenting the Domestic: Chantal Akerman’s Experimental Autobiography as Archive,” Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 91–92 (April 3, 2017): 150–70, https://doi.org/1 0.1080/08164649.2017.1357013; Vider, “Public Disclosures of Private Realities.” 26 Maria Haralovich, for example, makes the case that “[e]very aspect of media is imbued with domesticity.” Mary Beth Haralovich, “Domesticity,” in Keywords for Media Studies, eds. Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 64, https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctt1gk08zz.22; David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 27 See, for example, Gloria Yan Dou, “Toward a Non-Binary Sense of Mobility: Insights from Self-Presentation in Instagram Photography During COVID-19 Pandemic,” Media, Culture & Society 43, no. 8 (November 2021): 1395–413, https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437211008734; Tara Pixley, “Reframing the Homescape: Documenting Domesticity During Photography’s COVID Turn,” Visual Studies 36, no. 2 (March 15, 2021): 106–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1472586X.2021.1915704; Brent Luvaas, “Smudged Windows: Scenes from Home During a Pandemic,” Visual Studies 36, no. 2 (March  15, 2021): 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/14 72586X.2021.1914152; Cathy Smith, “A Screen of One’s Own: The Domestic Caregiver as

12  Introduction Researcher During Covid-19, and Beyond,” Australian Feminist Studies 36, no. 108 (April 3, 2021): 165–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2021.2010180. 28 Christopher Reed, “Introduction,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 15; For alternatives to Reed’s take on modernism, the avant-garde and the domestic, see Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, 4–5. See also, Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 4. Similar antagonism is also present in other areas of thought. For example, speaking about the documentation of history, Burton points out, for example, that “discourses of the nation actively managed the domestic sphere so that it appeared as the timeless, universal “other” of modernity but equally because home, coded as inherently feminine and private, apparently eludes what the Indian architect and critic Gautam Bhatia calls “forthright documentation.” Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 20. 29 Susan Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins, Gender and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 3. 30 Kathy Mezei, “Domestic Space and the Idea of Home,” in Tracing the Autobiographi cal, eds. Marlene Kadar et  al. (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2006), 81–95; Katherine Brickell, “Home Interiors, National Identity and Curatorial Practice in the Art Photography of Simryn Gill,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 3 (July  2014): 525–32, https:// doi.org/10.1177/1474474013487486; Harper and Price, Domestic Imaginaries; Jo Applin and Francesca Berry, “Introduction: Feminist Domesticities,” Oxford Art Journal 40, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx007; Imogen Racz, Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Gill Perry, Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). 31 See, for example, Martin Patrick, Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2018). 32 Betsy Greer, “Craftivist History,” in Extra/Ordinary, by M. Anna Fariello et  al., ed. Maria Elena Buszek (Duke University Press, 2011), 175–83, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392873013; see, for example, Kyra Clarke, “Willful Knitting? Contemporary Australian Craftivism and Feminist Histories,” Continuum 30, no. 3 (May  3, 2016): 298–306, https://doi.org/10. 1080/10304312.2016.1166557; Liz Stops, “Les Tricoteuses: The Plain and Purl of Solidarity and Protest,” Craft + Design Enquiry, no. 6 (August 21, 2014), https://doi.org/10.22459/ CDE.06.2014.02. 33 Helen Molesworth’s article “House work and Art Work” does crucial work highlighting the theoretical underpinnings of feminist artworks that explicitly dealt with domesticity and housework. Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” October 92 (Spring 2000): 71–97, https://doi.org/10.2307/779234. Molesworth’s article was positioned as a precursor to a conference held 15 years after its publication: “House, Work, Artwork: Feminism and Art History’s New Domesticities.” This conference was held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, at the University of Birmingham in July, 2015, see subsequent special issue of Oxford Art Journal, Applin and Berry, “Introduction,” 1–5. 34 See, for example, Amelia Jones, “The ‘Eternal Return’: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 4 (2002): 947–78. 35 For approaches that do this, see Clare Cooper Marcus, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, ProQuest Ebook Central (Berwick, ME: Nicolas-Hays, 2006); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (West Nyack: Cambridge University Press, 1981), https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781139167611. 36 Here, I follow the work of scholars who have highlighted the range of disciplinary factors and historical trajectories, which led to understandings of domestic spaces as sites that reflect an individual’s “psychic life.” This point is made clearly in Tom Crook’s discussion of bedrooms, beds, and sleep in Victorian Britain, in which he draws out the historical trajectories which led to understanding the bedroom as a psycho-physiological space, “a realm of unconscious revelations.” Tom Crook, “Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain,” Body & Society 14, no. 4 (December 2008): 25–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X08096893; For discussion of the domestic interior as a technology of subjectification in relation to psychoanalytic frameworks, see Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity, 37–54.

Introduction 13 37 Penny Sparke and Anne Massey, “Introduction,” in Biography, Identity and the Modern Interior, eds. Anne Massey and Penny Sparke (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 4. 38 For discussion of the ‘autobiography of objects’, see Gillian Whitlock, “Objects and Things,” in Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 34–40. 39 Gillian Rose, “Family Photographs and Domestic Spacings: A  Case Study,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, no. 1 (2003): 5–18; Gillian Rose, “How Digital Technologies Do Family Snaps, Only Better,” in Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography, eds. Mette Sandbye and Jonas Larsen (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 67–86; Gillian Rose, Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Mette Sandbye, “Looking at the Family Photo Album: A Resumed Theoretical Discussion of Why and How,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 6 (December 17, 2014), https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v6.25419; Gil Pasternak, “Posthumous Interruptions: The Political Life of Family Photographs in Israeli Military Cemeteries,” Photography and Culture 3, no. 1 (March 2010): 41–63, https://doi.org/10.2752/175145110X12615814378199; Elspeth H. Brown and Sara Davidmann, “ ‘Queering the Trans✲ Family Album’: Elspeth H. Brown and Sara Davidmann, in Conversation,” Radical History Review 2015, no. 122 (May 2015): 188–200, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2849612; Risto Sarvas and David M. Frohlich, From Snapshots to Social Media – the Changing Picture of Domestic Photography (London: Springer Verlag, 2011). 40 Jane Simon, “Critical Proximity,” Cultural Studies Review 16, no. 2 (2010): 20. 41 Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 51. 42 Simon, “Critical Proximity,” 4. 43 Meaghan Morris, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2006), 5. 44 Simon, “Critical Proximity,” 20. 45 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 47. 46 Simon, “Critical Proximity,” 9; for a discussion that attends to the slippery nature of description, see Michel Beaujour, “Some Paradoxes of Description,” Yale French Studies, no. 61 (1981): 27–59, https://doi.org/10.2307/2929876. 47 Chris Kraus, “Description Over Plot,” in Speaker Receiver, ed. Moyra Davey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, n.d.), 37–52. 48 Ibid., 46. 49 Highmore, Ordinary Lives, xiii. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 9. 52 Ibid., 15. 53 For a discussion of this shift in relation to viewers “completing” photographs, see Alison Dean, “Intimacy at Work: Nan Goldin and Rineke Dijkstra,” History of Photography 39, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 177–93, https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2015.1038109. 54 This book takes a hybrid approach to name order for artists from Japan and China. The book follows how artists have themselves chosen to display their name order in international publications and exhibitions: in most cases this is according to the Western convention of personal name followed by family name. 55 Kajri Jain, “Photography Beyond the Photograph: Dayanita Singh’s Theory of Photography,” in Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022), 68. 56 Ferguson in, Russet Lederman, “Photobooks by Women from Asia: A  Conversation with Amanda Ling-Ning Lo, Miwa Susuda, and Iona Fergusson,” The Trans-Asia Photography Review 9, no. 2 (Spring 2019), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0009.205. 57 Sen comments, for example, that he is “profoundly uncomfortable with the notion of Asia (or any other region) as context . . . especially when that notion is created and sustained in the non-Asian part of the world, and then globalized.” Aveek Sen, “Why Asian Photography?” The Trans-Asia Photography Review 1, no. 1 (Fall 2010), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.7977573.0001.102. 58 Sen, “Why Asian Photography?”

14  Introduction References Applin, Jo, and Francesca Berry. “Introduction: Feminist Domesticities.” Oxford Art Journal 40, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx007. Ashmore, Paul, Ruth Craggs, and Hannah Neate. “Working-With: Talking and Sorting in Personal Archives.” Journal of Historical Geography 38, no. 1 (January 2012): 81–89. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jhg.2011.06.002. Beaujour, Michel. “Some Paradoxes of Description.” Yale French Studies, no. 61 (1981): 27–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/2929876. Bennett, Katy. “Homeless at Home in East Durham.” Antipode 43, no. 4 (2011): 960–85. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00788.x. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203401354. Brickell, Katherine. “Home Interiors, National Identity and Curatorial Practice in the Art Photography of Simryn Gill.” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 3 (July  2014): 525–32. https://doi. org/10.1177/1474474013487486. Brown, Elspeth H., and Sara Davidmann. “ ‘Queering the Trans ✲ Family Album’: Elspeth H. Brown and Sara Davidmann, in Conversation.” Radical History Review 2015, no. 122 (May 2015): 188–200. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2849612. Burton, Antoinette. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Chee, Lilian. “The Domestic Residue: Feminist Mobility and Space in Simryn Gill’s Art.” Gender, Place & Culture 19, no. 6 (December 2012): 750–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X. 2012.674924. ———. “The Public Private Interior: Constructing the Modern Domestic Interior in Singapore’s Public Housing.” In The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, edited by Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal, 199–212. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. https://doi. org/10.5040/9781474294096. Cheng, Jingru (Cyan). “Rippling: Towards Untamed Domesticity.” The Journal of Architecture (January 4, 2023): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2022.2129730. Clarke, Kyra. “Willful Knitting? Contemporary Australian Craftivism and Feminist Histories.” Continuum 30, no. 3 (May  3, 2016): 298–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1166 557. Cook, Matt. “Queer Domesticities.” In The Domestic Space Reader, edited by Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, 173–79. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2012. Cotton, Charlotte. Public, Private, Secret: On Photography  & the Configuration of Self. New York: Aperture and International Center of Photography, 2018. Crook, Tom. “Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain.” Body & Society 14, no. 4 (December 2008): 15–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X08096893. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Halton. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. West Nyack: Cambridge University Press, 1981. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781139167611. Dean, Alison. “Intimacy at Work: Nan Goldin and Rineke Dijkstra.” History of Photography 39, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 177–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2015.1038109. Dou, Gloria Yan. “Toward a Non-Binary Sense of Mobility: Insights From Self-Presentation in Instagram Photography During COVID-19 Pandemic.” Media, Culture  & Society 43, no. 8 (November 2021): 1395–413. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437211008734. Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. Gender and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Galassi, Peter. Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Gay and Lesbian Couples at Home: Identity Work in Domestic Space.” Home Cultures 3, no. 2 (July 2006): 145–67. https://doi.org/10.2752/174063106778053200.

Introduction 15 Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Matt Cook. Queering the Interior. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Greer, Betsy. “Craftivist History.” In Extra/Ordinary, by M. Anna Fariello, Dennis Stevens, Louise Mazanti, and Paula Owen, 175–83, edited by Maria Elena Buszek. Duke University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392873-013. Haralovich, Mary Beth. “Domesticity.” In Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray, 62–65. New York: NYU Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctt1gk08zz.22. Harper, Ben, and Hollie Price, eds. Domestic Imaginaries: Navigating the Home in Global Literary and Visual Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Heynen, Hilde. Architecture and Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.). Perspectives on Gender. New York: Routledge, 2000. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203900055. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Hurdley, Rachel. “Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materializing Culture in the Home.” Sociology 40, no. 4 (August 2006): 717–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038506065157. Jain, Kajri. “Photography Beyond the Photograph: Dayanita Singh’s Theory of Photography.” In Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 55–68. Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022. Jones, Amelia. “The ‘Eternal Return’: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 4 (2002): 947–78. Kaika, Maria. “Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 2 (2004): 265–86. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2004.00519.x. Kraus, Chris. “Description Over Plot.” In Speaker Receiver, edited by Moyra Davey, 37–52. Berlin: Sternberg Press, n.d. Lederman, Russet. “Photobooks by Women from Asia: A Conversation with Amanda Ling-Ning Lo, Miwa Susuda, and Iona Fergusson.” The Trans-Asia Photography Review 9, no. 2 (Spring 2019). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0009.205. Lloyd, Justine, and Ellie Vasta. “Reimagining Home in the 21st Century.” In Reimagining Home in the 21st Century, edited by Justine Lloyd and Ellie Vasta, 1–18. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2017. www.elgaronline.com/display/edcoll/9781786432926/9781786432926.00006.xml. Luvaas, Brent. “Smudged Windows: Scenes From Home During a Pandemic.” Visual Studies 36, no. 2 (March 15, 2021): 85–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2021.1914152. Manlik, Kate, Jane Simon, and Nicole Matthews. “The Fabric of Resistance.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no. 3 (Spring 2023): 683–707. https://doi-org.simsrad.net. ocs.mq.edu.au/10.1086/723269 Marcus, Clare Cooper. House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. ProQuest Ebook Central. Berwick: Nicolas-Hays, 2006. McCarthy, Lindsey. “(Re)Conceptualising the Boundaries Between Home and Homelessness: The Unheimlich.” Housing Studies 33, no. 6 (August 18, 2018): 960–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/02 673037.2017.1408780. Mezei, Kathy. “Domestic Space and the Idea of Home.” In Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan, 81–95. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Molesworth, Helen. “House Work and Art Work.” October 92 (Spring 2000): 71–97. https://doi. org/10.2307/779234. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

16  Introduction Morris, Meaghan. Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2006. Opie, Catherine. Catherine Opie: 1999: In and Around Home. Ridgefield, CT: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2006. Parsons, Sarah. “Public/Private Tensions in the Photography of Sally Mann.” History of Photography 32, no. 2 (June 2008): 123–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087290801895720. Pasternak, Gil. “Posthumous Interruptions: The Political Life of Family Photographs in Israeli Military Cemeteries.” Photography and Culture 3, no. 1 (March 2010): 41–63. https://doi.org/1 0.2752/175145110X12615814378199. Patrick, Martin. Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2018. Perry, Gill. Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Pilkey, Brent. “Queering Heteronormativity at Home: Older Gay Londoners and the Negotiation of Domestic Materiality.” Gender, Place  & Culture 21, no. 9 (October  21, 2014): 1142–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2013.832659. Pixley, Tara. “Reframing the Homescape: Documenting Domesticity During Photography’s COVID Turn.” Visual Studies 36, no. 2 (March 15, 2021): 106–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14 72586X.2021.1915704. Poletti, Anna. Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book. New York: NYU Press, 2020. Racz, Imogen. Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Reed, Christopher. “Introduction.” In Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, edited by Christopher Reed, 7–17. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Rice, Charles. The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Riley, Terence. The Un-Private House. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999. Rose, Gillian. Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. ———. “Family Photographs and Domestic Spacings: A Case Study.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, no. 1 (2003): 5–18. ———. “How Digital Technologies Do Family Snaps, Only Better.” In Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography, edited by Mette Sandbye and Jonas Larsen, 67–86. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Sandbye, Mette. “Looking at the Family Photo Album: A Resumed Theoretical Discussion of Why and How.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 6 (December 17, 2014). https://doi.org/10.3402/jac. v6.25419. Sarvas, Risto, and David M. Frohlich. From Snapshots to Social Media – The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography. London: Springer Verlag, 2011. Sen, Aveek. “Why Asian Photography?” The Trans-Asia Photography Review 1, no. 1 (Fall 2010). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0001.102. Simon, Jane. “Contemplating Life: Rinko Kawauchi’s Autobiography of Seeing.” In Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, edited by Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty, 119–31. New York: Routledge, 2018. ———. “Critical Proximity.” Cultural Studies Review 16, no. 2 (2010): 4–23. ———. “Documenting the Domestic: Chantal Akerman’s Experimental Autobiography as Archive.” Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 91–92 (April 3, 2017): 150–70. https://doi.org/10 .1080/08164649.2017.1357013. ———. “Interior Matter: Photography, Spaces, Selves.” Life Writing 17, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 441–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2020.1770473. ———. “Ordinary Things, Domestic Space and Photography: Takashi Yasumura’s Interiors.” In Occupation: Ruin, Repudiation, Revolution: Constructed Space Conceptualized, edited by Lynn Churchill and Dianne Smith, 83–98. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Introduction 17 Smith, Cathy. “A Screen of One’s Own: The Domestic Caregiver as Researcher During Covid-19, and Beyond.” Australian Feminist Studies 36, no. 108 (April 3, 2021): 165–79. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/08164649.2021.2010180. Sparke, Penny, and Anne Massey. “Introduction.” In Biography, Identity and the Modern Interior, edited by Anne Massey and Penny Sparke, 1–10. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Steiner, Henriette. “On the Unhomely Home: Porous and Permeable Interiors From Kierkegaard to Adorno.” Interiors 1, no. 1 (July 2010): 133–48. https://doi.org/10.2752/204191210791602212. Stops, Liz. “Les Tricoteuses: The Plain and Purl of Solidarity and Protest.” Craft + Design Enquiry, no. 6 (August 21, 2014). https://doi.org/10.22459/CDE.06.2014.02. Vider, Stephen. “Public Disclosures of Private Realities: HIV/AIDS and the Domestic Archive.” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (May 2019): 163–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2019.41.2.163. ———. The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality & the Politics of Domesticity After World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Whitlock, Gillian. “Objects and Things.” In Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies, 34–40. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Willse, Craig. The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States. Difference Incorporated. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.5749/j. ctt17572nx.

2 Domestic things Animating domestic objects and the still life

Proximity, distance, and framing In Sian Bonnell’s (b. 1961, UK) Groundings (1995–1997), biscuit cutters sit amidst rural landscapes. In one photograph, a biscuit cutter in the shape of a sheep rests on top of a pile of rocks in an expanse of land typically used for sheep-grazing. In another photograph from the same series, a biscuit cutter shaped like a Christmas tree hangs on a holly tree. And in a different photograph, a silver butterfly-shaped biscuit cutter sits atop a pile of leaves. In each of these photographs, the view seen through and around the biscuit cutter is both everyday and made strange by these small domestic objects. Biscuit cutters, when used for their ordinary purpose, require the user to look down at biscuit dough on a kitchen bench as they cut out a shape ready for baking. Typically, the gaze through a biscuit cutter is met with the flatness of dough or kitchen bench. In Groundings #1 (1995–97) (see Figure 2.1), the biscuit cutter is a frame within the frame of the photograph, and through this outline are new expanses of rural life: clouds, fields, leaves, twigs, sheep. Many of Bonnell’s constructed photographs yoke together the proximate and the distant. Children’s toys in the shape of animals, typically held close, clutched by small hands, are positioned in wide open spaces, adrift in fields or their “real” habitats, thereby colliding the categories of the natural and the artificial and challenging the genres of still life and landscape.1 In one photograph from the Groundings series, a small soft toy lamb with black beady eyes sits in the foreground in sharp focus while sheep graze and rest in the background. In another black-and-white photograph from the same series, a small tin mould of a rabbit is positioned to emerge from a hole in the ground. The daily proximity of children’s toys, biscuit cutters, or moulds – purposeful items in the daily domestic labour of care – is held up against, and brought closer to, exterior expanses of field, ocean, or lake. This requires a shift in looking: focusing on the near and then opening out to the background. It also requires a shift in how we think about the categories of the near and distant, the proximate and the expansive. By bringing them together in unexpected ways, Bonnell muddies the categories and highlights the porous nature of the domestic. In Groundings #1 (see Figure 2.1), for example, we can’t look at the biscuit cutter without also looking through and around the slim metal shape. We look at, through, with, and around. Bonnell’s use of domestic objects is also, crucially, linked conceptually to broader social contexts. For example, the Groundings series references the culture and geography of Dorset where the images were made. Dorset’s chalk hillsides feature chalk-cut figures such as the Cernes Giant, so the use of biscuit cutters to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003089148-2

Domestic things 19

Figure 2.1 Sian Bonnell, Groundings #1, 1995–1997, Courtesy the artist

figuratively “cut-out” shapes in the rural landscape in Groundings is a reference to this custom. But as Bonnell also notes, the biscuit cutter is at the same time an object from my kitchen drawer, (one I used daily to cut sheepshaped sandwiches for my children when they were very small) and when placed on the top of the dry-stone wall is a landmark claiming that view and this land as mine.2 The shuttling of the biscuit cutter from kitchen drawer to dry-stone wall plays with scale and perspective and also marks a refusal to relegate the domestic to the realm of the minor. Instead, the domestic is made monumental. This chapter begins with the idea that photography can make us look anew at the domestic. It examines how the attention of the camera can refigure the hierarchical relationship between subjects and objects and highlight the relationality of bodies and things. This relationality is crucial to understandings of self-representation. Photography highlights the role of domestic objects and matter within life narrative and can urge reflection on the life of the object itself. Drawing on insights from – and expansions of – the genre of still life, this chapter examines representations of domestic things and objects in contemporary photographic art by five very different artists. I  start with the small kitchen objects set among landscapes photographed by Bonnell and end with a close-up photograph of a hand towel and kitchen rug by Zoe Leonard (US, b. 1961). Sandwiched between these two very distinct modes of the photographic still life, I engage with the work of Elaine Campaner (Aust., 1969–2020), Motoyuki Daifu (Japan, b. 1985), and Hong Hao (China, b.1965).

20  Domestic things These photographers all use perspective and still life differently, but they each focus attention on domestic objects in charged ways and reframe the role of domestic objects in relation to the self and photography, the telling of life stories, and the life of matter. I examine how each artist uses and unsettles the genre of still life and how this allows us to look anew at domestic objects. This rethinking involves understanding life stories as represented by objects rather than the human subject and also noticing the life of matter. Through their attention to the daily hum of domestic matter, I argue that Bonnell, Campaner, Daifu, Hong, and Leonard make visible that domesticity is not only a “human construct” but, rather, “a relational property that operates across the human/nonhuman distinction.”3 Photography can reorient the relationship between subjects and objects, and highlight the relationality of bodies and things. This relationality is crucial to thinking about both understandings of the self and understandings of the domestic. Some of the artists in this chapter use objects to represent the self or to tell autobiographical stories, while others use domestic objects in ways that question the subject/ object distinction. While this second usage isn’t directly autobiographical, I argue it is a related project that reframes ideas about the self and agency. It is with this second framing that I read Bonnell’s work. I argue that Bonnell offers an understanding of the way domestic objects in photographs can be used to rethink subject/object relationships and the agency of materials. For Bonnell, the domestic object is a conduit for new ideas. This can therefore reframe understandings of the self. Like Bonnell, Campaner flips the interior inside out. Campaner constructs detailed dioramas using everyday kitchen clutter and souvenirs to represent exterior spaces and scenes. Campaner deploys the domestic in two ways: in the types of objects she uses to construct her small narrative displays, as well as in the political messages that infiltrate her home life and are then referenced in her dioramas. For Campaner, the domestic and the political are always in conversation. She uses souvenir teaspoons, salt and pepper shakers, and other kitchen paraphernalia to sculpt scenes with threads of political narrative, and highlight the relationality between human stories and domestic objects. Daifu’s photobook, Still Life (2014), upturns the familiarity of the genre by capturing the daily chaos on his family’s dinner table. Daifu’s auto-documentary photographs of meals and clutter on his kitchen table are shot repeatedly using the same aerial perspective from above the table and are tightly framed to remove any surrounding context. Daifu’s ready-made assemblages of clutter found on his family’s table use photography’s ability to decontextualise and make strange daily materials. Hong’s obsessive collections of daily objects in his series My Things (2001–2012) again play with detritus and clutter. However, Hong’s collages are carefully arranged scenes. Hong creates expansive, large-scale assemblages of his things, turning scraps and rubbish as well as books and more obvious meaningful objects into aesthetic systems. Finally, Leonard’s lengthy series Analogue engages with the material life of objects. This project is a personal diary of her changing neighbourhood, one which documents ready-made still life arrangements of domestic items outside shops and stalls in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn. Analogue also focuses on the global movement and dispersal of recycled goods with photographs of worn objects and textiles in second-hand market stalls in, for example, Kampala, Mexico City, Ramallah, and Warsaw. Leonard’s deep interest in the minor keys of daily life is also echoed in her Habitation Is a Habit, Photographs by Zoe Leonard for “The Pliable Plane” by Anni Albers (2012/19). This is a series of close-up photographs

Domestic things 21 of tea towels and other domestic fabrics from her own home that uses proximity to defamiliarise the textures of everyday objects. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the gaze of the camera can unsettle patterns of recognition that automatically position humans as subjects and material things as objects.4 Photographs allow us to look at things differently, beyond their immediate use-value: photography “deprives things of their uses.”5 Photographers, Marina Warner suggests, “have a special relation to the mystery of thingness.”6 Photographers can “still” the material world, and notice what is usually overlooked. In other words, photography can act as a visual tool for directing our attention to the material world.7 The examples I discuss approach domestic objects using scale, framing, and perspective in ways that oscillate between proximity and distance and between figuring objects as monumental or minute. My positioning of the work of Bonnell, Campaner, Daifu, Hong, and Leonard through the genre of still life intentionally expands traditional understandings of the genre and focuses on the genre’s ability to upturn the hierarchy between subject and object. The trend I identify has also been explored in other writing about thing theory and discussions of materiality, as well as the shift towards acknowledging the life world of objects in life writing and auto/biography.8 I argue that photography offers unique insights into the life of domestic objects and I show how the unassuming quiet genre of still life unbalances the centrality of the individual human subject. The genre of still life does, in many ways, position the human subject as peripheral. The human figure isn’t present in representational terms – and the genre “demolishes the idea of a world convergent on the person as universal centre.”9 As the still life is focused on generic objects needed for sustenance (such as food), or daily rituals (such as kitchen utensils), objects that could “service” anybody, no specific individual is addressed. This approach, for Bryson, writing about still life painting, means that “[h]uman presence is not only expelled physically: still life also expels the values which human presence imposes on the world.”10 But, of course, photographic or painted still life is produced by a human subject, one who makes decisions about what or how to paint or photograph, and it is also a human subject who observes the final product. Thus, while the human figure may be excluded from the still life, this doesn’t mean that human values or presence are absent; rather, I see them as present and enmeshed with the objects in a more complex relationship. I argue that the realm of the personal and life stories is not limited to the selfrepresentation of the human body but can also be articulated through domestic objects and their arrangement and recording.11 Much critical work has been done to foreground the agency of material objects or things in the social world.12 This includes work on the role of objects in the making and remembering of selves.13 While some approaches to the topic of materiality, objects, and things emphasise the agency of things in themselves beyond human value, my discussion of still life photography through the work of Bonnell, Campaner, Daifu, Hong, and Leonard also emphasises the relationality between the human subject and material object.14 Photographic still life: some background Each of the photographers discussed in this chapter troubles the genre of the photographic still life in a different way. I’m using the genre of still life to refer here to photographs that are focused primarily on objects and food, but still life itself doesn’t have a

22  Domestic things singular, neat definition, drawing as it does from a wide range of histories and representational practices.15 Focusing on different modes of the photographic still life, the examples I discuss here are all enveloped in “still life’s radical shift of emphasis from bodies to objects.”16 Still life art photography pays careful attention to framing and perception with a concentrated mode of attention. The photographic still life is a rich and complex realm of photographic art that takes seriously the idea that objects are not “just stage settings for human actions and meanings, but integral to them.”17 Many photographic artists across different contexts and periods of time have used perspective and scale in complex ways that challenge the way the viewer looks at the everyday domestic object and have attended to materiality and questions of self-representation.18 Think, for example, of Jan Groover’s Kitchen Still Life (1978–79) series, which makes strange forks, knives, colanders, and other utensils by experimenting with spatial cues and troubling the distinction between foreground and background through extreme close-up and large-scale printing.19 In a similar use of scale and close-up to defamiliarise the domestic, Tuija Lindström’s Strykjärn (Flat Iron) (1991) creates “monumentalizing ‘portraits’ ” of the bottom plates of this domestic tool.20 Other examples use unfamiliar angles, and other abstracting techniques, and subtle modes of non-mimetic self-representation, such as Yoonjean Lee’s Still-Life (2005) series and photobook, which document her personal space and objects.21 In these photographs, Lee uses perspective akin to a cat’s eye view and flat light to abstract objects in her home.22 My focus in this chapter is on artists who are in conversation with the still life genre. However, I also note a trend towards using objects as forms of self-representation in more everyday practices. The relationality between humans and objects has been noted in the realm of selfie practice and culture as well as in recent photographic criticism.23 Michele Zappavigna and Sumin Zhao use the phrase “still life selfie” to describe images circulated on social media that don’t directly include the photographer’s body or face but where the perspective of the photographer is “indirectly represented through various traces of the photographer’s body, and through personal or intimate objects.”24 For images such as “shelfies” or foot or food selfies, the actual structure of the image and choices around perspective/angle, and composition are used to suggest the photographer’s presence and/ or perspective, and these choices “inflect the ‘point of view’ ” of the photographer’s subject.25 While my focus is not on selfie culture or social media, these framings of selfrepresentation through photographic assemblages of objects (instead of bodies) are useful for my argument about the relationality of subjects and domestic objects in contemporary photographic art and the use of the still life as a self-representational form and/or genre in which to challenge understanding of the self and subject/object relationality. Looking through/looking expansive/domestic monuments Bonnell’s photographs regularly depict domestic objects. She repurposes the most banal domestic items and places them in unexpected places, both inside and outside of the home. In Bonnell’s series, when the domestic meets the wild (1999), interior objects are placed in exterior sites, continuing the conversation between the exterior domestic implements in Groundings (see Figure 2.1). In one photograph from when the domestic meets the wild, a yellow rubber washing-up glove rests upright surrounded by bracken with green hills behind it. In another, an ironing board perches on top of rocks by the seaside. In this photograph, the ironing board appears small and diminutive amid the rocks, and

Domestic things 23 here Bonnell’s careful attention to scale makes the ironing board appear not so much monumental but as simply part of the seascape. In another seascape from the same series called Beachclean, ten dusters and scrubbing brushes stand alert on the rocky beach, as though ready for some kind of action (see Figure 2.2). While there is always an element of play in Bonnell’s use of the domestic, there is also a serious engagement with broader questions about the constraints and dangers of home and the absurdity of understanding the domestic realm as disconnected from an exterior public realm. While Bonnell is, in part, making a statement about the restrictions of the domestic in when the domestic meets the wild, this is not entirely a refusal of the domestic but rather a positioning of the domestic as anything but tame and an exploration of genre and methods of representing both interiors and exteriors. The images in when the domestic meets the wild twist the conventions of still life and landscape, turning both genres inside out. Bonnell’s works play with the themes of both intimacy and escape, bringing together objects usually held closely and repositioning them in a world beyond their normal range. Bonnell describes her practice as “wilful amateurism,” a mode of working that straddles photography, performance, and sculpture and is informed by the intersections between domesticity, parenting, absurdism, and feminism.26 Her attention to the most banal of domestic objects: cleaning mops and cleaning brushes, everyday food items, and kitchen implements, was – as Bonnell observes – a “ ‘pointed’ rebellion against the continuing (mostly male) fixations on large format cameras and tripods prevalent at that

Figure 2.2 Sian Bonnell Beachclean from when the domestic meets the wild, 1999, courtesy the artist

24  Domestic things time.” It was, Bonnell continues, an intentional provocation “to bring a lived, feminine/ domestic experience into the photographic domain.”27 This purposeful use of the domestic is also keenly present in Bonnell’s articulation of her working practice and methodology, which she positions as similar to “being in the kitchen” and creating soup out of whatever lies in the fridge.28 The domestic appears in Bonnell’s work in obvious and subtle ways. She uses domestic objects, most obviously, but her wilful amateurism means she also, at times, uses low-key domestic lighting sources such as torches or lamps rather than the polished lighting techniques used in professional photographic settings. Bonnell uses, for example, an amateur ad-hoc array of torches” to illuminate the objects in the series Glowing (2003–2005).29 With this series, Bonnell again shows the domestic bleeding into exterior landscapes. This time, jelly and jelly moulds, and other kitchen objects such as graters, and strainers, are illuminated on grass and photographed in close-up from a low perspective. The result is a series of glowing shapes, kitchen objects made monumental, framed with blades of grass and the dusk sky of early evening. In one image, an upturned green colander, lit from within, mimics the shape of an alien spaceship. In another, an iridescent pink fish-shaped mould glows brightly against dark grass and a blue evening sky (see Figure  2.3). The absurdity of placing these objects upon grass on the garden floor and giving them such close attention, making the minor objects (jelly, graters, strainers) appear looming and

Figure 2.3 Sian Bonnell, Glowing #33, 2003–2005, Courtesy the artist

Domestic things 25 large, was, according to Bonnell, connected to broader political absurdities and “conceived from my anger, as a mother of sons, on the decision to go to war in Iraq”30 Here Bonnell is using the domestic to articulate ideas about the constraints of the public realm and bringing into conversation the everyday material of the kitchen with the exterior realm of politics, showing how they interface together. In the colour images of when the domestic meets the wild, the domestic objects are often brightly coloured, sometimes garish, against the more muted tones of nature. Bright yellow and blue pegs hang off green leaves in one photo, rectangles of dishwashing scourers of all colours are strung across wire fences, framed by the green grass of a rural background in another. In the black-and-white photographs from the same series, the objects are shiny: a polished silver kettle reflects the grassy ground surrounding it; in another, a gleaming high heel shoe is atop a tree stump. All of these objects, having escaped their usual interior setting, are in a revolt of some kind. They reflect a type of desperation for the freedom of the outside world and examine, as Bonnell acknowledges, “family relations, the role of women, the mother, feelings of being trapped, a desire to escape, resentment, pain.”31 With these photos, with their elements of both the comic and the dark, I argue that Bonnell is elevating attention to the contradictions of the domestic, which I drew out in the previous chapter. Expelling domestic objects into the exterior is one of the ways Bonnell acknowledges home as a complex realm that is not always safe or comfortable. Bonnell’s drive to use domestic objects in displaced settings is again seen in her everyday dada (2003–2005) series and book. In one chapter of the series, “House beautiful”, the setting is the domestic interior as seen in home magazines: lounge rooms, kitchen tables, and couches. But this time Bonnell uses food to sculpt everyday objects within domestic scenes. A crepe is used instead of a cloth underneath a vase of flowers; a chequered floor is made from brown and white pieces of square bread; and long threads of spaghetti are used to create a tablecloth. Yellow and white fried eggs make a patterned rug around the base of a toilet and bathroom sink. In another chapter of everyday dada, called “Scenic Cookery,” Bonnell uses food: potatoes and peas are sculpted to represent the coast line of Dorset, and Stonehenge is sculpted from corned beef. A  pile of soup mix – dried peas, lentils, and pearl barley – became the rocky shore of the British seaside. Again through a playful use of scale, Bonnell’s photographs make the daily domestic appear immense, a site of significance where tedium interfaces with imagination.32 The care and detail with which Bonnell constructs these scenes (frying so many eggs, carefully sculpting scenes out of mashed potatoes and peas, and weaving spaghetti into tablecloths) suggests an acknowledgement of, or appreciation for, the painstaking repetitive labour of household management. Susan Bright observes, for example, that there is a “respect, a love even, of housework” in Bonnell’s practice.33 I understand this respect to be not about a love of the tedium of housework but rather a love for the banal and repetitious as a potential site of imaginative play and a recognition of the domestic as a complex and meaningful site. One reading of Bonnell’s photographs, which focus on domestic spaces and objects, is that they are the result of practical choices made when navigating the care of young children and maintaining an art practice. However, Bonnell’s practice is also an intentional challenge of the idea that art is made outside of the home, as shown through Bonnell’s continued exploration of the domestic as a conceptual tool across the breadth of her career.34 In other words, Bonnell acknowledges the constraints of the domestic whilst also positioning it as a complicated site of exploration. If a key cause of women’s historical

26  Domestic things

Figure 2.4 Sian Bonnell, Disciplines #18, 2014 Courtesy the artist

exclusion from the making of “proper” art objects was linked to the idea that art is not made in the home, that it is made in the “professional” realm of the studio, then Bonnell, through her wilful amateurism, flips this script by also bringing the domestic into the studio in her more recent photographs (see Figure 2.4). Bonnell’s Disciplines (2014) series situates the artist’s own body surrounded by a range of domestic objects. These photographs were taken in a studio that has a flat grey floor, white walls, and a radiator. In one photograph from the series Disciplines #18 (2014) a number of domestic objects rest on the radiator: a pink fly-swatter, an egg flipper, a hand blender, a peg, and pots and pans (see Figure 2.4). Bonnell pictures her own body among these objects, with her head covered with a strainer and each hand wielding a pan and pot. In this series of images, Bonnell pictures her own body as just one object amidst other (banal, domestic) objects, and describes her own body on the same plane as the other objects in this hybrid mixture of sculpture, performance, and photography: “I too am the found object, the ready-made for these pictures . . . I understand that in these images the figure becomes object with all the objects themselves acting.”35 The distinction between subject and object again becomes blurred in the photographic field of vision. Bonnell herself, as a “found object” and readymade, also appears in Health & Safety (2007). In this series, Bonnell wears domestic items positioned in place of typical health and safety objects: kitchen gloves, brioche tins, and colanders replace heavy-duty work gloves, steel-capped boots, face masks, and hard hats. This series operates as a comment on the invisibility of domestic labour. It also implies a challenge to the assumption that the domestic is a safe zone. We see Bonnell performing again in her series Camera: How to be Holy (2011), in which Bonnell performs religious gestures, with cake tins

Domestic things 27 and paper/picnic plates acting as haloes and religious symbols. Significantly, these works bring elements of the domestic into the studio: Bonnell refuses to leave domestic items in the home and continues to challenge the links between the domestic and the amateur, and the studio and the professional. With these series, Bonnell seems to be pointing towards the relationality between the human and the inhuman. Bonnell is also harnessing here the ability of the camera, as I’ve described elsewhere, to shift “patterns of recognition that position humans as subjects and material things as objects.”36 All objects, including the human body, become flattened and stilled in photography; and removed from their usual domestic context, the tools and implements take on a different role. Through Bonnell’s camera, objects perform. Small domestic exteriors: Elaine Campaner’s dioramas Campaner’s dioramas and photographs tell stories common to the political landscape of Australia. Campaner’s dioramas are constructed from domestic everyday objects and they feature complex reversals. Campaner utilises domestic objects or souvenirs that are printed with landscape scenes: objects that bring home the exterior. She then integrates these miniature scenes into broader dialogue with other domestic objects to create dioramas representing exterior scenes. She uses souvenirs and miniature objects alongside regular domestic objects and puts them to work to create small narrative worlds. The stories in these small dioramas often reflect public events that have circulated in the news media and seeped into Campaner’s home life. Here, interior domestic paraphernalia is again made exterior. However, this isn’t a reversal that demotes the realm of the domestic, or the interior. Rather, I argue that Campaner’s reversals bring the collision of the interior and exterior into plain sight. At first glance, the photographs in Elaine Campaner’s series Petri Dish (2017) appear to be urban landscapes documenting towers, electricity poles, energy plants, institutional buildings, and airport viewing towers. When looking closer, the photographs reveal carefully constructed dioramas made from small objects. Like Bonnell, Campaner sculpts scenes from banal domestic items. She describes her practice as using “objects found in the ordinary detritus of everyday life” and engaging with the politics of the outside world using items from her domestic realm.37 In Campaner’s miniature worlds, salt and pepper shakers become towers; the shallow bowls of champagne saucers shift into an airport viewing tower in Viewing Lounge (2016) (see Figure 2.5); and an ice tray stacked on its side becomes a faceless institutional building. In Stockmarket (Small) (2008), tiny figurines gather, hands raised, as though on the trading floor, at the bottom of a 1950s tin measuring cup (see Figure 2.6). The weights and measures on the cup’s interior surface become the wall of a stock exchange, and two small figurines perform the role of the stock trader, hands held up to the measurements and ingredients listed on the cup. Here again, Campaner plays with scale: the human figures become miniscule, while the domestic object takes on a grander scale. And the “public” realm of trading is contained within the “private” realm of the domestic cook. Campaner’s work is part of a lineage of photographers who construct miniature scenes using sets and figurines, which are then photographed. Campaner’s photographs have echoes of Laurie Simmons’ carefully photographed dollhouses and doll figures in her Colour Coordinated Interiors (1982–1983) and small toys in her series Cowboys (1979) and David Levinthal’s photographs of toy soldiers, dolls, and figurines.38 Her work also has links with James Casebere’s photographs of meticulously constructed architectural

28  Domestic things

Figure 2.5 Elaine Campaner, Viewing Lounge, 2017, original in colour, pigment ink print, courtesy Elaine Campaner Estate

models in his Landscape with Houses (2009–2015) series and much of his earlier work documented in Model Culture which, like Campaner’s photographs, plays with photography’s ability to disrupt scale.39 Simmons’ and Casebere’s photographs also specifically attend to domestic interior spaces in their constructed scenes.40 What is distinct about Campaner’s scenes is her consistent use of domestic objects in her dioramas: teaspoons, teacups, ice-cube trays, salt and pepper shakers alongside figurines, and miniature plastic models. In the same way that Bonnell positions domestic objects in unlikely situations, creating new relationships and meaning between pegs and leaves, or scrubbing brushes and the seaside (see Figure 2.2), Campaner uses domestic objects, taking them outside of their typical use and picturing them outside their domestic realm. However, while Bonnell

Domestic things 29

Figure 2.6 Elaine Campaner, Stockmarket (Small), 2008, original in colour, pigment ink print, courtesy Elaine Campaner Estate

takes domestic objects and often makes them monumental by producing large-scale images of small objects or positioning objects in an expansive rural landscape, Campaner takes domestic objects and places them in miniature scapes, drawing the viewer into small, oneiric microcosms. Campaner uses familiar domestic objects to create what are often industrial, exterior, and public miniature scenes, again displacing the objects from their usual context and, like Bonnell, exteriorising what is usually interior. In Campaner’s photographed dioramas, there is no organic material as seen in the dioramas of natural history museums. Instead of the perishable objects of nature, Campaner takes advantage of the existing imagery on mugs, cups, milk pourers, matchboxes, and spoons – experimenting with how “illustrations on objects can be reused as spatial elements in a photograph.”41 Imagery of animals, trees, or clouds on ready-made – often kitsch – domestic objects, injects scenes of nature into the largely industrial settings of her dioramas. In Water Cooling Towers (autumn) (2017), for example, the 1970s white coffee mug picturing an autumnal scene with orange and leafless branches is framed by a blue-sky backdrop, small plastic toy trees, and towers represented by salt and pepper shakers (see Figure 2.7). In Poplars (2017), Campaner paints a pink sunset on the diorama’s backdrop. This echoes the sunset painted on the souvenir pouring jug featuring poplars, which sits among miniature electricity towers in Campaner’s tiny scene. In Ballina (2007), a gold-plated souvenir spoon featuring an illustration of the region’s lighthouse on top of a cliff is incorporated into a scene with an oceanic backdrop and two miniature tourist figures peering at the lighthouse on the spoon. Campaner takes advantage of the miniaturisation common to lots of souvenirs, those “travelling landscape-objects” that circulate handheld images of places across time and

30  Domestic things

Figure 2.7 Elaine Campaner, Water Cooling Towers (Autumn), 2017, original in colour, pigment ink print, courtesy Elaine Campaner Estate

space.42 Across her dioramas, small souvenir objects are regularly used: teaspoons, boxes of matches, mugs and plates, miniature planes like the type sold in airports, and, in one photograph, a miniature White House. Campaner draws on the souvenir’s crystallisation of “an entire experience in one image.”43 And, harnessing the sentimental banality of the kitsch souvenir, she knits images into the wider scene of each diorama: the picture of Sydney Harbour on a box of matches becomes part of the dioramic scene of the city in Breakfast in Sydney (2009); a glass photograph plate picturing the seaside and an esplanade is inserted into the miniature beachside scene in Esplanade, Southport (2013).44 Campaner appears to take these interiorised scenes of public monuments and nature imprinted on domestic objects and flip them outward again into the realm of constructed nature, rejuvenated – through her dioramas – into a world of the collective and the exterior narrative. The incongruity of the scenes, and the striking way in which small daily items are repurposed – rescued from household cupboards, second-hand stores, and other places of inertia – and arranged in Campaner’s photographs create a “psychological, environmental or political narrative.”45 A diorama is, as Donna Haraway points out in her discussion of their role in the American Museum of Natural History, “eminently a story.”46 The natural history diorama, with its creatures stilled in time amid backdrops and props in three walled rooms, are crammed with “meaningful detail that eventually adds up to one big elaborate narrative,” Celeste Olalquiaga writes.47 Campaner also uses the affordances of miniature toys – such as figurines, planes, tea sets – in her photographs. The toy, Susan Stewart reminds us, “opens an interior world” and is “a device for fantasy, a point of

Domestic things 31 beginning for narrative.” Thus, the form of the diorama as a story-telling device rich in detail, along with the capacity of the miniature to propel a beholder into interior storyworlds, coheres in Campaner’s photographs to do narrative work. Norman Bryson argues that still life painting, because it empties the frame of human presence, offers “the world minus its narratives or, better, the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest.”49 Campaner, through her use of the diorama, and careful arrangement of domestic objects, insists on an expanded approach to still life, one which understands the presence of narrative in daily objects and their relation to each other. Campaner’s expansive approach to the still life genre is one which includes toy human figures. The scale of the tiny figures juxtaposed against the domestic items reverses the hierarchy between the human figure and the domestic object. Here the domestic objects tower above or next to the tiny human figures. Campaner’s photographs, with their miniature – often industrial – scenarios represent “environmental and political imagery that ‘seeps’ into the artist’s domestic life.”50 Across the Petri Dish series, for example, are implied narratives about climate change. In Power Plant (2017), two apocalyptic barren trees in the foreground frame the industrial energy plant site constructed from salt and pepper shakers and toy construction pieces. In Steam Stacks (2018), cotton wool “steam” pollutes the blue sky. Her photographs also reference populist-political narratives about refugees and asylum seekers arriving by boat, which have saturated the Australian media landscape since the early 2000s. In Lifeboat (sand atoll) and Amsterdam III (2017), for example, a small orange boat appears packed with tiny figurines floating in water. In an earlier image, Illegal Photograph (Orange Monochrome #1) (2005), Campaner uses miniature figurines to constructs an image of asylum seekers in orange suits trapped behind a fence: a response to the cruelty of Australia’s policies around refugees arriving by boat. This photograph is also referring to the Australian Government’s refusal to allow journalists to photograph refugees who had arrived by boat, and thus Campaner positions this image and others in the same series as “illegal photos,” and also a “historic record via constructed photos.”51 In all of these photographs, Campaner repurposes and redeems domestic material objects to turn our view towards exterior scenes, using domestic objects to show the way interiors and exteriors are co-constitutive.52 48

The life of the table: Motoyuki Daifu’s Still Life Motoyuki Daifu describes his Still Life (2016) series and book of the same title as consisting of images of my family kitchen table, which I shot from above. I have been taking these photos for two years, photographing my mother’s dinner on the table. I think that this series is ‘beautiful still,’ structured by a complex mess of things on the kitchen table.53 This chaotic, cluttered table top is the focus of this series, with its tightly framed images of food, kitchenware, and other objects strewn across it. Still Life is an extension of Daifu’s earlier series and book Project Family (2013), which documents his own family life and interior domestic space with a focus beyond the kitchen table.54 Still Life is distinct from Project Family because of its focused attention to the material objects and domestic mess of a kitchen table between 2012 and 2016. Daifu’s Still Life tells the story of a life – or lives, as the photographs document his family’s kitchen table – through material

32  Domestic things objects. It focuses on objects that are mass-produced and consumed, in combination with more singular personal objects, and reveals the kitchen table surface as an integral site in the unfolding of human and non-human relationality. Daifu’s images contain none of the careful curation of Campaner’s dioramas or Bonnell’s careful arrangement of domestic objects in both interior and exterior settings. Instead, Daifu’s images align with an observational auto-documentary mode of photography, one that turns inward to examine private spaces: his own domestic realm in all its chaos and messiness. It has resonances with Nigel Shafran’s attention to his kitchen sink in his Washing-up (2000) series and his tracking of fruit and vegetable scraps in his Compost Pictures (2008–2009), which I discuss in Chapter 4. However, the tight framing of Daifu’s pictures means there are no quiet spaces or backgrounds in the photographs that make up Daifu’s Still Life series. The framing of Still Life has echoes of Nobuyoshi Araki’s photobook The Banquet, a series of close-up photographs of meals cooked by Araki’s wife Yoko in the final month before her death.55 In The Banquet, the food is glossy, oily, sometimes half eaten, and made strange by Araki’s use of a macro lens. In Daifu’s series, the photographs are a cacophony of food, chop sticks, packets, detritus, and domestic objects, illuminated with the use of a heavy flash and from above, like aerial photographs of a table landscape. The mode of attention in Daifu’s photographs aligns with Bryson’s description of still life painting’s “fascination with effects of intense focusing, frequently amounting to glare.”56 This intensity of attention – or glare – that Bryson observes in many still life paintings prior to the 1700s is, interestingly, compared to a photographic lens. He writes: “still life seems to have been a camera with only one, unadjustable lens, with the sole property of rendering all objects in the scene in brilliant and drilling clarity.”57 At first, Daifu’s aerial perspective and the bright flash create a flattening effect: every inch appears in the foreground. But then layers appear. A floral tablecloth sits behind the clutter. In one image, a bunch of flowers are out of focus in the very foreground mimicking the floral tablecloth, which peeks out behind mandarins, containers, a pair of glasses, and a half-eaten curry in a bowl that has the words “home cooking” on its edge (see Figure 2.8). The view of his family’s table from above reveals a range of juxtapositions. These reflect Daifu’s own description of his practice. He comments: “I  take a close look at the things around me and look for the moments of non-ordinariness in everyday life,” searching, he says, “for the moments when there’s something off or odd – even when things seem to be going as usual.”58 When focused tightly on the dining table, these odd moments are found when domestic miscellany is brought into conversation. In one photograph, a packet of band aids, a can of muscat wine, and a can of tennis balls surround a bowl of vegetable tempura. In one page spread of the book version of Still Life, there is a photograph on the left page that includes a bowl of unshelled peanuts, a carton of coffee, and a pair of reading glasses sitting on top of a page from a magazine featuring Ai Shinozaki, a singer and gravure idol (a term describing models who pose, often provocatively, wearing few clothes) in a lacy bikini (see Figure 2.9). On the opposite page is an extreme close-up of a shiny red apple – a visual echo of Shinozaki’s curves, and an opened packet of Look chocolate. With this page spread, Daifu is dryly bringing together the various types of consumption that occur at the table: eating and looking are both modes of consumption. Here, the table is a stage, and the mass-produced images and food move across it.

Domestic things 33

Figure 2.8 Motoyuki Daifu, Still Life, 2012–2015, ©Motoyuki Daifu All Rights Reserved, courtesy the artist

Expiry dates, receipts, and food labels are everywhere in Daifu’s Still Life series, as are plastic wrap, foil packets, and plastic containers. There are symbols of childhood: a lid from Tokyo Disneyland (see Figure 2.10), a cereal box featuring Winnie the Pooh, packaging featuring the Japanese superhero Anpanman, a Peter Rabbit bowl, and a packet featuring the characters from Frozen, as well as more adult symbols: a lighter, a can of red bull, and the gravure idol. The realm of mass production is here in bright garish packages, as well as the homey, in the well-used bowls and plates with their cheery phrases – “Sunday afternoon” announces one blue plate holding a dish of eggplants and snow peas – floral motifs and well-used patinas. There are home-cooked meals, dirty plates, and plentiful takeaway, much of it half-eaten, lots of mass-produced junk food and fruit, often still half contained in red net sacks, or clear plastic. There is, quite simply, a lot of stuff, these busy photographs are cluttered with colour and table-top mess, a mixture of

34  Domestic things

Figure 2.9 Motoyuki Daifu, Still Life, 2012–2015, original in colour, ©Motoyuki Daifu All Rights Reserved, courtesy the artist

the mass-produced and the more personal. The realm of the personal here is not provided through any one individual object or item but through the cluttered combinations themselves: the glasses on top of a page; the chopstick resting on a half-eaten bowl of noodles. Daifu’s images can be read as a critique of consumption and its often unsustainable by-products: plastic packaging which, after it leaves Daifu’s family table, will then move on to clutter other environments. Still Life contains multitudes of packaging and a fairly constant presence of fast modes of consumption through ready-made meals. His adjacent series Project Family was shortlisted for the 2014 Prix Pictet Global Award for Photography and Sustainability, which aligned his work with the theme of consumption. However, I read Still Life less as a critique of consumerism than as a visual poem dedicated to his mother’s meals and the daily clutter of his life, as well as a playful engagement with the genre of still life viewed through the contemporary experience of lower middle class urban Japanese domestic life.59 Daifu highlights the food which sustains his family; he

Domestic things 35

Figure 2.10 Motoyuki Daifu, Still Life, 2012–2015, original in colour, ©Motoyuki Daifu All Rights Reserved, courtesy the artist

also focuses on the relationship between forms, colours, textures, and composition. Daifu describes his visual style as “[d]aily life filtered through non-daily life filtered through daily life.”60 That is, his artwork is inseparable from the mundanity of daily existence, and there is in Daifu’s work no real filter or editing out of the blemishes of his home life. Mess and clutter are the material of his life and the focus of his photography. Looking flat: Hong Hao’s My Things The materials that we consume and are surrounded by in our everyday life are also given obsessive attention by Hong Hao. Unlike the chaotic mess of Daifu’s kitchen table, Hong’s series My Things is a visual diary, recording in rigorous and, for the most part, very neatly ordered detail the objects he has purchased and consumed over a period of

36  Domestic things 12 years in a series of large-scale collages. Hong’s work on the project over this period reflects the 12-year cycling of different fates according to traditional Chinese culture. He describes his making of the series as part of a daily practice similar to a yogi’s daily practice, a ritual in his “day-to-day life as well as a tool to observe the human condition in contemporary consumer society.”61 Each day Hong would place objects he had consumed into a scanner one by one and collect these scanned objects to patchwork later on into “complex digital collages composing colored still lifes of great size.”62 Like Daifu’s Still Life series, the countless objects in Hong’s My Things series flood the frame. Dense with clutter, these “micro universes resembling satellite photos offer an intimate glimpse into the domestic life of the artist and a snapshot of contemporary China through an overwhelming caché of evidence.”63 I argue that Hong’s collages show a version of life story focused on everyday matter and detritus. Hong’s My Things is about his world of everyday matter that flattens attention across the more personal (such as a book collection that suggests inclinations, knowledge, and a personal history of reading) and the realm of mass consumption (the containers, wrappers, and small paraphernalia that would be found in many homes, not just Hong’s own realm). Other artists have also obsessively documented domestic objects from their own homes. For instance, Sol LeWitt documented every surface and material object in his own home and titled the project Autobiography (1980).64 This photobook, a kind of visual catalogue of his domestic world, has strong resonances with Hong Hao’s My Things. LeWitt’s book is a detailed and compulsive recording of all the objects in his home and studio.65 This is a self-portrait project in which the subject is not visually present within this “democracy of images” (with no image more important than the rest) depicted across pages of grids of over 1,000 photos.66 In this way, Autobiography also has links with the democratic grids of Zoe Leonard’s Analogue, which I discuss later in this chapter.67 Adam Weinberg describes Autobiography as “an image of multiplicity” through which LeWitt is both concealed by and revealed through the sheer profusion of objects in his home and studio at that specific moment in time.68 I note a similar attention to representations of the self through photographs of personal objects in the work of Tammy Rae Carland, who documents personal objects in her Archive of Feelings (2008) series. This series includes the piece My Inheritance (2008), which documents every object Carland chose to keep from her mother’s house after her death and One Love Leads to Another, a collaged photograph of mix-cassette tapes made and given to Carland at the beginning of past relationships or friendships. Carland describes the drive behind these projects as “taking advantage of the first-handedness of objects that represent my own experience, to give value to personal experience.”69 With these images, Carland uses the camera as a tool to place archival significance onto personal domestic objects.70 While Carland’s project is more selective in its use of objects than LeWitt’s Autobiography, both deploy photographs of objects as a mode of life narrative. The exhaustive archiving of objects in Hong’s home world doesn’t so much tell us autobiographical detail about Hong’s own life in quite the same manner as Carland and LeWitt, although it does give insight into what he buys, collects, reads, eats, and perhaps tosses away. What Hong does turn our attention to is the matter of his life, the density of the material that a life can churn through, collect, and keep, and his practice of scanning and documenting these everyday items is a visual diary, a catalogue of consumption, and the accumulation of objects using the practice of assemblage.

Domestic things 37 In My Things: Book Keeping of 07 B (2008), items such as tins of cat food, a pair of glasses, packets of pills, a carton of eggs, coffee filters, printer cartridges, noodles, beans, cling wrap, and a garden hose nozzle are carefully arranged according to shape and sometimes colour. The amount of detail is overwhelming and intimate at the same time, like peering into someone’s trolley at a supermarket (see Figure 2.11). Across this series of photographs are the material traces of Hong’s life. These are objects Hong has bought, consumed, lived with, and thrown out. They are also regular objects that many people would also have consumed, making this project both personal and impersonal at the same time. Some of the domestic objects are unbranded, more intimate, or personal; others are mass-produced and decidedly commercial.71 Hong’s My Things is detailed, exhaustive, and precise: a catalogue or list of things. Writing about the lists in literature in the context of slow narrative, Marco Caracciolo insists they play a key role in disturbing narrative progression, in slowing the pace of narrative through a descriptive “openness” (in that lists can always be added to) and carving out a space or “an island” that is not about “causality and plot.”72 Further to this, the form of the list itself can disrupt ontological divisions and focus attention on non-human materiality.73 That is, literary lists invite an appreciation of material objects that exceeds anthropocentric perspectives. Hong’s visual catalogue of things is autobiographical – they are, indeed his things. But like Caracciolo’s literary lists, they open out beyond the narrative of life story: they are also about the life of matter. In My Things No 5.5000 Pieces of Rubbish in 2002 (2002), the frame is crammed with carefully curated shapes and colours (see Figure 2.12). Objects in the shape of tiny circles are grouped together, small pink objects come together, and the smallest spines of objects form colourful dashes across the bottom of the frame. Hong repurposes 5,000 pieces of rubbish to make what appears to be an aerial landscape of abstract colour. When viewed from a distance, the everyday items become “an ocean of aesthetic objects.”74 At a distance, the objects in these large photographs themselves appear as abstract form and shape. There are dots, lines, and patterns of colour: their material form is obscured. This densely detailed photograph reveals its objects when viewed at close range: pegs, buttons, pull-tabs from cans of drink, lighters, lids, tubes, rolls of films, and other endless inventory.75 All are brought together into the flattened landscape of Hong’s collages, in what Bill Brown would describe as the practice of assemblage.76 Hong’s work plays with the ambiguities of scale, distances, and proximities within assemblage, reflecting the “problematic of scale” that Brown describes as key to the realm of assemblage thinking more broadly with its attempts to examine different social phenomena at a range of scales from the human to the global.77 I am reading Hong’s collages as an example of the photographic still life, which draws attention to objects and challenges perceptions of every domestic matter. However, it is important to understand the context of Chinese Maximalism when considering his repetitive ritual of placing objects onto the scanner.78 The use of the term maximalist in this context does not align with the Western understanding of maximalism and its implication of busy patterns and clashing colours (although My Things is certainly a cacophony of colours and pattern). Rather, the Chinese avant-garde maximalist art movement refers to practices that bring together both “personal meditation” and “social critique.”79 Artists linked to this movement used labour-intensive, repetitive, and monotonous practices (such as tracing, stitching, rubbing, or in Hong’s case, collecting and scanning) to create artworks that were often visual records of daily activities.80 These artworks then

38  Domestic things Figure 2.11 Hong Hao, My Things Book Keeping of 07B, 2008, scanned objects, digital c-print, 120 × 210 cm (47–1/4” × 82–11/16”), © Hong Hao, courtesy Pace Gallery

Domestic things 39

Figure 2.12 Hong Hao, My Things No. 5, 2002, scanned objects, digital c-print, 120 × 210 cm (47–1/4” × 82–11/16”), © Hong Hao, courtesy Pace Gallery

40  Domestic things function, as Gao Minglu notes, as “what is often called liushui zhang in Chinese, literally, ‘an account book of streaming water,’ which means an everyday record of something that is extremely unimportant, trivial, and fragmented from daily life.”81 Regular everyday objects are important to Chinese maximalism, which understood ideas and originality as coming not so much from grand thoughts but from “touching daily materials.”82 With My Things, Hong’s repetitive documentation of objects from his daily life over a period of 12 years and the practice of scanning and filing away images of each object – which are then laboriously arranged and composed into large-scale photographic mosaics – speaks to issues around accumulation, waste, and consumption as well as the relationship between the individual and collective experience. To make these macro-collages, which explore the “economies and aesthetics of accumulation,”83 Hong intentionally deployed the flattening ability of the scanner bed. The choice to scan the objects enables, for Hong, a type of “a calm observation without any pre-judgement, a plain testimony, a relevant context for aesthetic exploration.” He also speaks of the practice of scanning as enabling “an intimate relationship . . . among human and things, things and machine.”84 Elsewhere, he describes the process of scanning as having similarities to the traditional practice of Chinese rubbings.85 Both scanning and rubbing require two objects to press together, and the resulting image is not seen until one surface is lifted. They are also repetitive activities. The scanner moves light back and forth to capture the object rendered flat in a digital file, just as the hand moves back and forth to press paper onto an object to make the rubbing. This repetitive labour is a bit like housework: the hand and the scanner move back and forth over a surface like the movement of a scrubbing brush cleaning a domestic surface. The type of looking that Hong’s My Things invites is itself a type of scanning. When viewed up close, I immediately seek out recognisable objects in the crowded space of the photographic collages. In one photograph, My Things No. 7: Knowledge is Power, Hong has collated together the scanned spines of his personal collection of books: a flatbed scanner version of the modern shelfie. Amongst the book spines, the largest title Araki jumps out (an anchoring of the image in the realm of art photography via the well-known Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki). Within this collection is the 1997 Venice Biennale catalogue. Hong also includes the “Oahgnoh” 1997 and 2001 biennales, fictive versions of his own art festival using an anagram of his name.86 There is also the large tome from the Chengdu Biennale, which did include Hong’s work. There are Chinese titles about architecture and sculpture, the history of Western art, photography, Chinese literature, and revolutionary comics as well as the odd English title scattered throughout. There are many artists who photograph their own bookshelves as both an autobiographical gesture and a means of intertextual linkages.87 For example, Yoonjean Lee photographs her bookshelves as part of her Still-Life series; Sol Le Witt documents his book shelf in his photobook Autobiography; and Moyra Davey, who I discuss in Chapter 3, also photographs her own bookshelves. Hong’s My Things series also includes more concentrated thematic collections.88 In My Things Bottom No. 3 (2009), for example, Hong focuses on the underside of objects. The scanned undersides of staplers, containers, small electrical equipment, food cartons, tins, mugs, trays, and pencil packets are collated into an underneath map of daily objects, made strange by this viewpoint. In one of the early pieces of the My Things series, No. 6 – The Hangover of Revolution in My Home, 2002, Hong collected every item in his house that had a connection to the period of the Cultural Revolution. Hong points out that My Things, No. 6 is “the memory of my childhood – things that were used at that

Domestic things 41 time which I kept” and a “document of my personal history.” This photograph, when considered as part of the whole series, also makes “explicit the tension between Communist history and the consumerist present.”90 It highlights how the material of collective history is entangled with domestic items. A map of the Long March, propaganda postcards, matchboxes, buttons, and books have been carefully scanned and archived into this still life, which traces the political ephemera in Hong’s home. Hong gives both political ephemera and personal items the same flat attention as his scanner. There is no distinction here between the personal and political objects; both press up against the bright light of his home scanner. 89

Looking similar: Zoe Leonard Zoe Leonard’s photographs are wide-ranging in content but connected through her concern with practices of looking, the relationship between interiors and exteriors, as well as the politics of contemplation.91 My emphasis here is specifically on the materiality of domestic things through the found still life. I focus on how Leonard explores the life and materiality of fabrics in Analogue (1998–2009) and Habitation Is a Habit, Photographs by Zoe Leonard for “The Pliable Plane” by Anni Albers (2012/19). Leonard uses the genre of still life, perspective, and the materiality of the photograph to invite us to reflect on the lives of objects. Across all her projects, Leonard has a sustained interest in the obsolete, the discarded, and the everyday. Like Hong, Leonard is a collector for whom detritus provides material for making art. She describes how her work often involves collections of older, used objects. I’m interested in the marks we leave, the signs of our use. I’m interested in the things we make and the things we leave behind. Like archaeological findings, I think our detritus tells an awful lot about us.92 Elsewhere she describes her interest in how humans “fetishize objects, communicate through them, and project meaning onto them.”93 While the human figure is mostly absent, “a human presence is palpable in objects” in Leonard’s photographs.94 Reflecting the relationality between humans and objects that I  discuss earlier in this chapter, Leonard directs attention away from the human figure and towards the traces left after humans have used or intervened with material matter. The 412 photographs that make up the full series of Analogue are mostly taken in exterior settings, documenting storefronts and signage, as well as market stalls and tarps on dirt. Yet, in line with this chapter’s focus, many of the images contain objects with a domestic bent: bristles of brooms stacked alongside a storefront, piles of differently coloured buckets, pillows, televisions, patterned bolts of fabric, ironing boards, and mattresses. This is about domestic objects outside the home: shown in a range of exterior sites (see Figure 2.13). In comparison, Leonard’s extreme close-up photographs of everyday domestic fabrics in the series Habitation is a Habit focus on tactility (see Figure 2.14). If Analogue is, as Elisabeth Lebovici describes, “an atlas of details,” then Habitation is a Habit, I suggest is a map of domestic texture.95 Leonard’s almost decade-long project, Analogue, a meditation on obsolescence, relates to this chapter’s focus on the material life of domestic objects. The title of this series is a reference to the analogue mode of film photography Leonard deployed in this series, as well as the indication that the photographs themselves are analogues of reality. This

42  Domestic things lengthy project is, amongst other things, “a very personal diary of her neighborhood.”96 Analogue documents the changing urban fabric of New York as small shops and stands give way to slick stores and multinationals. This involved documenting small stores selling everyday domestic objects, the mouths of which were open and spilling wares out onto the pavement or strung along the signage of New York streets, as well as exploring the global journey of used goods to distant markets in cities in, for example, Cuba, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Mexico. The result was imagery that “splits the difference between landscape and still life.”97 Although, as Svetlana Alpers suggests, each image aligns closely with the realm of the still life, she points out that Leonard is following the tradition of still life painting, but instead of depicting objects on tabletops, she depicts objects – accumulated stuff – in shop windows.98 Anna Blume describes Leonard’s art as aiming to “animate the inanimate” and to create “a conversation with silent objects.”99 One aspect of her expansive project Analogue, for example, was a focus on the material life of objects, in the words of one critic this project was “a series of love letters to the resilience of the material world.”100 The images in Analogue are a form of still life, with their focus on the object world. Leonard speaks of her interest in Flemish and Dutch still life traditions, and how the careful arrangement or grouping of objects can, when assembled together, create a portrait that “relate a story of the fragility of life, the temporal qualities of life.”101 While each frame of Analogue documents a found still life on the streets of Brooklyn or the markets in cities further afield from her home, each chapter of Analogue brings a collection of photographs together to create a still life constructed of photos, each photo an object (see Figure 2.13).

Figure 2.13 Zoe Leonard, Analogue, 1998–2009 (detail), 412 C-prints + gelatin silver prints, each print 11 × 11 in. (28 × 28 cm), courtesy the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth, New York

Domestic things 43 In one frame from the series, a selection of cleaning objects outside a store includes a row of brooms held upright by hessian bags. Like the brooms and brushes standing to attention in the rocky seaside pictured in Bonnell’s when the domestic meets the wild, these brooms are mid-journey on their way to or from the domestic: both examples highlight the mobility of domestic objects, showing how they are perceived differently outside of the home. In another frame, a used mattress leans up against a red brick wall, ready for collection. It is held in place by a taut metal chain pressing against the soft floral fabric of the mattress. This photograph shows the different qualities of everyday materials in conversation with each other. Leonard has a long interest in the process of mapping and archiving and the role of photography in these practices and is driven by an “archaeological impulse.”102 She has photographed bricked-up houses with windows and doors closed up, as in Red Wall (2001/2003) and Wall (2002) and has brought the exterior into the interior in her many site-specific camera obscura installations (2011–). In Bubblegum no.1–7, (2000/2003), she makes pictures of the discarded gum stuck to the pavement, pictured from above like small continents on a map. As Fred Moton describes in his elegiac discussion of Leonard’s photography, she uses photography as an instrument “for detecting lower frequencies.”103 Hers is a photography snagged on everyday detail. Attention is given to decaying gum, to plastic bags caught in trees, to tree trunks pushing out against fencing: the small triumphs of matter caught upon, or pressing against, other matter. So many of her photographs direct attention to how “life erodes objects” or to their “afterlife,” or what happens to objects once worn down, thrown away, or recycled.104 Leonard’s attention to the material life of objects in Analogue orients the viewer to the global exchange and movement of objects. Leonard’s work, so carefully attentive to the entanglement of politics in daily life, draws attention to the way minor domestic objects carry traces of broader histories and narratives. In one “chapter” of Analogue, Leonard photographed large bales of used clothing on the streets of Brooklyn New York, enormous multi-coloured round-edged fabric cubes of clothes that had been bundled together from the donation bins of charities full of unwanted clothes in the United States. Leonard subsequently traced the journey of these used clothes from the United States and photographed the clothes in various markets in Uganda. This component of Analogue tracked the “life history” of used clothing, from its “passage from clothing-as-use, to its withdrawal from usage, to its re-inscription within a commodity circuit, and a presumed second life in Africa.”105 But while the mass scale of this movement of clothing and objects across multiple borders sounds like a monumental, and perhaps impersonal, project, Leonards’ “relation to the things she documents always remains close-up, personal, and small scale.”106 While Leonard does employ the formal grid in her presentation of the 412 photographs, which constitute Analogue, this piece doesn’t have the distance and consistent rigor of maintaining the same perspective as seen in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s well-known grids of urban buildings and power stations. Instead, Leonard’s perspective changes according to the scenario.107 This conscious engagement with vantage point and subject means she moves closer to some storefronts than others, changing the point of view, moving in closer to some signage and items for sale, and hanging back to photograph others. While the project is immense in terms of the sheer number of images it includes, Leonard has always maintained modest print sizes (28 × 28 cm) when exhibiting the series. Leonard’s deep interest in fabric, texture, and daily materiality is evident in the recycling of clothes and domestic materials such as mattresses in Analogue. Bolts of fabric, large cubes of recycled clothing, rows of buttoned-up jackets, and a screen of

44  Domestic things white shirts appear in the series and Leonard is attuned to the “significance of clothes as vessels of social history.”108 Leonard’s more recent Habitation is a Habit (2012/19) shifts focus from the “fragmented urban fabric”109 that she explores in Analogue, to the more proximate materials she lives with, sits on, dries her hands on, or washes her body with. This is a shift from the street as point of contact with domestic objects and fabrics, to the domestic interior as the site of the decontextualised fabrics. The distance of the street is replaced with the proximities of domestic fabrics depicted in close-up. This modest series of five photographs document, in close-up, textiles from Leonard’s own domestic realm: a cartography of domestic texture. The series includes Washcloth (1084) (2012) (see Figure 2.14), Couch Upholstery (1203) (2012), Kitchen Rug (1281) (2012), Bathmat (1251) (2012), and Handtowel (1181) (2012). Unlike Analogue, with its persistent use of film photography, these five photographs are taken using an iPhone, and each is taken as a flat surface and a fragment of the whole. The textile in each fills the foreground with no surrounding background or context. Leonard’s Habitation is a Habit was made in response to the essay by Bauhaus weaver and theorist Anni Albers, “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture” written in 1957.110 Albers’ essay places the qualities of textiles and the practice and structure of weaving into conversation with architecture, finding connections between the processes of building and the process of weaving and interlacing threads.111 Albers emphasises that weaving was foremost concerned with structural organisation, rather than decoration, and thus positions it as a potential plane of architecture, one that is open and flexible rather than rigid and permanent. Leonard’s series “connects the machinic, reproductive device of the camera to the machinic, reproductive device of the loom.”112 Seriality and reproducibility are key to both photography and weaving. But both the camera and the loom require the use of hands as well as the machinic, and both Albers’ and Leonard’s art is concerned with the conceptual properties of weaving and photography, respectively, as well as the embodied tactile properties of their chosen form. Leonard speaks, for example, of how she loves how tactile a photograph is and how its “physical presence is very beautiful.”113 Leonard’s series, importantly, is concerned with mass-produced textiles: her photographs focus on the familiar loop piles of terrycloth towels, for example, and not the hand-made textiles of a domestic space. Instead, Leonard again draws attention to the minor textures of everyday, the fabrics that we don’t often look at with any focus, but which we cross paths with, touch, and use multiple times a day. In doing so, she explores the ability, as well as the inadequacy, of the camera and the flatness of the photograph to communicate the tactility of fabric.114 Albers’ essay speaks to the haptic nature of fabrics. An interior bereft of fabric, she notes, would miss what is “warm to the touch,” the “soft play of folds,” “the luster of fuzz of fibres in contrast to flat, hard and cool surfaces.”115 Leonard’s photographs capture her household fabrics with close attention, and this proximity brings attention to the feeling of fibres. Her photograph of a bathmat, for example, with its imperfect and “gently askew rows of nubs” is suggestive of use and wear and, as Julia Bryan-Wilson observes, has a “queer intimacy” in the way it “imbues a “low,” everyday artefact with an almost erotic charge.”116 Leonard gives emphasis to fabrics that we touch all the time yet rarely stop to look at and consider beyond their use value in the moment – as a surface to sit on, a washer to wipe one’s skin, or a mat to drip onto after a shower. She reorients us away from the human towards the qualities of objects. According to Vacche, “the close-up and still life rearrange scales of values and challenge hierarchies built into the act of looking.”117 This challenging of how one looks and

Domestic things 45

Figure 2.14 Zoe Leonard, Habitation Is a Habit Photographs by Zoe Leonard for “The Pliable Plane” by Anni Albers, 2012/19, (detail) Washcloth (1084), five inkjet prints from iPhone photographs, 16.5 × 13 inches each, courtesy the artist

46  Domestic things what one values and notices could easily be a description of what drives Leonard’s own practice. In Habitation is a Habit, Leonard’s use of both the close-up and an extreme decontextualised version of still life is used to continue her concern with acts of viewing, as well as the “repositioning of common objects.”118 Leonard’s photographs find grids and seriality in the texture of a handtowel and the woven threads of her couch upholstery. Her photograph of the washcloth (see Figure 2.14) looks a bit like a landscape viewed from an aerial perspective, the cotton fibres – some flattened others upright and bearing the traces of its use against skin – resembling grasses blown sideways by wind. Habitation is a Habit captures traces of living, as evidenced in used fabrics of daily existence. Each of the five photographs emphasises the weave and the thread, the loop pile, and the tautness of fabric. Here, Leonard rearranges perspective to be flat and democratic. This makes daily textures strange and invites us to see them anew. There is no main point of focus in these photographs; rather, they are all surface, much like Hong’s scanned collages. Like so many of Leonard’s projects, Habitation is a Habit presents serial images, accumulations on a theme.119 Like the accumulation of suitcases in 1961, or the collection of images of gum accreted on pavement in Bubblegum no. 1–7, or the 25 chapters of collected photographs that make up Analogue, Habitation is a Habit is a small collection, each photograph a close-up – but also aerial – mapping of a domestic fabric. Conclusion: the politics of stillness My focus on photographs of domestic objects in this chapter has considered the work of photographers who intentionally flex the boundaries of still life while also acknowledging the potential charge and intensity of objects envisioned through their cameras. Like the broader category of domestic or home life, still life representations have often been understood as a retreat from public life: merely decorative, focused on formal questions of light, and not concerned with the realm of public debate or social issues. Bonnie Costello argues that still life is “one of many ways the arts find to bring the distant near and to relate to the world and public events within the private life.”120 I would add to this that still life also provides a conduit for thinking beyond the binary of the public and the private. These five photographers – Bonnell, Campaner, Daifu, Hong, and Leonard – with their various and distinct approaches to domestic objects make clear that the genre of still life offers new orientations to the material world. The artworks discussed in this chapter all point towards the porosity of the domestic and the political meanings of objects in homes, and each understands that stillness generates new ways of looking. While Campaner’s and Bonnell’s photographs orient the viewer towards exteriors by deploying domestic objects in relation to exterior scenes, Daifu’s Still Life is focused solely and repeatedly on the scene of a kitchen table. Even here, public life is folded into Daifu’s private realm. Again, here we can perceive still life as an arena for action rather than escape.121 And Hong’s large-scale collages create a visual map of a particular moment in China’s history, and Hong’s careful arrangement of things speak to the relationship between individual and collective experience. Leonard’s attention to the material life of objects is shown in her close attention to the daily fabrics of tea towels, as well as the bulging bales of used clothes in Analogue as they move from New York to continue their life in market stalls in Africa. These photographers and artists with their attention

Domestic things 47 to perspective and scale, and their privileging of the domestic object, use the camera to provoke thought about the various proximities and distances between domestic objects and human lives. I see the work of Bonnell, Campaner, Daifu, Hong, and Leonard as adding to this rich terrain of photographic works that depict domestic objects in ways that challenge our perception of everyday material or that deploy photographs of objects as complex modes of self-representations that don’t rely on the human figure. Each of these photographers demonstrates how the arena of still life is a scene of action rather than withdrawal, one with a reach that crosses the boundary of the home. Notes 1 The history of photography includes many examples that brought together components of both still life and landscape, and there was, as Martineau points out, a “blurring of boundaries” between these genres in photographic practice during the 20th century. Paul Martineau, Still Life in Photography (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 8. See also Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World, Planets on Tables (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 175–76, https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501727047, for a discussion of the still life/landscape trope. 2 Sian Bonnell, “The Camera as Catalyst, the Photograph as Conduit: An Exploration of the Performative Role of Photography” (Ph.D., Manchester Metropolitan University, 2013), 24, https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/336516/. 3 Marco Caracciolo, Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (Nebraska, 2022), 80, https:// doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv25p442v. 4 Jane Simon, “Ordinary Things, Domestic Space and Photography: Takashi Yasumura’s Interiors,” in Occupation: Ruin, Repudiation, Revolution: Constructed Space Conceptualized, eds. Lynn Churchill and Dianne Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 87. 5 Shino Kuraishi, “Family Home, or the Stage of Representation: Takashi Yasumura’s Domestic Scandals,” in Domestic Scandals Takashi Yasumura, ed. Takashi Yasumura (Tokyo: Osiris, 2005), 89. 6 Marina Warner, “Introduction,” in Things: A Spectrum of Photography, 1850–2001, ed. Mark Haworth-Booth (London: Jonathan Cape; Victoria and Albert Museum, 2004), 10. 7 Simon, “Ordinary Things, Domestic Space and Photography,” 96. 8 See my earlier discussion linking thing theory to the photographic still life in Simon, “Ordinary Things, Domestic Space and Photography: Takashi Yasumura’s Interiors.” 9 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990), 145. 10 Ibid., 60. 11 Anna Poletti, “The Implied Rummager: Reading Intimate Interiors in Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules,” Life Writing 17, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 456, https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528. 2020.1768874. 12 Jane Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 47–69; Ann Cvetkovich, “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice,” in Feeling Photography, eds. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 273–96. 13 László Munteán, “Modeling the Memories of Others: David Levinthal’s I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq,” in Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, eds. László Munteán, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik, 1st ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 191– 208, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315472171; Poletti, “The Implied Rummager”; Jane Simon, “Interior Matter: Photography, Spaces, Selves,” Life Writing 17, no. 4 (October  1, 2020): 441–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2020.1770473. 14 For a discussion on new materialism to still-life painting, see Ashley Lazevnick, “Never Still! Nonhuman Life in Charles Demuth’s Green Pears,” Oxford Art Journal 44, no. 2 (April  7, 2022): 269–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcab017.

48  Domestic things 15 As Paul Martineau notes, “most definitions position still life ‘as a picture consisting predominantly of inanimate objects such as fruit, flowers, dead game, and vessels, but because still life incorporates a wide variety of influences from different cultures and periods in history, it has always resisted precise definition’ ” Martineau, Still Life in Photography, 6. 16 Angela Dalle Vacche, “Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine Space: Cavalier’s ‘Thérèse’,” Film Criticism 17, no. 1 (1992): 19. 17 Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds., Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004), 4. 18 Modernist photographers in the 1920s, for example, used fragmentation, the close-up, and unexpected angles in the still life, to “bring out the magic of everyday objects.” See Louise Wolthers, “Things and People: Still Lifes Meet Work Lives,” in Still Life Work Life, eds. Dragana Vujanovic, Louise Wolthers, and Hasellblad Foundation (Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing and The Hasselblad Foundation, 2013), 12. 19 Linda Andre, “A Knife Is a Knife,” Afterimage 11, no. 3 (October 1, 1983): 16, https://doi. org/10.1525/aft.1983.11.3.16. 20 Wolthers, “Things and People,” 12. 21 Yoonjean Lee, Still-Life (Seoul: Datz Press, 2015). Originally published by Hyundai Gallery in 2005. 22 P. Celina Lunsford, “Still Life: A Visual Interrogation of Habitation,” in Stilled: Contemporary Still Life Photography by Women, eds. Kate Newton and Christine Rolph (Cardiff: Ffotogallery, 2006), 33. 23 Thy Phu and Elspeth Brown note that “although the face, and specifically the smile or lack of one, may emote most obviously, an attention to objects can be just as, if not more, revelatory.” Thy Phu and Elspeth H. Brown, “Epilogue,” in Feeling Photography, eds. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 353; Other researchers, noting the proliferation and circulation of objects on social media as modes of self-representation, have challenged the accepted role of the human figure in photographic self-representation, “decoupling the mandatory presence of a face/body from the definition of a selfie.” Katrin Tiidenberg and Andrew Whelan, “Sick Bunnies and Pocket Dumps: ‘Not-Selfies’ and the Genre of SelfRepresentation,” Popular Communication 15, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 146, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 15405702.2016.1269907. 24 Michele Zappavigna and Sumin Zhao, “Selfies and Recontextualization: Still Life Self-Imaging in Social Media,” in Photography and Its Publics (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 208. 25 Zappavigna and Zhao, 209, 216. This is not altogether a new argument: while observing the similarities between much earlier still life compositions and the more recent social media practice of laying out the contents of, for example, one’s personal bag (#whatsinmybag), Zappavigna and Zhao note that self-representation via the still life “punctuates the history of self-portraiture interpretation” and that many periods of art history have similar commentary about “the extent to which objects reflect the subjectivity of the artist.” However, the selfie discussion here is unique: selfies are generally not created or circulated as art. 26 Bonnell, “The Camera as Catalyst, the Photograph as Conduit,” 4. 27 Ibid., 22. 28 Ibid., 52, 50 The overarching conceptual drive of Bonnell’s work – her ‘wilfulness’ – “revolves around a lived experience . . . and is woven through my everyday life: I will make a piece of work just out of my lunch.” 29 Bonnell, “The Camera as Catalyst, the Photograph as Conduit,” 33. 30 Ibid. 31 Alasdair Foster and Sian Bonnell, “Sian Bonnell: Insights of the Absurd,” Talking Picture (blog), November  13, 2020, https://talking-pictures.net.au/2020/11/14/sian-bonnell-insightsof-the-absurd/. 32 This insight about the domestic as a bridge across which tedium and imagination can meet comes from a personal conversation with Bonnell. 33 Susan Bright, “Household Management,” in Text + Work (Bournemouth: Arts Institute, 2007). 34 Bonnell, “The Camera as Catalyst, the Photograph as Conduit,” 27. 35 Sian Bonnell, “Sian Bonnell,” accessed February 21, 2022, www.sianbonnell.com. 36 Simon, “Ordinary Things, Domestic Space and Photography,” 87.

Domestic things 49 37 Museum of Contemporary Art, “Elaine Campaner: Christmas Island, from the Series Lapped,” Art Base, 2014, https://art.base.co/product/1807-elaine-campaner-christmas-island-from-theseries-lapped. 38 “David Levinthal,” accessed April 1, 2022, https://davidlevinthal.com/. 39 James Casebere and Maurice Berger, James Casebere: Model Culture, Photographs 1975–1996 (San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1996). 40 Simon, “Ordinary Things, Domestic Space and Photography,” 84. 41 “Elaine Campaner – A Place in the Sun,” The Big Idea, May 29, 2012, www.thebigidea.nz/ connect/media-releases/2012/may/117741-elaine-campaner-a-place-in-the-sun. 42 Veronica della Dora, “Travelling Landscape-Objects,” Progress in Human Geography 33, no. 3 (June 1, 2009): 335, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508096348. 43 Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 160. 44 Susan Stewart observes that the “delicate and hermetic world of the souvenir is a world of nature idealized,” where she writes “nature is removed from the domain of struggle into the domestic sphere of the individual and the interior.” The souvenir’s reduction of the “public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into the miniature” then becomes “appropriated within the privatized view of the individual subject.” I see the domestic sphere differently: not as retreat from politics, but one enmeshed with the same struggles. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 1st paperback ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 145, 137. 45 “Elaine Campaner – A Place in the Sun.” 46 Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text, no. 11 (1984): 24, https://doi.org/10.2307/466593. 47 Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom, 276. 48 Stewart, On Longing, 56. 49 Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 60. The apparent stillness of objects in the still life does not automatically remove the “possibility of event.” Indeed, the very idea that the still life is frozen has been challenged by authors such as Claudia Tobin, who insists that “transformation and movement live at the heart of stillness and the ordinary.” Peter Schwenger, “Still Life: A User’s Manual,” Narrative 10, no. 2 (2002): 141; Claudia Tobin, Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 211, https://doi.org/10.3366/j. ctv10kmdqb. 50 Gallery 9 and Elaine Campaner, Elaine Campaner Petri Dish, Exhibition Catalogue (Darlinghurst: Gallery 9, 2017), 9, www.gallery9.com.au/assets/Elaine%20Campaner/G9%20Elaine% 20Campaner%202017.pdf. 51 Museum of Contemporary Art, “Elaine Campaner.” 52 As Campaner puts it, “What is the bigger picture that these objects are part of? Can they be redeemed in any way? What are our containing or fracturing cultural mythologies? How can we experience these objects as part of a different story?” Elaine Campaner, “Elaine Campaner – Citizenship Artists’ Statement,” Damien Minton Gallery (blog), May 17, 2011, http://damien mintongallery.blogspot.com/2011/05/elaine-campaner-citizenship.html. 53 Ken Miller and Motoyuki Daifu, “Motoyuki Daifu Interview,” Purple Magazine, 2015, https:// purple.fr/magazine/fw-2015-issue-24/motoyuki-daifu/. 54 Project Family documents domestic clutter along with Daifu’s parents and siblings. 55 Nobuyoshi Araki, The Banquet (Tokyo: Magazine House, 1993). 56 Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 169. 57 Ibid. 58 Motoyuki Daifu, “A  Humorous Look at Japanese Family Life, in Photos,” Huck Magazine, February  11, 2020, www.huckmag.com/playlist-archive/motoyuki-daifu-hypermarchenovembre-photography-japan/. 59 Daifu notes that the reception of his work is often at odds with what an international audience expects of a Japanese home with their impression of minimalist spaces and cleanliness, which means they often think his home realm is unusual, but Daifu comments that “the situation of my family is the same as most other families from a middle or ‘lower’ class, so I am bit surprised about the reactions and points of view of people from abroad” (cited in Louise Benson, “Get Up Close and Personal with Japanese Photographer Motoyuki Daifu,” Elephant, January 15,

50  Domestic things 2021, https://elephant.art/get-up-close-and-personal-with-japanese-photographer-motoyukidaifu-15012021/.). 60 Miller and Daifu, “Motoyuki Daifu Interview.” 61 Hao Hong, “Hong Hao Artist Statement,” Prix Pictet, November 6, 2013, https://prixpictet. com/portfolios/consumption-shortlist/hong-hao/. 62 Emanuela Zanon, “Hong Hao. My Things,” Juliet Art Magazine, October 23, 2015, www. juliet-artmagazine.com/en/hong-hao-my-things/. 63 Kerry Ann Lee, “Home Made: Picturing Chinese Settlement in New Zealand” (Masters, Wellington, Massey University, 2008), 22, http://hdl.handle.net/10179/723. 64 Sol LeWitt, Autobiography (New York: Multiples Inc, 1980). 65 This is an interesting piece to consider in light of LeWitt’s claim that conceptual art is a means of “avoiding subjectivity”, see Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 13. 66 Adam D. Weinberg, “LeWitt’s Autobiography: Inventory of the Present,” in Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, eds. Sol LeWitt and Martin Friedman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 102. 67 Douglas Crimp also makes this comparison, see Douglas Crimp, “Zoe’s New York,” in Zoe Leonard: Survey, eds. Bennett Simpson and Rebecca Matalon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018), 205. 68 Weinberg, “LeWitt’s Autobiography,” 101. 69 Tammy Rae Carland and Ann Cvetkovich, “Sharing an Archive of Feelings: A Conversation,” Art Journal 72, no. 2 (June 2013): 73, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2013.10791035. 70 Cvetkovich, “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice,” 273. 71 For example, in his reading of My Things: No 1 (2001), Malcolm McNeill focuses on the presence of a “corporate, commercial and mass produced” red and white milk carton, and compares this to a jar brewed tea which is “unbranded, domestic, and intimate.” McNeill, “Consumption at Christmas: Hong Hao’s ‘My Things No. 1’,” Victoria & Albert Museum Blog (blog), December 20, 2016, www.vam.ac.uk/blog/asia-department/considering-consumption-at-christ mas-hong-haos-my-things-no-1-on-display-this-december. 72 Caracciolo, Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities, 72–73. 73 Ibid., 76. Here, he draws on Jane Bennet’s work in Vibrant Matter, and her own use of what she describes as an “onto-story,” which itself relies on the list form. 74 Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art, Art, Architecture and Design from the MIT Press (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 342. 75 For a discussion of the use of trash in art works, see Gillian Whiteley, Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010). 76 Bill Brown, “Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode),” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 2 (January 2020): 259–303, https://doi.org/10.1086/706678. 77 Ibid., 294. Brown describes the problematic scale as concerned with ‘the relations among different scales of social phenomena, and the question of what becomes visible or invisible from one or another distance.’ 78 Gao Minglu, Zhongguo Ji Duo Zhu Yi: Chinese Maximalism (Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House, 2003). 79 Gao, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art, 311. 80 Many of these works had the surface appearance that aligned with Western minimalist art. The term maximalist was used to distinguish this movement from Western minimalism, as they had very different conceptual approaches: maximalist artists were interested in the spiritual meaning and experience of the artist through the process of making art and disagreed with minimalist philosophy, which emphasises meaning within the art object itself, and were not engaged with issues of subjecthood and spirituality. See Gao, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art, p. 314. 81 Gao, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art, 314. 82 Ibid., 269. 83 Angie Baecker, “Hong Hao,” Artforum, April 2012, www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201204/ hong-hao-30638. 84 McNeill, “Consumption at Christmas.”

Domestic things 51 85 Denis Fred Simon and Cong Cao, “China’s Future: Have Talent, Will Thrive,” Issues in Science and Technology 26, no. 1 (2009): 31. 86 Edward Leffingwell, “Hong Hao at Chambers,” Art in America 92, no. 6 (July  6, 2004): 176–76. 87 For a discussion of photographic representation of books and libraries, see Kate Flint, “Books in Photographs,” in The History of Reading, Volume 3, eds. Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), 156–73, https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230316737_10. 88 For a discussion of the labour of consumption and collecting, including a discussion of how “objects become domesticated via the collection,” see Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 13. 89 Cited in Susan Bright, Art Photography Now, Revised and Expanded ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 121. 90 Baecker, “Hong Hao.” 91 Zoe Leonard and Elisabeth Lebovici, The Politics of Contemplation (New York: Murray Guy Gallery, 2012). 92 Beth Dungan and Zoe Leonard, “An Interview with Zoe Leonard,” Discourse 24, no. 2 (2002): 84. 93 Leonard cited in Bright, Art Photography Now, 124. 94 Svetlana Alpers, “Zoe Leonard: Analogue,” in Zoe Leonard: Photographs, ed. Urs Stahel (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2007), 220. 95 Elisabeth Lebovici, “The Friction of Everyday Life,” in Zoe Leonard: Photographs, ed. Urs Stahel (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2007), 73. 96 Cvetkovich, “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice,” 283. 97 Andrea K. Scott, “A Love Letter to New York City’s Vanishing Mom-and-Pops,” The New Yorker, August 5, 2015, www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-love-letter-to-new-yorkcitys-vanishing-mom-and-pops. 98 Alpers, “Zoe Leonard: Analogue,” 220. Alpers makes the point that the shop window for a photographer is the equivalent of the tabletop to a painter. She writes: “We are so used to looking at paintings of objects set on tables as still lives that the oddity of the format is not often noted. Much the same could be said of the photographer’s window. The window, like the tabletop, is a real thing in the world at the same time that it is a convention. Starting in the seventeenth century, Dutch painters retired to the studio to observe and paint things, some of which were set on a table. One could say that in the nineteenth century photographers went outside and, taking the street for a studio in a specific sense, they observed and photographed things in shop windows” (Alpers, “Zoe Leonard: Analogue,” 223). 99 Anna Blume, “Zoe Leonard Interviewed by Anna Blume,” in Zoe Leonard: An Exhibition Catalogue from the Vienna Secession (Wien: Wien Secession, 1997), n.p. 100 Scott, “A Love Letter to New York City’s Vanishing Mom-and-Pops.” 101 Zoe Leonard et al., “Artist Questionnaire: 21 Responses,” October 100 (2002): 93. 102 Tom McDonough, “The Archivist of Urban Waste: Zoe Leonard, Photographer as RagPicker,” Afterall: A  Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 25 (2010): 21, https://doi. org/10.1086/657459. 103 Fred Moton, “Photopos: Film, Book, Archive, Music, Sculpture,” in Zoe Leonard: Survey, eds. Bennett Simpson and Rebecca Matalon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018), 145. 104 Lebovici, “The Friction of Everyday Life,” 72. 105 McDonough, “The Archivist of Urban Waste,” 26. 106 Margaret Iversen, “Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 4 (2012): 805, https://doi.org/10.1086/667425. 107 This reflects what Lebovici describes as Leonard’s “simultaneous questioning of both subject and vantage point, the relation between viewer and world – in short subjectivity and how it informs our experience of the world.” Leonard and Lebovici, The Politics of Contemplation, n.p. 108 Robyn Gibson, “Introduction,” in The Memory of Clothes, ed. Robyn Gibson (Rotterdam: Springer, 2015), xiii.

52  Domestic things 109 Elisabeth Lebovici, From There to Back Again (New York: Murray Guy Gallery, 2012). 110 Albers was a weaver, printmaker, textile designer, and writer. She wrote extensively on the history and practice of weaving, see for example her On Weaving, first published 1965 with the most recent edition published by Princeton University Press 2017. 111 Lynne Albers, “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture,” in Interiors, eds. Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke, and Josiah McElheny (Annandale-on-Hudson and Berlin: Center for Curatorial Studies and Sternberg Press, 2012), 45–53. 112 Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Maneuver,” 4 Columns, November  22, 2019, http://4columns.org/ bryan-wilson-julia/maneuver. 113 cited in McDonough, “The Archivist of Urban Waste,” 6. 114 Bryan-Wilson, “Maneuver.” 115 Albers, “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture,” 51. 116 Bryan-Wilson, “Maneuver.” 117 Vacche, “Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine Space,” 18. 118 Leonard cited in Bright, Art Photography Now, 124. 119 In his essay on Leonard’s work, Jonathon Flatley describes how Leonard “has a gift for seeing similarities.” See “A Thousand Years of Zoe Leonard,” Public Books: A Magazine of Idea, Arts, and Scholarship, June 15, 2018, www.publicbooks.org/a-thousand-years-of-zoe-leonard/.   This “gift” is made obvious in her many collections (of suitcases in 1961 (2002–), sewn fruit in Strange Fruit (1992–1997), and photographs of similar scenarios such as plastic bags caught in trees in the series tree + bag (2000) or tree trunks growing around metal fences in the series tree + fence (1998)). But I also see Leonard’s ability to see similarities across her work, leaving trails of connection across different series. The grid-like pattern in the threads of Couch Upholstery and Hand Towel is similar to the grids produced by her expansive collection of postcards of Niagara Falls, which she placed in grids over the gallery walls in You see I am here after all, which is also similar to the grids in each chapter of Analogue. 120 Costello, Planets on Tables, 6. 121 Bonnie Costello, “Planets on Tables: Still Life and War in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 3 (2005): 448, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2005.0080.

References Albers, Lynne. “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture.” In Interiors, edited by Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke, and Josiah McElheny, 45–53. Annandale-on-Hudson and Berlin: Center for Curatorial Studies and Sternberg Press, 2012. Alpers, Svetlana. “Zoe Leonard: Analogue.” In Zoe Leonard: Photographs, edited by Urs Stahel, 219–23. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2007. Andre, Linda. “A Knife Is a Knife.” Afterimage 11, no. 3 (October 1, 1983): 16–17. https://doi. org/10.1525/aft.1983.11.3.16. Araki, Nobuyoshi. The Banquet. Tokyo: Magazine House, 1993. Baecker, Angie. “Hong Hao.” Artforum, April  2012. www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201204/ hong-hao-30638. Bennett, Jane. “A  Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 47–69. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Benson, Louise. “Get Up Close and Personal with Japanese Photographer Motoyuki Daifu.” Elephant, 15 January  2021, https://elephant.art/get-up-close-and-personal-with-japanese-photographermotoyuki-daifu-15012021/. The Big Idea. “Elaine Campaner – A Place in the Sun.” May 29, 2012. www.thebigidea.nz/connect/ media-releases/2012/may/117741-elaine-campaner-a-place-in-the-sun. Blume, Anna. “Zoe Leonard Interviewed by Anna Blume.” In Zoe Leonard: An Exhibition Catalogue from the Vienna Secession. Wien: Wien Secession, 1997. Bonnell, Sian. “The Camera as Catalyst, the Photograph as Conduit: An Exploration of the Performative Role of Photography.” Ph.D., Manchester Metropolitan University, 2013. https:// e-space.mmu.ac.uk/336516/.

Domestic things 53 ———. “Sian Bonnell.” Sian Bonnell. Accessed February 21, 2022. www.sianbonnell.com. Bright, Susan. Art Photography Now. Revised and Expanded Edition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011. ———. “Household Management.” In Text + Work. Bournemouth: Arts Institute, 2007. Brown, Bill. “Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode).” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 2 (January 2020): 259–303. https://doi.org/10.1086/706678. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Maneuver.” 4 Columns, November  22, 2019. http://4columns.org/ bryan-wilson-julia/maneuver. Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion, 1990. Campaner, Elaine. “Elaine Campaner – Citizenship Artists’ Statement.” Damien Minton Gallery (blog), May  17, 2011. http://damienmintongallery.blogspot.com/2011/05/elaine-campaner-citi zenship.html. Caracciolo, Marco. Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv25p442v. Carland, Tammy Rae, and Ann Cvetkovich. “Sharing an Archive of Feelings: A Conversation.” Art Journal 72, no. 2 (June 2013): 70–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2013.10791035. Casebere, James, and Maurice Berger. James Casebere: Model Culture, Photographs 1975-1996. San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1996. Costello, Bonnie. Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World. Planets on Tables. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501727047. ———. “Planets on Tables: Still Life and War in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens.” Modernism/ Modernity 12, no. 3 (2005): 443–58. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2005.0080. Crimp, Douglas. “Zoe’s New York.” In Zoe Leonard: Survey, edited by Bennett Simpson and Rebecca Matalon, 202–9. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018. Cvetkovich, Ann. “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice.” In Feeling Photography, edited by Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, 273–96. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Daifu, Motoyuki. “A Humorous Look at Japanese Family Life, in Photos.” Huck Magazine, February  11, 2020. www.huckmag.com/playlist-archive/motoyuki-daifu-hypermarche-novembrephotography-japan/. “David Levinthal.” Accessed April 1, 2022. https://davidlevinthal.com/. Dora, Veronica della. “Travelling Landscape-Objects.” Progress in Human Geography 33, no. 3 (June 1, 2009): 334–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508096348. Dungan, Beth, and Zoe Leonard. “An Interview with Zoe Leonard.” Discourse 24, no. 2 (2002): 70–85. Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London: Routledge, 2004. Flint, Kate. “Books in Photographs.” In The History of Reading, Volume 3, edited by Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed, 156–73. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230316737_10. Foster, Alasdair, and Sian Bonnell. “Sian Bonnell: Insights of the Absurd.” Talking Picture (blog), November 13, 2020. https://talking-pictures.net.au/2020/11/14/sian-bonnell-insights-of-the-absurd/. Gallery 9, and Elaine Campaner. Elaine Campaner Petri Dish, Exhibition Catalogue. Darlinghurst: Gallery 9, 2017. www.gallery9.com.au/assets/Elaine%20Campaner/G9%20Elaine%20 Campaner%202017.pdf. Gao, Minglu. Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art. Art, Architecture and Design from the MIT Press. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. ———. Zhongguo Ji Duo Zhu Yi: Chinese Maximalism. Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House, 2003. Gibson, Robyn. “Introduction.” In The Memory of Clothes, edited by Robyn Gibson, xiii–xvi. Rotterdam: Springer, 2015. Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936.” Social Text, no. 11 (1984): 20–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/466593.

54  Domestic things Hong, Hao. “Hong Hao Artist Statement.” Prix Pictet, November 6, 2013. https://prixpictet.com/ portfolios/consumption-shortlist/hong-hao/. Iversen, Margaret. “Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean.” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 4 (2012): 796–818. https://doi.org/10.1086/667425. Kuraishi, Shino. “Family Home, Or the Stage of Representation: Takashi Yasumura’s Domestic Scandals.” In Domestic Scandals Takashi Yasumura, edited by Takashi Yasumura, 87–89. Tokyo: Osiris, 2005. Lazevnick, Ashley. “Never Still! Nonhuman Life in Charles Demuth’s Green Pears.” Oxford Art Journal 44, no. 2 (April 7, 2022): 269–90. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcab017. Lebovici, Elisabeth. “The Friction of Everyday Life.” In Zoe Leonard: Photographs, edited by Urs Stahel, 71–79. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2007. ———. From There to Back Again. New York: Murray Guy Gallery, 2012. Lee, Kerry Ann. “Home Made: Picturing Chinese Settlement in New Zealand.” Masters, Massey University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/723. Lee, Yoonjean. Still-Life. Seoul: Datz Press, 2015. Leffingwell, Edward. “Hong Hao at Chambers.” Art in America 92, no. 6 (July 6, 2004): 176–76. Leonard, Zoe, George Baker, Martha Rosler, Richard Serra, William Kentridge, Gerard Byrne, Andrea Robbins, et al. “Artist Questionnaire: 21 Responses.” October 100 (2002): 6–97. Leonard, Zoe, and Elisabeth Lebovici. The Politics of Contemplation. New York: Murray Guy Gallery, 2012. LeWitt, Sol. Autobiography. New York: Multiples Inc, 1980. Lunsford, P. Celina. “Still Life: A Visual Interrogation of Habitation.” In Stilled: Contemporary Still Life Photography by Women, edited by Kate Newton and Christine Rolph, 29–34. Cardiff: Photogallery, 2006. Martineau, Paul. Still Life in Photography. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010. McDonough, Tom. “The Archivist of Urban Waste: Zoe Leonard, Photographer as RagPicker.” Afterall: A  Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 25 (2010): 18–29. https://doi. org/10.1086/657459. McNeill, Malcolm. “Consumption at Christmas: Hong Hao’s ‘My Things No. 1’.” Victoria  & Albert Museum Blog (blog), December  20, 2016. www.vam.ac.uk/blog/asia-department/ considering-consumption-at-christmas-hong-haos-my-things-no-1-on-display-this-december. Miller, Ken, and Motoyuki Daifu. “Motoyuki Daifu Interview.” Purple Magazine, 2015. https:// purple.fr/magazine/fw-2015-issue-24/motoyuki-daifu/. Moton, Fred. “Photopos: Film, Book, Archive, Music, Sculpture.” In Zoe Leonard: Survey, edited by Bennett Simpson and Rebecca Matalon, 144–47. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018. Munteán, László. “Modeling the Memories of Others: David Levinthal’s I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq.” In Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, edited by László Munteán, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik, 1st ed., 191–208. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315472171. Museum of Contemporary Art. “Elaine Campaner: Christmas Island, from the Series Lapped.” Art Base, 2014. https://art.base.co/product/1807-elaine-campaner-christmas-island-from-the-serieslapped. Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artificial Kingdom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Phu, Thy, and Elspeth H. Brown. “Epilogue.” In Feeling Photography, edited by Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, 273–96. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Poletti, Anna. “The Implied Rummager: Reading Intimate Interiors in Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules.” Life Writing 17, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 455–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2 020.1768874. Rice, Charles. The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Schwenger, Peter. “Still Life: A User’s Manual.” Narrative 10, no. 2 (2002): 140–55.

Domestic things 55 Scott, Andrea K. “A Love Letter to New York City’s Vanishing Mom-and-Pops.” The New Yorker, August 5, 2015. www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-love-letter-to-new-york-citysvanishing-mom-and-pops. Simon, Denis Fred, and Cong Cao. “China’s Future: Have Talent, Will Thrive.” Issues in Science and Technology 26, no. 1 (2009): 29–42. Simon, Jane. “Interior Matter: Photography, Spaces, Selves.” Life Writing 17, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 441–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2020.1770473. ———. “Ordinary Things, Domestic Space and Photography: Takashi Yasumura’s Interiors.” In Occupation: Ruin, Repudiation, Revolution: Constructed Space Conceptualized, edited by Lynn Churchill and Dianne Smith, 83–98. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. 1st paperback ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Tiidenberg, Katrin, and Andrew Whelan. “Sick Bunnies and Pocket Dumps: ‘Not-Selfies’ and the Genre of Self-Representation.” Popular Communication 15, no. 2 (April  3, 2017): 141–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1269907. Tobin, Claudia. Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3366/j.ctv10kmdqb. Vacche, Angela Dalle. “Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine Space: Cavalier’s ‘Thérèse’.” Film Criticism 17, no. 1 (1992): 3–25. Warner, Marina. “Introduction.” In Things: A Spectrum of Photography, 1850–2001, edited by Mark Haworth-Booth, 7–12. London: Jonathan Cape; Victoria and Albert Museum, 2004. Weinberg, Adam D. “LeWitt’s Autobiography: Inventory of the Present.” In Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, edited by Sol LeWitt and Martin Friedman, 100–8. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Whiteley, Gillian. Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010. Wolthers, Louise. “Things and People: Still Lifes Meet Work Lives.” In Still Life Work Life, edited by Dragana Vujanovic, Louise Wolthers, and Hasselblad Foundation, 11–18. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing and The Hasselblad Foundation, 2013. Zanon, Emanuela. “Hong Hao. My Things.” Juliet Art Magazine, October 23, 2015. www.julietartmagazine.com/en/hong-hao-my-things/. Zappavigna, Michele, and Sumin Zhao. “Selfies and Recontextualization: Still Life Self-Imaging in Social Media.” In Photography and Its Publics. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.

3 Domestic time Diaries, habits, durations

Diaries, domestic time, photography In the last chapter, I examined the work of photographers who deploy the gestures of still life to draw attention to the charge of domestic objects, and the role of those objects in connection to the self, photography, and the life of matter. The photographers I write about in this chapter, Moyra Davey (Canada, b. 1958), Elina Brotherus (Finland, b. 1972), and Anna Fox (UK, b. 1961) are also, in many ways, concerned with domestic objects. Davey, for instance, describes her pictures in Long Life Cool White as being “about the life of objects.”1 Brotherus’ self-portraiture in Annonciation gives weight to both the human figure and the material object in the domestic realm. Fox trains her gaze on domestic objects inside cupboards and around the home in Cockroach Diary and My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words. While continuing to observe the role of objects and matter in photography, I turn in this chapter towards photographic art that harnesses diaristic modes of attention that unfold in the domestic. I  examine different temporalities, habits, and durations associated with the domestic and diaristic photographic practice in the work of Davey, Brotherus, and Fox. The genre of the diary has links to both photography and the domestic. Both the photograph and the diary are often understood to be a mix of both personal and objective viewpoints, and both are often received as direct unmediated records of life.2 Kylie Cardell, in her unpacking of assumptions about diaries and authenticity asks, for example, “Is diary a genre of literature that does in fact approach what [Susan] Sontag finds in the amateur photograph?”3 Here, Cardell is referring to Sontag’s description of amateur photographs as providing more authentic depictions of the world than the artistry or skill of the professional photograph and thus being more appropriate to the act of witnessing. The assumption that the diary and the amateur photograph are both somehow more proximate, more direct, and less mediated modes of representation than other genres does not stand up to critique: both may function as evidence, but they are just as constructed as other modes of representation. However, this shared reception, or set of assumptions, is useful when thinking about the intersection between photography and diaristic modes of self-representation. The diary also has links to the domestic: it is a form closely linked with the private sphere and often associated with “secrecy, domesticity, and privacy.”4 At the same time as having connotations of rumour or scandal, it is also related to the recording of ordinary daily details. As this oscillation between potential titillation and boredom in the connotations of the diary form suggests, diary practices are heterogeneous, and may travel between the personal reflection, the practical note, as well as more sweeping DOI: 10.4324/9781003089148-3

Domestic time 57 testimonial, confessional descriptions. While all of this points to the difficulties in neatly defining the genre, for my purposes in this chapter, when I use the term diaristic mode, I am suggesting a practice focused on articulating and recording the experience of the self in a regular serial fashion, in a way which deploys diary time either with dated entries or a concern with “making sense of the present as it accumulates each day.”5 Domestic time is often positioned in relation to repetition, routine, and the need for efficiency. Accounts of domestic time have focused, for example, on how the structural forces of industrialisation, globalisation, and urbanisation impact upon the tempo of home life and how the introduction of new domestic technologies mechanised the home.6 Representations of home life have often involved two versions of domestic temporality, one as timeless, outside of history, and as a static haven, and the other as machine-like, with an endless cycle of routine banal activities ruled by clock time.7 These two visions of domestic temporality are connected: it is the repetitious and habitual labour of housework that is needed in order to produce the illusion of the domestic realm as timeless.8 Importantly, for my discussion of domestic time in photographic art, recent scholarship on domestic rhythms and temporalities recognises the heterogeneity of domestic time.9 No matter how much the domestic may be embedded with routines and the mundane activities of cooking, cleaning, and care, domestic temporalities are composed of a range of shifting relations and activities. They are made, as Sarah Pink argues, at the intersection between everyday practices, negotiations with the home environment, as well as “biographical, memorial and imaginative ways of situating the ‘now’ in relation to past and future.”10 Put simply, domestic time is not straightforward, but rather continually shaped through a range of materials, objects, practices, and environments, as well as the rhythms of humans and non-human lives.11 Photography, like the domestic, has its own complex relationship to time and temporality.12 The camera is, as Roland Barthes famously argued in Camera Lucida, a “clock for seeing,”13 and photography has played a key role in understandings of domestic temporality. Family photography, for example, has historically been deployed to evoke the idea of domestic life as a “haven from rather than a necessary correlate of industrial time.”14 In other words, photography doesn’t just reflect the reality of time but creates and shapes ideas about time. As Elizabeth Freeman argues, photography is a technology which made domesticity visible “as a form of temporality.”15 For example, the practice and display of family photography in the home both reveal and coordinate a mode of domestic time often focused on the reproducibility of the middle-class heterosexual family.16 Representations of children and the spatial organisation of multiple generations in family photographs all suggest the link between photography and the reproduction of family.17 Freeman’s analysis of domestic time asks what it means “to say that domesticity is a particular tempo, a way of living time rather than merely a relationship to the space of the home”?18 She poses this question in the context of analysing texts by lesbian filmmakers and authors that challenge modes of domestic time based on familial reproduction and that also put forward a counter version of domestic time informed by the temporal discords of queer life.19 Like Freeman, I am interested in explorations of domestic time that are out of step with a version of domestic time that is bound to routines, synchronicity, maintenance, and the idealisation of family life as a “moving watchwork.”20 Specifically in this chapter, I bring domestic time and diaristic modes into dialogue. Drawing from life writing scholars who focus on the diary form as well as feminist and queer writers who interrogate the durations and tempo of the everyday, I analyse how Davey, Brotherus, and Fox use diaristic modes of photography in ways that reveal a range

58  Domestic time of domestic temporalities. I turn to Davey, Brotherus, and Fox in this chapter because they each offer up – through photographs (and, in Davey’s case, writing) – a version of domestic time that doesn’t align with the synchronous, the linear, and the efficient. Each produces work that examines the passing of time, durations of waiting and loss, temporal experiences of repeated failure, and the changing rhythms of home life across time. In the first section of the chapter, I focus on Davey, who employs the diaristic in her methods of reading, her fragmentary mode of writing, and her ongoing attention to the domestic details around her in her photographs. I explore Davey’s connection to the diaristic and the domestic across her photography and her writing in Long Life Cool White and several of her essays and photographs that have been collected in her book Index Cards.21 Davey’s practice examines the lulls and troughs of photographing and writing, and I position Davey’s domestic time as one that is slow, contemplative, and embedded with minor affects and ambivalences. I then discuss Brotherus’ Annonciation series and her photobook Carpe Fucking Diem in which she offers an account of her experience of unsuccessful infertility treatments.22 Brotherus’ self-documentation captures the duration of waiting, the seemingly endless needles and medications, and her increasing despair that unfolds largely within domestic interiors. I argue that Brotherus’ Annonciation and Carpe Fucking Diem produce a complex temporal map by bringing together the fertility tracking device of the calendar, the durations of repetitive personal disappointments, and non-reproductive time, with a range of art historical references. In the final part of this chapter, I  focus on three of Fox’s books that attend to the domestic realm using diaristic modes: Cockroach Diary, 41 Hewitt Rd, and My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words.23 Cockroach Diary tracks a cockroach invasion, as well as household tensions, 41 Hewitt Rd documents domestic time with young children in a messy share house, and My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words collates and juxtaposes Fox’s observations of her mother’s neat habits and her father’s cruel words. Across these works, I  suggest that Fox offers a domestic economy of repetition and a temporal mode based on the changing rhythms of her children, her parents, as well as human and non-human visitors. Taken together, I argue that all three photographers use diaristic modes in ways that reveal the complexity of shifting domestic durations and the important role of photography in both showing and producing domestic time. Fragments and detail: Moyra Davey Many of Davey’s photographs, especially those made in the 2000s, track a landscape of domestic details. In Long Life Cool White (2008), she photographs her desk covered in papers and mugs, her fridge, piles of her diaries, her record collection, and her books. In her essay films, such as Les Goddesses (2011), Davey wanders about her own apartment. She is, as George Baker describes, a “prowler of her own domestic interior,”24 waiting to catch the right light. Davey’s photographs aren’t limited to domestic interiors and objects. Increasingly, she has included figures in her pictures.25 She has photographed writers and readers on the subway in New York. She has also photographed café tables, cemeteries, her dog, and, since the late 2010s, other animals have also become more prominent in her photographs. Broadly, however, it is fair to describe Davey as being focused on photographing modest things.26 Like Zoe Leonard, whose work I discussed at the end of the previous chapter,

Domestic time 59 Davey’s photography is often concerned with used things, and human traces on objects.27 Fred Moton’s description of photography as “an atmosphere for misplacing things” and a tool for “detecting lower frequencies” was made specifically in relation to the work of Leonard.28 However, Moton’s positioning of photography as a tool for observing minor reverberations also applies to the work of Davey. Her series Copperheads (1990), for example, consists of 100 close-up photographs of pennies which, when examined closely, reveal their history of use. The dents in the coins, their worn away sections, speak to their history of being handled, passed between and across hands, stored in purses and pockets, rubbing against tissues and paperclips, and being dropped to the ground before being picked up again, or left behind. While Davey’s photography moves beyond the realm of the domestic, I focus here primarily on examples where she explicitly or implicitly draws attention to the temporal economy of her domestic representations. Davey is not only a photographer but also a writer and a filmmaker. Across her writing, films, and photographs, she employs fragmentary modes and acknowledges her drift towards to “lists, diaries, notebooks, and letters.”29 Davey’s writing, and mode of production, echoes this attraction: her essays are sometimes divided into diary-like entries, and she refers back to her own notes, and often includes conversations and other exchanges as well. Her weaving of diaristic entries in her essays takes advantage of the diary’s tendency to be, as K. Eckhard Kuhn-Osius points out in her study of writing patterns in diaries, “especially rich in spots of indeterminacy for the reader.”30 Her essays read like a series of photographs: each note or section of an essay linking to the previous one but not in a necessarily chronological or obvious way. That is, Davey edits her writing like a photographer: links are made through shape, texture, and form.31 This is relational autobiography, one that is relational across media as much as across individual and collective lives. When Davey dives into her own life, integrating quotes from her own diaries, or offering diaristic reflections, this is often done in relation to the autobiographical details (and sometimes the published diaries and journals) of other authors, creating a web of connections, coincidences, and correspondences.32 In this way, Davey’s work is built around a practice of citation and what Lauren Fournier describes as “intertextual intimacy.”33 The lines of Davey’s life are written as intersecting with what she has read and learnt about others: a mode of “collaborative criticism.”34 In Davey’s work, the diaristic appears in various forms. In the pair of photographs Spider/Diaries (2014), she brings together an image of a spider caught in a glass cup ready to release outside, with another image of a substantial pile of her diaries on a desk. The spider is captured and observed in the process of release: diaries too are tools of capture, repositories for reflections. This image, with its depiction of multiple diaries of different sizes and colours (some flagged with post-it notes), clearly suggests a sustained practice of diary writing over a lengthy period of time. Aside from the literal representation of her own diaries in photographs, in her writing and essays, Davey employs the genre of the diary entry to weave the daily and the personal across her discussion of wider topics (such as photography, politics, memory, literature, and motherhood). “Notes on Photography  & Accident,” for example, is an essay which quietly argues for the value of small-scale photographs and the continued potency of the contingent, the accidental, and chance to photography. Here, Davey brings together photography theory, contemporary photographic art, and debates that have shaped the progression of photography practice since the 1970s, with diary-like entries that offer fleeting insights into her own life and illness, time spent in hospital, discussions with eye doctors and her own reflections on photographs and reading. When Davey writes about her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis,

60  Domestic time she refers to it as a “disease of accidents,” “mistakes of the immune system,” linking her body’s experience to the form of photography with its own set of accidents and risks: it is all on the same plane for her.35 One of her books is titled Burn the Diaries. In this book, Davey’s writing and photographs circle around Jean Genet’s work, as well as Davey’s childhood memories and her ambivalence about her own diary practices. This uncertainty is reflected in comments such as “[t]he dross of the diary, the compulsion to scribble, the delusion that we can hold on to time.”36 Davey’s description of the impulse to diarise reflects Phillippe Lejeune’s observation that a diary is not merely a text but is rather “a behavior, a way of life, of which the text is merely a trace or by-product.”37 While Davey maintains an ambivalence towards her own towering pile of diaries, the diary as an object and as a practice is a recurring motif. “Why would I want this stuff made public?” Davey asks in her piece of writing Transit of Venus.38 “Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?” is another question Davey poses in the grid of aerogramme photographs that together form Dr. Y., Dr. Y., (2014).39 Here, each aerogramme placed together constructs a larger image of Davey at home, lying in bed, heavily pregnant, with her dog next to her. This central image is surrounded by separate smaller photographs of her dog, back arched and shitting. Dr Y is the abbreviated name of Davey’s former analyst who she refers to in her video Fifty Minutes, which reflects on her years of analysis and what she describes as “the burden of disclosure” alongside reflections about other writers and artists, as well as her domestic life.40 Here, the dailiness of defecating is paralleled with practices of disclosure on the analyst’s couch and in the diary. These regular expulsions are contrasted here too with the slower tempo of pregnancy as well as the unhurried time of letters posted and received. Passing time The title of Davey’s book of photographs and essays, Long Life Cool White, is borrowed from the tiny text printed on the fluorescent tube light that features in the book’s cover photograph. This title also speaks to duration and a quality of light: both key to the practice of photography. Duration, temporality, and the passing of time are key themes in Davey’s work. This is clear, for example, in her photographs that feature the accumulation of dust: under her dog’s paw in Paw (2003) (see Figure 3.1), beneath her bed in Floor (2003), and on top of a record in Shure (2003).41 In both her photographs and writing, the dust is a reminder of the passing of time, “an index of duration,”42 but also suggestive of a mode of domestic time that is steady, slow, and contemplative. In a dated diaristic entry within her essay “Notes on Photography & Accident,” Davey writes “Dust and vacuum bedroom where I work on the bed. Within days every surface is again covered in powdery white dust.”43 In another section of the essay where she writes of being blocked in her art practice, Davey comments “I take pictures of the same dusty surfaces, the cherry wood bedside table with its thin coating of linen dust” and positions these photographs as failures.44 And then on October 10, “Pictures of dust motes in sunlight after shaking out the bedspread. . . . I’ve broken the ice, am taking pictures again.”45 Across these entries, the work of cleaning and the work of creating are linked through the motif of dust in their common cyclical nature: their shared incompletions, repetitions, and rejuvenations.46 While dust in Davey’s work operates as a recurring suggestion of time’s passage, Davey’s work also includes explicit images of timekeepers or indexes. 16 Photographs from

Domestic time 61

Figure 3.1 Moyra Davey, Paw, 2003, C-print, courtesy the artist; greengrassi, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

Paris (2009) features clock faces. In another work, Dictionaries (1996), a small clock sits on top of one half of a pair of huge dictionaries: making an obvious connection or prompt about the relationship between time and meaning, but one which is skewed: the clock is on its side (see Figure 3.2). Davey also directly engages the theme of time in “Notes on Photography & Accident,” where she writes about searching for a particular reference Roland Barthes or Walter Benjamin makes to clocks in photographs, a search that remains unsuccessful at the conclusion of her essay.47 Her series Empties (1996– 2000), taken over a period of five years, consists of 55 black-and-white photographs of empty whiskey bottles. Davey describes this series as a type of “calendar . . . a marker of time denoted by a particular type of consumption.”48 Much of Davey’s work is focused on material objects that reveal the passing of time.49 This includes the finitude of lived

62  Domestic time

Figure 3.2 Moyra Davey, Dictionaries, 1996, C-print, courtesy the artist; greengrassi, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

time, shown, for example, in the cemeteries and gravestones that appear in her video My Necropolis (2009), as well as the measurement of therapy time in Fifty Minutes (2006). All these examples indicate Davey’s sustained attention to the pace, duration and the accretion of time in her practice. Inertia and absorption The relationship between domestic time, the diaristic, and photography comes together especially clearly when Davey writes about the slowness and inertia that happens when creativity is at bay when making photographs, as well as when she describes the feeling of suspension, of being outside of time when absorbed in the making of photographs. Davey meditates on her photographic practice, often detailing – and diarising – her imminent sense of failure about images taken, or her inability to photograph, or lack of motivation to make images as well as the importance of slowness to her practice.50 Her reflections on making work often describe its accompanying failures, disappointments, and difficulties. In “Photography & Accident,” for example, she speaks of the entropy of making photographs, of there being no specific phrase for a creative block in taking photographs that accords with “writers block.”51 In another context, she describes a difficult shoot in a studio with human subjects: I struggle massively with the 4x5 camera, my light meter’s broken, clouds block the sun just as I’m about the release the shutter. I flail around like an amateur and shout at

Domestic time 63 J & B to help me. But I stick with it, I push through my awkwardness and ineptitude, endure my small panic despite my conviction that the pictures will be failures.52 This kind of self-reflection is echoed elsewhere. In Fifty Minutes, she talks about “having an idea for a picture, but eventually feeling a kind of inertia about the whole thing, and after some time and effort, chalking it up to failure.”53 After making photographs of family members at a wedding, she refers to writing in her notebook about her “own fear of failure,” musing “I’m sure the pictures I’ve taken earlier with a Hasselblad are mediocre.”54 Soon after in the same essay: “I was getting more and more depressed about my pictures. Old feelings of fraudery and worthlessness.”55 Here, as elsewhere in Davey’s writing, failure is examined repeatedly. But I suggest that dwelling upon the possibility of failure is a productive refrain for Davey. Her reflections often explore what Sianne Ngai calls minor affects: feelings that are explicitly “amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release.”56 This is not the realm of grand or dramatic emotion, but slight moods (Ngai cites, for example, envy, irritation, and anxiety) that Ngai argues are “defined by a flatness or ongoingness” and which have a “remarkable capacity for duration.”57 Ngai’s project is, at least in part, a recuperative one that claims the critical productivity of negative, ugly, or minor affects, by noting how they can bring attention to “the politically charged predicament of suspended agency from which all of these ugly feelings ensue.”58 Davey’s work, in a similar manner, draws out the creative potential, and social significance, of the low feelings – and ongoing duration – of inertia and fear of failure. This is expressed in Davey’s writing, and through her thematic focus on images and objects that suggest duration and the passing of time. It is also shown in instances where Davey observes the flux between producing and not-producing and where, amidst her reflections of failure and inertia, she also records the moments when she loses herself in making work. In Fifty Minutes, for example, she observes: “I take far fewer pictures now, but it can still happen that I’ll get that sense of heightened absorption and suspended time that comes with the first idea and the notion of a latent image.”59 Davey also writes of the repetition and slowness of producing images in and of domestic spaces, which themselves address the slow and cyclical. Speaking about her photograph Fridge, Davey writes, “It involved a slow, methodical deliberation, a stalking of light, of waiting for the precise moment of solar illumination in an otherwise dim room.”60 And in Burn the Diaries, she describes her apartment as “both a sundial and a camera” describing the “planetary slowness” of its movement,” and how in late fall/early winter she will “wait and watch the light, trap it, and later observe its subtle shifts as the days begin to lengthen.”61 Here, Davey writes about her domestic space as a camera, with herself waiting inside ready to trap light. Domestic time in Davey’s work travels slowly. It is made in relation to the sun, to seasonal rhythms, and to the tempo of minor affects as she photographs, writes, and reads. Elina Brotherus: infertile time My discussion of domestic time and the diaristic in Brotherus’ art is focused on her Annonciation (2009–2013) series as well as her photobook Carpe Fucking Diem. This photobook incorporates the Annonciation series into its pages, along with other photographs that provide a temporal expansion – or an aftermath – of the Annonciation photographs.62 Annonciation documents Brotherus’ five-year experience of attempting to

64  Domestic time conceive a child through In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF). The photographs in this series track with emotional precision the yellow plastic sharps bin, needles, and medication, the injection of flesh with stimulating drugs, and the layered grief of multiple IVF cycles, creating what Gilles Mora describes as a “mourning diary.”63 The title of Brotherus’ Annonciation series is a reference to the history of Christian painting and its numerous depictions of the moment when Archangel Gabriel visits Mary to tell her that she will give birth to the son of God. In this instance, the connotations of religious visual imagery operate as a thematic introduction to Brotherus’ experience of involuntary childlessness. Despite much clear effort, time, and hope, for Brotherus, there is no baby, no final moment of success. This failure is a very common – but rarely shown – aspect of infertility treatments. Brotherus’ representation of her own involuntary childlessness and the rigour of IVF treatments, followed by hollow disappointment when they aren’t successful, expresses a narrative about failed IVF treatments rarely seen in mainstream media.64 As Brotherus describes: What we learn about the subject in the media – documentaries, interviews, articles and TV programs on infertility – they all have a happy end. In reality, the success stories are rare, but they are the ones we hear of. For the rest of us, this biased broadcasting is upsetting. It’s as though the general public should not see the inconsolable reality but instead a cathartic “per aspera ad astra” Hollywood story.65 The invisibility of, and popular misconception around, failed infertility treatments is a key driver for Brotherus’ Annonciation, with its unflinching focus on failed infertility treatments (see Figure 3.3). While many of the photographs in this series are self-portraits in the traditional sense, in that they feature Brotherus’ face and body, others are facsimiles of calendar pages: material documents of the wrench of infertile time. These autobiographical photographs are carefully framed documentations and narratives of loss that are mostly set within domestic spaces. They focus on the self and home life through the lens of loss and infertility and are both a “record of pain” and an “archive of feeling.”66 The photographs in Annonciation reflect earlier examples of Brotherus’ work that are also openly autobiographical. For example, she documented her marriage breakup and its aftermath in Divorce Portrait (1998), Epilogue (1999), and This is the first day of the rest of your life II (1998). In these images focused on her own divorce, Brotherus uses self-portraiture to document difficult or cathartic moments or important periods of transition in her life trajectory. In a similar autobiographical manner, Brotherus represents her experience with sex and relationships in the photograph I hate sex (1998), where she is pictured lying down on her stomach on a bed looking pensively away from the camera.67 In all the earlier photographs, Brotherus uses her own body while also beckoning the viewer to consider intimate experiences from their own life.68 Calendar time and art history time The Annonciation series begins with an image of a calendar page marking time: it is 2008. As the series progresses, we see Brotherus in a range of domestic settings: sitting on her couch, hunched over at her kitchen table, sitting on the bathroom floor amidst an increasing amount of IVF paraphernalia: needles, medicines, sharps containers, and pregnancy tests. Interspersed throughout the series are more calendar pages: marking

Domestic time 65

Figure 3.3 Elina Brotherus, Annonciation 10, 2011, 30 × 42 cm, pigment ink print, from the series Annonciation, 2009–2013, courtesy the artist

out the “temporal map” of Brotherus’ experience (see Figure 3.4).69 Time is a key framework for how fertility is understood in an everyday sense: metaphors about fertility and women’s bodies often use temporal markers: “biological clock”; “biological timeline”; “windows of fertility,” and time is regularly described in this context as a “limited, winnowing resource.”70 The importance of the calendar or diary as a fertility tracking device is therefore a key motif in Brotherus’ series. In Annonciation, the tracking of monthly cycles is diarised and visualises the passing of infertile time: suddenly it is 2009, and the series continues, showing calendar pages with various jottings through 2010, 2011 and, finally, 2012. The Annonciation series is diaristic in the sense that it is a personal record that attempts to make sense of the process of infertility treatments as they unfold, but it is also diaristic in its clear temporal markers. Diary practices have a necessary link to temporality and, according to Lejeune’s definition, “diaries are only diaries because they have dated entries.”71 The juxtaposition of self-portraits depicting various stages of Brotherus’ personal experience of infertility treatments with the impersonal consistency of calendar pages produces a tension between clock or calendar time and lived experiences of time. Experiential time does not in general, of course, neatly align with clock or calendar time.72 But periods of infertility treatment produce increased tension between firstly, the required intense scheduling and timed precision of biological rhythms, infertility drugs that have

66  Domestic time Figure 3.4 Elina Brotherus, 2012, Calendar page facsimile, pigment ink print, from the series Annonciation, 2009–2013, original in colour, courtesy the artist

Domestic time 67 to be administered at precise hours, egg collections and embryo transfers, and secondly, the more amorphous suspenseful slow time of waiting for the results from a pregnancy test, and the inertia of disappointment after an unsuccessful treatment cycle. The other temporal tension between the self-portraits and the calendar pages is about individual and collective time. The self-portraits represent Brotherus’ individual lived time while the calendar pages correspond to a shared sociotemporal order that stretches beyond the individual.73 But yet another sense of time emerges from Annonciation: the unscheduled – but collective – lived experience of infertility. Brotherus points out that her Annonciation series has struck a particular chord with her viewers, she notes: “I have received more feedback after showing this work than I have for any other body of work. It gives a voice to those people whose experience is rarely articulated in art or in life.”74 Annonciation is personal and diaristic photographic art, but it also operates, as Brotherus explains, as “peer support” for others going through similar experience.75 Brotherus’ work, in this sense, challenges the idea that personal experiences of failure are solely about the individual. As Susan Bright points out, Brotherus’ “work is autobiographical but it is also about women in general.”76 The calendar pages in Annonciation are presented with no context: they are not hung on a wall or held in a pair of hands. Instead, the calendar pages appear in the Annonciation series as facsimiles: this is infertile time documented and tracked simply and directly. In other photographs from the series, there appears to be a diary, often placed next to a phone, a pen, and sometimes a pregnancy test. In one photograph, Annonciation 21, New York 11.07.2012, part 5 (2012), there is no diary or pregnancy test, but a more concrete signal of yet another month of infertility: blood-stained water in the toilet bowl. The calendar time represented in Annonciation is also brought together with the lengthier historical time of religious painting suggested through the title of the series and several recurring motifs. The title references the history of religious visual imagery, which represents the Annunciation, the moment when Mary is visited by an angel and learns she will miraculously give birth to the son of God. Aside from the literal reference to the Annunciation in the title of her series, Brotherus also cites several motifs, gestures, and features from the long history of Annunciation painting. In particular, Brotherus’ use of the domestic interior has links to Flemish Annunciations from the 15th and 16th centuries which typically set Mary within a domestic interior, and to the curved exterior archways of Early Renaissance Annunciation paintings.77 The domestic interiors of the Flemish Annunciations, like many of the settings of Brotherus’ photographs, feature curved arches, table settings, vases containing lilies symbolising purity and Mary’s designation as a “vessel,” and the figure of Mary with her head often bowed in meditation.78 Brotherus’ photograph Annonciation 7 (2011), for example, cited various iconographies from the history of religious art. Annonciation 7 is taken from the perspective of one room looking into another, with an archway – which recurs in several photographs from the series and is suggestive of passage, and the crossing of thresholds – framing the lone figure of Brotherus. Brotherus is seated at the table, head bowed with a glass vase containing a lily in front of her on the table: a clear citation of Annunciation iconography. The earliest surviving images depicting the Annunciation are from the 3rd and 4th centuries.79 This brings the temporality of Brotherus’ Annonciation into conversation with a deeper, extended historical time. By titling her series Annonciation, and by referencing several motifs and gestures from art history, Brotherus positions the series as part of a history of visual representations of the moment Mary receives news of her pregnancy

68  Domestic time from an angel. While Brotherus cites this visual imagery and its long history, Brotherus’ Annonciation also marks a departure from it: Brotherus’ angel never arrives. Doing time and waiting time The bathroom and toilet provide the setting for some of Brotherus’ portraits in this series, but so too do the couch, the kitchen, and the dining room table. And Brotherus explicitly doesn’t document her experience in the waiting rooms, blood collection facilities, and doctor’s rooms that the IVF treatments involve. She comments that “I didn’t shoot in the clinics, and I didn’t shoot my partner. He appears in one picture only, where we see his legs standing next to me. So, I guess you can’t fully even call it ‘documenting the process.’ ” Instead, Brotherus continues, “I wanted to see what happens to me, because the ‘me’ is my tool; it’s a sign in my visual vocabulary, so if it changes, I want to be able to see that change.”80 In Annonciation, these changes over time are firmly located in the domestic. In Annonciation 19 (2012), Brotherus sits in her kitchen at a small table, concentrating on extracting liquid from a glass vial into a syringe (see Figure 3.5). She sits at the

Figure 3.5 Elina Brotherus, Annonciation 19, 2012, 50 × 59 cm, pigment ink print, from the series Annonciation, 2009–2013. Courtesy the artist

Domestic time 69 table surrounded by normal kitchen things: the dishwasher is open, its drawers full of plates and cutlery, the microwave door is open on the shelf, tea towels hang on the stove. This is a lived-in kitchen, and Brotherus is situating her treatments as part of her everyday life. Habitual opening of vials and injecting occur alongside the unstacking of dishes from the dishwasher. The photographs in Annonciation also reflect the oscillation between the temporality of doing IVF treatments: injections, blood tests, pregnancy tests, calendar tracking, phone calling for results, and the intensity of waiting: waiting for a phone call, waiting for day one of a period so another round of treatment can begin, waiting and hoping for a baby. Photographs like Annonciation 10 and 19 capture the intensity of the activity of an IVF cycle, the concentration of measuring and injecting (see Figures 3.3 and 3.5). Other photographs such as Annonciation 3 (2010) and Annonciation 7 (2011) portray the in-between lengthy periods of waiting. In both Annonciation 3 and Annonciation 7, Brotherus sits at the table head lowered, just sitting in wait. In Annonciation 25, Brotherus is not herself present, but instead a mass of IVF medications is piled on top of a couch (see Figure 3.6). Prenatal vitamins sit next to stimulating hormones and needles. This photograph documents the sheer amount of IVF paraphernalia involved in each cycle: a stocktake of the supplies soon to be ingested, injected, and tracked in the calendar pages. The positioning of the medications is on the couch; again, Brotherus chooses a daily interior surface, locating the process of treatment and her autobiographical representation of it in the everyday space of the domestic. Another photograph in the series shows the same beige couch, empty of paraphernalia except for

Figure 3.6 Elina Brotherus, Annonciation 25, Medication, 2012, 30 × 45 cm, pigment ink print, from the series Annonciation, 2009–2013, original in colour, courtesy the artist

70  Domestic time a single pregnancy test. The production of domestic time in Brotherus’ series is clearly out of sync with the idealised version of domestic time connected to generational time. Here, domestic time is caught in cycles of repetition and failure and arrested reproduction. Aftermath The emotional strain and conceptual distancing present in the Annonciation series take on a slightly different tone when the series is integrated into Brotherus’ photobook Carpe Fucking Diem.81 This photobook offers a visual prelude and afterword to the Annonciation series and provides another lens with which to receive Brotherus’ life narrative about IVF and infertility. Carpe Fucking Diem opens with a photograph titled Hurricane: a tumultuous seascape with the Manhattan skyline in the background. The prelude includes self-portraits of Brotherus, portraits of her partner and their puppy, a small brown Dachshund named Marcello. Some of these photographs are set in exterior landscapes – rivers and forests – and some in domestic interiors. One photograph documents a framed family picture on an otherwise empty shelf. In this frame within the frame, Brotherus’ grandmother holds Brotherus as a baby on her lap, gazing down at her, a visual reference to maternal links in her past and the unreachability of further maternal links in her future. Other photographs in the prelude skew towards the everyday surreal. In one page layout, a photograph of used syringes is juxtaposed with a photograph of oysters sitting on plates of ice. These two facing pages place the hard plastic of the syringes in conversation with the soft, slippery oysters – a food understood not only to be an aphrodisiac but also one that can boost fertility – creating a visual poem about the disjunction between pleasure and the everyday banality of injections. Another page layout includes a photograph of Brotherus’ figure, her face turned from the camera, and her back marked with red iodine marks and wound dressing after a liver biopsy. This photograph is positioned next to a photograph of a large section of frozen duck wrapped in a clear plastic bag. This visual cacophony of imagery, with its acknowledgement of the unpredictability of any life narrative, the pull of kinship, and the reminders that human bodies too are flesh, precedes the concentrated intensity of the next section of the book. This visual arrangement in the prelude places various temporalities into conversation: the everyday time of eating and injections, the memory time of family photographs, the time of the body as medical object, and the stalled time of frozen meat. The middle section of the book dedicated to the Annonciation series is separated from the rest of the book by a series of blank brown paper pages: a visual demarcating of the series from the more surreal earlier images. In Carpe Fucking Diem, the Annonciation photographs are followed with pages of Brotherus’ own jotted notes about medication instructions, lists, and dates. These scribbles show the overwhelming amount of administration needed to keep on track of the IVF process, and again bring the diaristic mode into focus. These pages of written notes are followed by Brotherus’ self-portrait photograph of herself with her dog Marcello. In this image, Brotherus stares determinedly at the viewer, giving the middle finger, uncaring of who she offends with the gesture. Unlike most of her self-portraits, where she appears in impeccable clothing or fully nude, Brotherus appears in this image in a stained jumper, standing in front of a wooden fence. Her eyes are piercing, and Marcello is held in one of Brotherus’ hands, also looking directly at the viewer. The grief of the previous self-portraits has not disappeared but is now accompanied by anger, determination, and wry humour in the title of the image: My dog is cuter than your ugly baby.

Domestic time 71 The remaining photographs in the afterword section of Carpe Fucking Diem show Brotherus afloat in water, or out in the landscape with her dog or out exploring exterior sites. The intimate interior photographs of Brotherus in domestic spaces seen in the Annonciation section of the photobook are replaced with photographs largely set in exterior settings. These later images depict views from a taxi window in New York and selfportraits taken in a range of exterior settings: in green forests; floating in a pond; in a field of snow; and on a dried up lake. These aftermath photographs suggest Brotherus’ turn away from the intense grief of trying and failing to conceive a child and instead a shift towards a different life narrative arc and a less measured experience of domestic time.82 In one of the final images in the photobook titled 3D Glasses (2012), Brotherus appears in red and blue clothing that matches the coloured lenses of the paper glasses on her eyes. She stands tall, and the piece of furniture on which she has planted herself appears as a slim beige surface beneath her: it is the same couch that held the many medications and various IVF paraphernalia in Annonciation 25. Here, the domestic time of endless waiting and the calendar time of appointments and injections have shifted, replaced by a different temporal order of the unknown. Squishing repetition: Anna Fox Anna Fox is a British photographer who considers domestic detail, trains our gaze on the overlooked, and provides an opportunity to consider the relationship between domestic interiority, the diaristic, and temporality in photography. Val Williams aptly describes Fox’s photography as being attuned to “ordinary secrets,” the commonly experienced but often undocumented or unspoken about elements of daily life.83 Fox often directs our attention to the detritus of her own domestic life: dust, cockroaches, mess on the floor, a cat’s half eaten prey. She then returns again and again to similar scenes on floors, benchtops, and bathroom walls, often framing these images with text that situates these small repetitive moments in her daily life and relationships. While my focus here is on Fox’s work that revolves around domestic spaces and times, her practice includes a diverse range of subjects that fall within the broader framework of everyday rituals and daily absurdities of life in Britain. For example, she documented office workers in London in the context of Thatcher’s Britain in Work Stations (1988). She recorded paintball war games in Friendly Fire (1989–1994); the messy after-effects of rave parties in Hampshire in Afterwards (1983–1996); and family holidays and adult weekends at a resort in Bognor Regis, as small seaside town in West Sussex in Resort 1 (2009–2011) and Resort 2 (2009–2010). More recently, she collaborated with Andrew Bruce on the series Spitting (2015), documenting the life-size puppets featured in a satirical television show called Spitting Image, which caricatured figures from British public life in the 1980s and 1990s. Fox has also regularly paid attention to life in rural parts of England: she produced a portrait of a small English town in Basingstoke (1986–86), documented the lives of women living in West Sussex in collaboration with Val Williams in The Village (1991–1993), and, in collaboration with Alison Goldfrapp, made staged photographs about young women’s lives in rural England in Country Girls (1996–2001). Fox often explores the relationship between writing and image. She is interested in fragments, diaristic notes, and personal exchanges between people, and text plays an important role in her work. It appears in the form of jotted diary entries in Cockroach Diary, in an assemblage of email communications from friends about their memories of a household in 41 Hewitt Rd, and in the transcribed mutterings of a father in My Mother’s

72  Domestic time Cupboards and My Father’s Words (see Figure 3.9).84 These textual components accompany photographs that deploy the immediacy of the snapshot, plenty of flash, and vivid, saturated colour. Karen Knorr describes Fox’s tendency to bring together text and image as fusing “a vernacular visual approach to conceptual textual strategies.”85 At first glance, Fox’s photographs appear brash and driven by the documentarian’s desire to shock by showing distasteful moments and objects. But across the breadth of Fox’s practice, there is a sustained exploration of loss, time passing, and small confrontations with death and decay in ordinary life. Her photographs are a tangle of comedy, bleakness, comfort, and unease. And, of interest to me in terms of this chapter’s focus on time (and its connection to loss, especially the marked loss of time), like Davey, there is an undercurrent in Fox’s work about delays and minor affects. There is a feeling in Fox’s work, as Williams so aptly describes, of “[a]lways watching but never quite taking part . . . a feeling of someone standing at the edge, waiting for things to begin, and always a sense of loss.”86 This sensation of waiting or of apprehension in Fox’s work set in home spaces is embedded in a domestic time of repetition: the repetition of cockroach sightings, the repetition of familial tensions, and the repetitive detritus and marks that accumulate over time on a home’s walls, benches, and floors. Fox’s aesthetic economy of repetition positions her work amidst a wealth of feminist art and writing, which explores practices of reiteration and feelings of boredom. As Patrice Petro points out, much feminist work across literature, visual media, and theory, “has involved an aesthetics as well as a phenomenology of boredom: a temporality of duration, relentless in its repetition, and a stance of active waiting, which, at least in their feminist formulations, allow for redefinition and change.”87 Fox utilises the zone of repetition and boredom to examine a mode of domestic time that is closely calibrated to the rhythms of those around her. Fox’s use of repetition in images is further emphasised by her use of the diary mode, as well as her use of the book format to present her work. For Fox, the book form is not an incidental format, but a structuring form for exploring the views within it. Both My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words and Cockroach Diary are designed using inexpensive printing and use simple stapling as the binding: these are books to be handled and not treated as precious objects.88 In other words, the format of the book itself is crucial to how the photographs themselves are experienced, and the pages set up a cumulative gaze that matches the repetition and vernacular vision of the images themselves. Given Fox’s emphasis on capturing slow accretions of daily experiences, David Chandler suggests she “might now more usefully be called a diarist than a photographer.”89 However I don’t see these categories as distinct: I suggest that Fox clearly straddles both roles and shows them to be co-implicated. Fox’s concentrated forensic gaze at her own domestic sites is neither celebratory nor judgemental, and manages to be both “empathetic and distanced.”90 That is, she often deploys the distance of an observer at an unfamiliar scene, but through the lens of attachment (to her family, her friends, and her home). Domestic discomfort Fox’s Cockroach Diary is a recording of domestic discomforts, and it sits within the conventions of the diary as the “literature of the mundane.”91 This book tells a narrative of cockroaches invading Fox’s share house in London.92 This is domestic time structured by repetition; despite constant attempts to remove them, the pests appear again and again. Domestic time is punctuated and unsettled by the small cockroaches, but it is also, as

Domestic time 73 I will show, domestic time lived as a photographer compelled by the urge to document. In Cockroach Diary, the unfolding of time happens in relation to a range of, sometimes conflicting, rhythms – the rhythm of the cockroaches invading, the rhythm of making photographs, and the rhythm of domestic relationships. Cockroach Diary is composed of two separate sections. The first is a facsimile copy of a notebook containing a series of handwritten diary entries. The cover of this notebook section of Cockroach Diary is a direct reproduction of the original diary, complete with a 99p sticker and store barcode on the cover. The reproduction also depicts the ring binding, so it feels very much like you are holding the actual notebook in your hands. The second section of Cockroach Diary is a small book of photographs collected between 1996 and 1999. The second section contains photographs that provide visual evidence of the little pests and often their deaths, squashed into tissues. Both sections of Cockroach Diary are enclosed in a green slipcover, and it is smaller in scale than most books (15 × 10.5 cm). The structure and design of the book combine the informal, the vernacular, and the unpolished alongside the formal, polished realm of art book publishing. For example, while the diary is a reproduction of a small and cheap spiral bound notebook, the small book of photographs – which are themselves taken with a point and shoot camera, quickly composed, printed in bright colour – begins with the formal white page with the word “PLATES” printed. This framing evokes the sense that this is a documentation of insects akin to the rich illustrations of insects in an expensive book of natural history pictures.93 The images in Cockroach Diary show floors, benchtops, and cookers that have stains, dirt, and crumbs and that feature tiny cockroaches alive, stomped on or squished in small scenes of death (see Figure 3.7). These photographs are printed full-page, and the eye has to search out the cockroaches, which remain minute on the page. In one image, the creature is a tiny brown speck amidst a pink domestic landscape. The use of flash photography means the cockroach appears as though frozen: caught at a crime scene by the authorities’ sudden flashlights. In another photograph, a cockroach appears caught mid-step on blue and red tiles, with the toe of a shoe poking just into the frame ready to crunch the pest. In the next photograph, it appears to have been juicily squished, with the shoe no longer in frame. In other photographs, there appears to be no cockroach at all; the photo was taken a second too late for it to be captured. The handwritten diary entries evoke the mess and drama that the little creatures cause in the household. Here, diary time is used to track a very particular experience of living in a shared house in North London and the emotional tenors of its occupants. The narrative, which focuses, at one level, on the specific details of the cockroach invasion, spirals outwards to document the relationships between members of the household and their connection to the house itself. One of the earlier diary entries about the roaches, dated July 18, 1996, includes the observation “Kitt thinks I’m panicking” and it ends with a one-word sentence: “Depressed.” Another early entry, dated October 9, 1996, reads: loads of roaches around cooker on top. Oven on, they seem to come out when it gets too hot for them – get Gareth to kill them with a knife. I  am absolutely frantic  & threatening to leave home if somebody doesn’t do something about them. Gareth says don’t do that. Kitt says I’m too dramatic and he likes the roaches anyway. The entry for Jan 98, records abruptly “Kitts left.” Fox never directly reveals her relationship to Kitt, just his approach to the cockroaches and the built-up resentment between

74  Domestic time

Figure 3.7 Anna Fox, Untitled from the series Cockroach Diary 1996–99, courtesy the artist

them over how to deal with the infestation. The significance of Kitt’s leaving is implied by the long break in diary entries. Kitt leaves, and there are no scribbled diary entries until five months later. The theme of Fox’s fellow occupants thinking she is over-reacting repeats throughout the diary entries, alongside Fox’s notes about her own displeasure and frustration with her household. Then, in the entry, October 10, 1996, Fox records the kernel of thinking that led to Cockroach Diary: “Tell Val about roaches. . . . She suggests photographing them + keeping track. Great idea.” Fox’s own reactions to the cockroaches then become partly about her own disgust and fear of the creatures and increasingly as record of her attempts to photograph them. She describes in one entry, for example, finding a cockroach in a box, photographing the creature, and then killing it. In another more dramatic incident, dated August 31, 1997, she writes: I’m screaming spray it. Kitt’s shouting no it’s on the chair – I’m photographing – Kitt’s angry that I’m panicking and photographing – I ask him to pass spray I could do it now – kill it – but he won’t pass it – he wants me to calm down 1st. The rhythm of photographing is both driven by and in conflict with the rhythms of the small creatures: “They’re too quick for the camera now” she observes in October 1997. And Fox’s disgust for the creatures morphs into aesthetic obsession: “roaches are climbing the bathroom walls – they’re a different colour – black & white with a white stripe & tiny – they look amazing on the bright green walls. I’m shouting to Felix for my camera.”

Domestic time 75 By June 1998, Fox’s commentary is equally obsessed with her fear of them and her desire to picture them: Jump when I think I see one running up the wall but it’s only my shadow. If they’re bigger they’ll be faster and I won’t be able to photograph them. I hope I find one on the bathroom wall it’s such a great colour for a photo. Leave my camera outside the bathroom for a few weeks but no luck. Cockroach Diary revels in mundane details. It shifts focus from the minutiae of an argument with a housemate, to an encounter with a cockroach, obsessive cleaning, and multiple phone calls with the local council, and the urge to photograph. The description of events recorded on August  31, 1997, in Cockroach Diary reveals the following: “Jo’s birthday. Diana’s dead. Cockroach large in the kitchen in tumble dryer. . . . I’m really panicking.” The shifting from the calendar time marking a friend’s birthday to the collective time of a public event (the death of Princess Diana) to the immediacy of panic demonstrates a range of colliding temporal rhythms infiltrating the home, punctuated by Fox rushing for her camera and the many minor irritations amongst the housemates. Cockroach Diary also shares in the hum of failure that circulates in Davey’s and Brotherus’ practice. In Fox’s book, small failures are present in the missed opportunities to photograph documented in the diary, the photographs that haven’t captured the cockroach in frame, and the failure to control the pests. These minor domestic failures sit amongst the interpersonal ruptures in the book: the tensions, arguments, and resentments between the humans in the household. Children, cockroaches, clutter The domestic time of repetition, a time of dealing over and over with cockroaches, or doing the dishes again and again, the endless cycle of activities and habits of the home, is also documented in Fox’s 41 Hewitt Road (1996–1999). The photographs document the same home where Fox made Cockroach Diary and where she lived with her family and other housemates, and it also documents the same period of time: 1996–1999. In 41 Hewitt Road, Fox compiles emails from people who once visited the houses and their recollections of the house in response to her seeking out her friends’ and visitors’ memories of the space. The email replies to Fox’s questions are frank and appear unedited in the book. The recollections echo the layers of chaos documented in Fox’s photographs: “I think I remember a lot of fleas and getting bitten all over my ankles” one notes, and “Children Cockroaches Clutter” observes another. “Victorian, red, hill, stripped walls/ works in progress of some description, missing mosaic, children’s drawings, BIG circular kitchen table, complex collage, odd bathroom, wooden stairs, intimate living room, late 70s cooker, tent, climbing frame, mud,” lists another correspondence. But the emails also refer to parties, meals, time spent in the garden, food consumed, conversations, disagreements, and the social entanglements linked to the house. Williams describes 41 Hewitt Road as Anna Fox’s meditation on herself, on life in the city and on communal living. The photographs portray disjunction and morbidity, dead things litter the series, nothing is pleasant or agreeable, the careful decorations of past owners are trashed with scrawls and tears.94

76  Domestic time Both the emails and images in 41 Hewitt Road all point to the presence of human lives lived in the space. There are no people represented in this book, but the rhythm of their presence is palpable. The emails are interspersed between photographs of the space with its written-on walls, busy shelves, general chaos, and mess: the interior skin of the home registering the passing of time and the chaos of its occupants (see Figure 3.8). The proximity to some of these walls in the photographs is jarring: every bit of peeled paint, the cracks in light fittings, each scuff mark and sticker are shown, and sometimes dead animals appear on an often dirty floor.95 In a similar vein to Daifu Motoyuki’s cluttered tabletops in his Still Life, which I discussed in the previous chapter, the domestic surfaces in Fox’s photographs are also full of mess and pictured in a similar forensic and unflinching style. The domestic surfaces of 41 Hewitt Road mapped across the pages of the book also evidence children’s presence in the space. Walls and doors are covered with stickers

Figure 3.8 Anna Fox, Untitled from the series 41 Hewitt Road, 1996–1999, courtesy the artist

Domestic time 77 and scrawled crayon drawings, and one photograph features a rocket made from cardboard boxes. The photographs document papier mâché projects, littered toys, school photos, and home-made calendars. And, about halfway through the book, Fox includes a double-page photograph of a home-made clock. This is the type of clock used to teach children how to tell time, with large numbers and moveable clock hands. While the calendars and the cardboard clock are literal symbols of domestic time, the book throughout also expresses the experience of domestic time with young children: time that is both repetitive and cluttered with objects and bodies vying for attention, an experience that is all-consuming and ongoing in duration, and, in retrospect, very fleeting. The final section of 41 Hewitt Rd presents an archive of objects from the house formed from the contents of a box found years after Fox left Hewitt Road. In this section of the book, each object has been photographed individually in a small homemade cardboard studio made from the box in which the objects were discovered. The photographs are presented on the page as grids of objects, and here Fox is using the formality of the word archive and the conceptual history of the grid format to stake out a claim for the importance of lived experience in domestic spaces. The random objects include pieces of paper with children’s poems and a sheet of paper with a child’s carefully practiced rows of number writing, stamps of Princess Diana, and a small jar of puzzle pieces. There is also – and this is not an exhaustive list – a cat brush, a pair of sunglasses, a shiny award cup with a wooden peg attached to the handle, matches, and small toys. The practice of carefully photographing these objects and then collating them into a book endows them with a seriousness that is at the same time also tongue-in-cheek: there is no attempt to hide the background cardboard of the homemade small studio or the folds and edges of the cardboard. It also brings domestic time into conversation with archival time and ideas about storage and memory. As with Cockroach Diary, the archive section of 41 Hewitt Rd treats the everyday domestic with a seriousness usually preserved for objects and spaces from historical sites and objects embedded in museums and other formal institutions. Combined with the varied perspectives provided by the email contents, the book positions the site of 41 Hewitt Road as an archaeological project, a complex realm of relationships and labour, and one that is worth documenting in all chaos.96 It is important that 41 Hewitt Rd, like many of Fox’s projects that are focused on the domestic, doesn’t contain images of people yet is dense with life narrative. This is a lived space with its layers of wallpaper, scratched surfaces, and many drawn on walls. The photographs, the used objects in the archive, and the words in the collated emails work together to create a personal – but not nostalgic – portrait of the space, the relationships within, and Fox’s place within the chaotic domestic temporality of 41 Hewitt Rd. Delicate and aggressive My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words is a tiny book that takes us into the world of Fox’s parents’ domestic space. It measures a mere 7.5 × 10 cm and fits into the palm of the reader’s hand. The use of the miniature and the small, with their implications of preciousness and delicacy, makes the representation of the repetitions, habits, and tensions of domestic life within the book more potent. The pink cardboard cover, cursive text, and opening photograph of a cupboard scene of delicate pink and white crockery prepare the viewer for a nostalgic gaze at Fox’s parents’ things and words. However, this

78  Domestic time “short story in words and pictures,” as the subtitle declares on the book’s title page, is not as pretty as the pink tones of the cover and opening photograph imply. Rather, it is a portal into the ambiguities and jarring discomforts of home life. The book is a diaristic record or collection of visual and textual fragments of Fox’s parents’ home life. It combines small colour photographs of Fox’s mother’s tidy cupboards together with excerpts from her father’s cruel comments about, or directed to, Fox’s mother, grandmother or herself (see Figure  3.9). The scale of the book and the small photographs mean you feel drawn inside the space of the miniature. Every photograph of the cupboard’s contents is interspersed with a quote from Fox’s father, which were recorded by Fox while her father was ill. For example, a picture of a neat pile of plates and floral crockery is preceded by the minute cursive text “I’m going to tear your mother to shreds with an oyster knife.” And the quote “I’ll cut your bum off and serve it in slices, like raw ham” is sequenced next to a photograph of a cupboard containing a neat pile of rolls of paper. Reading the acerbic tone of the tiny text and turning the small pages to find neat cupboards full of domestic objects cleaning materials, kitchen objects, a child’s highchair, folded sheets – jolts the viewer from the awkward space of conflict to the familiar space of domestic things contained in cupboards. The photographs work

Figure 3.9 Anna Fox, Untitled from the series My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words, 1999, courtesy the artist

Domestic time 79 here not as an illustration of the text but rather as a silent response to it. The neat organisation of the cupboards signals a refusal to go into combat or respond to the hurtful words, and at the same time is suggestive of how Fox’s mother preserves a sense of normality – by maintaining strict control and order of things in the house – while Fox’s father becomes increasingly ill and difficult to deal with. While My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words is in some ways a cutting work, it falls into the tradition of artists’ books, which use absurdity, humour, and surprise as structuring features.97 Tiny, delicate cursive font is used for the words “She’s bloody rattling again. Can you stop your bloody fucking rattling.” The juxtaposition of this text next to a photograph of a tidy cupboard of whistle-clean wine glasses, for example, reflects Fox’s use of humour to highlight the façade of domestic order that can paper over the messy, chaotic, and nasty sides of family life in domestic spaces. The photographs and texts in My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words are out of sync with a mode of domestic time based around shared family memory. Fox’s gaze at her mother’s cupboards, for example, avoids a nostalgic perspective. If there is a nostalgic gaze captured in the photographs of domestic objects in My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words it is not a nostalgia that is an uncritical celebration of the domestic or the past. The objects are not offered up as evidence, or reassurance, of belonging or as a search for familial proof of how history has produced the present. These photographs don’t present the domestic objects as saturated with personal memory (indeed, some of the cupboards contain collections of cleaning products, which hardly carry nostalgic weight), but rather as evidence of a particular relationship to domestic objects and to housework. As much as the photographs ask us to look at the objects, they also invite us to scrutinise their neatness and order in relation to the sharp comments of Fox’s father’s words. This is not a vision of family time that offers continuity between past and future, but rather one that is jarringly caught in the ongoing durations of Fox’s mother’s tidiness and Fox’s father’s aggressive words. Fox offers up photographs of cupboard interiors alongside her father’s comments with no broader context: there is no portrait of Fox’s mother and father, no representation of a whole house, or even an entire domestic room. There is also no wider temporal context provided; there is no indication of when in time the words were collected or if they are sequenced chronologically. Speaking about My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words, Fox describes how in each photograph “all the cupboards are really tightly framed, so there is a level of aggression in both the cupboards and the words in very different ways, like parallel conversations.”98 By offering such tight temporal and spatial framings of both words and images, My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words offers glimpses and fragments of a family narrative. This is not an attempt at a complete narrative. This is an important part of the pact that Fox makes with her viewers in the three of her books I’ve discussed here. Acutely aware of the impossibility of photography ever telling the full story, Fox uses photography to pay attention to small pockets of daily domestic life, through its layers of joy, despair, humour, and melancholy in the passing of domestic time. Conclusion Davey, Brotherus, and Fox all provide different interactions with diaristic modes and domestic time. Davey deploys the diaristic fragment regularly in her essays and visualises diaries in her photographs. Brotherus tracks her experience of trying to conceive a child

80  Domestic time through photographs and calendar pages in Annonciation and, in doing so, creates a mourning diary. Fox uses the diary in a literal form in Cockroach Diary, but I also suggest that the diaristic mode appears in her use of textual fragments and photographs in 41 Hewitt Rd and My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words. Through these diaristic modes and photographic practices in domestic spaces, I’ve suggested that Davey, Brotherus, and Fox calibrate a range of temporal relationships to the domestic. Domestic time for Davey emerges in slow durations fed by the low hum of inertia and feelings of failure, which also feed into a contemplative and suspended time of making photographs. The motif of waiting and the temporalities of failure are also key in Brotherus’ Annonciation and Carpe Fucking Diem, which draw together a range of temporal connections between personal despair, art history, and the calendar time measuring daily life and tracking reproductive time. Fox’s temporal map tracks across chaotic time with young children in a cluttered, sprawling household, tight claustrophobic time with her parents, and the repetitious rhythms of insects. Across these examples, the practice of photography in domestic spaces also creates another temporal relationship between each artist and the domestic. I think, for example, of Fox running to photograph a cockroach or leaving her camera by the bathroom ready to shoot; of Brotherus setting up her tripod and camera ahead of time to make a self-portrait of herself injecting medication at a precise time; and I think of Davey stalking the light in her apartment to photograph her fridge. The camera, as part of their daily lives, is a relational tool that inflects and enables their experience and representation of domestic time. Notes 1 Jess Dugan, “Conversation With Moyra Davey,” Big Red & Shiny, 2008, n.p. 2 Kylie Cardell, Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary, Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 14–15. 3 Ibid., 15. 4 Ibid., 23, 104. 5 Julie Rak, “Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary,” in Phillipe Lejeune, On Diary, eds. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 23–24. 6 See, for example, Kerry J. Daly, Families & Time: Keeping Pace in a Hurried Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996); Tamara K. Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Christina Hardyment, From Mangle to Microwave: The Mechanization of Household Work (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Elaine Lally, At Home With Computers, (London and New York: Routledge, 2020); Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (Oxford, England: Berg, 2003). 7 Maria Damkjær, “ ‘Split . . . Peas’: Mrs Beeton and Domestic Time, Decomposed,” in Serialization in Popular Culture, eds. Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 51, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203762158-9. 8 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 40. 9 Julia Brannen, “Time and the Negotiation of Work – Family Boundaries: Autonomy or Illusion?” Time & Society 14, no. 1 (March 2005): 113–31, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X05050299; Deborah Chambers, “Emerging Temporalities in the Multiscreen Home,” Media, Culture & Society 43, no. 7 (October  2021): 1180–96, https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719867851; Sarah Pink, Domestic Time in the Sensory Home: The Textures and Rhythms of Knowing, Practice, Memory and Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012), 184–200, https:// doi.org/10.1057/9781137020680_10; Emma R. Power, “Domestic Temporalities: Nature

Domestic time 81 Times in the House-as-Home,” Geoforum 40, no. 6 (November 2009): 1024–32, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.07.005. 10 Pink, “Domestic Time in the Sensory Home,” 188. 11 Power, “Domestic Temporalities,” 1031. 12 See, for example, Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger, and Hilde Van Gelder, eds., Time and Photography (Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2018). 13 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 15. 14 Freeman, Time Binds, 22. 15 Ibid., 45. 16 Ibid., 59. 17 Ibid., 22; Much has been written about the role of photography in not only representing but producing and constructing the family. See, for example, Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Gillian Rose, Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 18 Freeman, Time Binds, 39. 19 Freeman focuses her discussion on Cecelia Dougherty’s film Coal Miner’s Granddaughter (1991), Diane Bonder’s film The Physics of Love (1998) and Beth Harris’s novel Lover (1976). 20 Freeman, Time Binds, 40. 21 Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays (Cambridge, MA and New Haven: Harvard University Art Museums; Yale University Press, 2008); Moyra Davey, Index Cards: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020). 22 Elina Brotherus, Carpe Fucking Diem (Berlin: Kehrer Verlag, 2015). 23 Anna Fox, Cockroach Diary (London: Shoreditch Biennale, 2000); Anna Fox, 41 Hewitt Road 1996–1999 (London: The Photographers’ Gallery and Impressions Gallery, 2010); Anna Fox, My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (London: Shoreditch Biennale; Cornerhouse Miniature [distributor], 2000). 24 George Baker, “The Absent Photograph,” in Speaker Receiver, ed. Moyra Davey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 53. 25 In her essay ‘The Opposite of Low-Hanging Fruit’ Davey writes, “After diverting my practice away from the figure for over 20 years I find myself once again pulled in that direction.” Index Cards, 169. 26 As Helen Molesworth puts it, “humble and mundane objects are the stuff of Davey’s oeuvre.” Helen Molesworth, “Long Life Cool White: An Introduction to Moyra Davey,” in Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 13. 27 There are several ways in which Leonard’s and Davey’s practices resonate with each other. I see links and overlaps in their use of grids, their mutual obsession with objects bearing marks of use and time passing, and their refusal to separate the personal, the particular and the intimate, from the conceptual in their work. Davey and Leonard also share an insistence on the materiality of photography: they both use analogue cameras long after the arrival of the digital. In her series Newsstands (1994), made in the 1990s, Davey photographed the street stall news-stands which were beginning to disappear. Leonard began her decade long project Analogue in the late 1990s, documenting the disappearing nature of shabby stores in the same city. Davey and Leonard both use books repeatedly in their work, and in 2011 they collaborated on a curated exhibition exploring the proximity between writing and photography called “Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic” (held at Murray Guy, New York, 2011). 28 Fred Moton, “Photopos: Film, Book, Archive, Music, Sculpture,” in Zoe Leonard: Survey, eds. Bennett Simpson and Rebecca Matalon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018), 145. 29 Davey, Long Life Cool White, 92. 30 K. Eckhard Kuhn-Osius, “Making Loose Ends Meet: Private Journals in the Public Realm,” The German Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1981): 171, https://doi.org/10.2307/405350. 31 She has, as Quinn Latimer describes, “slipped the concerns of the writer/reader into that of photography, the concerns of photography into that of literature, and in so doing pressed patiently past the borders of both.” Quinn Latimer, “Woman of Letters,” Frieze, May 2012, 188.

82  Domestic time 32 Davey’s film Hemlock Forest (2016), for example, weaves together narratives from Davey’s own family life, as well as references to Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Chantal Akerman – including recreating a scene from Akerman’s film News From Home. Davey, like Akerman, crystallises the personal with broader cultural histories. For more on Akerman’s cinching together of personal and broader cultural histories, see Jane Simon, “Documenting the Domestic: Chantal Akerman’s Experimental Autobiography as Archive,” Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 91–92 (April 3, 2017): 150–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1 357013. 33 Fournier reads Davey’s essay film Les Goddesses (2011) as an example of “autotheory,” a genre that brings together the personal and autobiographical with the theoretical. Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 133. 34 Stephen Horne describes this intertextual and conversational approach as “collaborative criticism.” Stephen Horne, “Taking Seed in Words: Moyra Davey,” Border Crossings 36, no. 2 (July 5, 2017): 37. 35 Davey, Long Life Cool White, 118. 36 Moyra Davey, “Burn the Diaries,” in Index Cards: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 132. 37 Lejeune, cited in Rak, “Dialogue with the Future,” 22. 38 Moyra Davey, “Transit of Venus,” in Index Cards: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 15. 39 Since 2007, Davey has taken to printing her photographs and then folding them into a mailout/aerograph with address and stamps and tape to hold the paper together. These are then mailed to friends, and then recollected, or mailed directly to galleries, and are often exhibited directly on the wall in large groups or grids. I discuss Davey’s mailers or aerogrammes in more detail in Chapter 5. 40 Moyra Davey, “Fifty Minutes,” in Index Cards: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 1–14. 41 Davey, Long Life Cool White, 67–70. 42 Margaret Iversen, “The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art After Barthes,” Art History 44, no. 4 (2021): 808, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12587. 43 Moyra Davey, “Notes on Photography & Accident,” in Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 102. 44 Ibid., 84. 45 Ibid., 106. 46 Many writers have commented on the role of dust in Davey’s work. See, for example, Iversen, “The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art After Barthes,” 808; Chris Kraus, “Description Over Plot,” in Speaker Receiver, ed. Moyra Davey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, n.d.), 37; Molesworth, “Long Life Cool White,” 14; Barry Schwabsky, “Favorite Hallucination,” The Nation, May  20, 2014; Marcus Verhagen, “Moyra Davey: Slack Time,” Afterall: A  Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 29 (2012): 19, 21–22; Meeka Walsh, “A Certain Kind of Distance,” Border Crossings 27, no. 4 (November 2008): 54. 47 Davey, Long Life Cool White, 107, 119. 48 Moyra Davey, “Empties,” in Index Cards: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 81. 49 Martin Herbert, “Moyra Davey: Hangmen of England,” Camera Austria, 2013, 84; See also, Baker’s discussion of Davey’s photographs of objects which he describes as “durational ‘portraits’,” George Baker, Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 335. 50 Verhagen, “Moyra Davey.” 51 Davey, “Notes on Photography & Accident,” 84. 52 Moyra Davey, “Wedding Loop,” in Index Cards: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 180. 53 Davey, “Fifty Minutes,” 13. 54 Davey, “Wedding Loop,” 176–77. 55 Ibid., 178. 56 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6–7. 57 Ibid., 6–7.

Domestic time 83 58 Ibid., 12. 59 Davey, Index Cards, 13. My italics. 60 cited in Dugan, “Conversation with Moyra Davey.” 61 Davey, “Burn the Diaries,” 146. 62 Brotherus, Carpe Fucking Diem. 63 Gilles Mora, “The Double Perspective,” in La Lumière Venue Du Nord/The Light From the North, Photographies/Photographs 1998–2015 (Montpellier: Hazan et Le Pavillon Populaire, 2016). 64 There are, however, a more comprehensive range of self-representations of infertility and failed treatment cycles which circulate online and via social media platforms. For discussion of this, see Layne Parish Craig, “ ‘Soldiering On’: Social Media Representations of Infertility and Assisted Reproduction as Patient Narratives,” Literature and Medicine 38, no. 1 (2020): 88–112, https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2020.0004. 65 Brotherus in Ellyn Kail, “ ‘Carpe Fucking Diem’: One Photographer’s Courageous Discussion of Involuntary Childlessness,” Feature Shoot, 2016, www.featureshoot.com/2016/01/ carpe-fucking-diem-one-photographers-courageous-discussion-of-involuntary-childlessness/. 66 I’m borrowing this phrase from Cvetkovich here. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 67 The images are part of a series titled Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe (1997–1999). 68 There are other examples of Brotherus’ art, however, where she deploys her own figure, but not her own life narrative. In these images, she explicitly positions herself as a model and not the subject of the photograph. These photographs are often set in landscapes, or within a studio setting, and while Brotherus is identifiable (although she is sometimes framed from behind), the work is primarily in conversation with art history and conceptually engaged with the visual codes of landscape and portraiture. These images, as seen in the series Artists at Work (2009), or Model Studies (2002–2008), and The New Painting (2000–2004), are thematically concerned with a conversation between photography and the history of painting, and experiment with the relationship between the human figure and the space of the picture. In more recent work, such as Règle du jeu (2016–2017), The Baldessari Assignments (2016–), and Seabound (2018–2019), Brotherus uses her own body to perform in photographs, inspired by, or responding to, the performance scores of Fluxus, the art ideas of John Baldessari, or the writing of Kurt Johannessen. In other words, Brotherus regularly uses her own figure in her photographs, but doesn’t always reference her own life narrative. 69 Here, I am borrowing from Zerubavel’s phrase “temporal map,” which he uses to describe the weekly cycle in calendars. See Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 70 Lauren Jade Martin, “Pushing for the Perfect Time: Social and Biological Fertility,” Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (May 2017): 95, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.04.004. 71 Rak, “Dialogue with the Future,” 23. 72 For a discussion of this disjuncture in relation to daily life, see Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 88. 73 Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, 2. See also Elizabeth Shove, “Everyday Practice and the Production and Consumption of Time,” in Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture, eds. Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 17–33. 74 Brotherus cited in Kail, “ ‘Carpe Fucking Diem’.” 75 Elina Heikka and Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, “The Rules of the Game,” in La Lumière Venue Du Nord/The Light From the North, Photographies/Photographs 1998–2015 (Montpellier: Hazan et Le Pavillon Populaire, 2016). 76 Susan Bright, “Now and Then,” in Artist and Her Model, ed. Elina Brotherus (Brussels: Caillou bleu, 2012), 15. 77 For a recent discussion of domestic iconography in Flemish Annunciation paintings, see Thor-Oona Pignarre-Altermatt, “What Approach to Flemish Annunciations?” Arts 11, no. 1 (February 10, 2022): 33, https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11010033. For more general history of Annunciation images, see has Julia Hasting, Annunciation (New York: Phaidon, 2004). 78 For discussion of arch imagery in the history of religious painting, see Karl M. Birkmeyer, “The Arch Motif in Netherlandish Painting of the Fifteenth Century: Part One,” The Art Bulletin 43, no. 1 (1961): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.2307/3047928. For discussion of vases and

84  Domestic time vessels in Annunciation paintings, see José María Salvador-González, “The Vase in Paintings of the Annunciation, a Polyvalent Symbol of the Virgin Mary,” Religions 13, no. 12 (December 2022): 1188, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13121188. 79 Maria Lidova, “Annunciation Imagery in the Making,” IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies 10 (January 2017): 45–62, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.IKON.4.2017005. 80 Kail, “ ‘Carpe Fucking Diem’,” Brotherus cited in. 81 Brotherus, Carpe Fucking Diem. 82 For a discussion of Brotherus’ photographs of Marcello and alternative family models, see Tiina Salmia, “Marcello the Dog and More-Than-Human Family in Elina Brotherus’s SelfPortraits from the Series Carpe Fucking Diem,” TRACE∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies 7 (April 7, 2021): 46–68, https://doi.org/10.23984/fjhas.99338. 83 Val Williams, Anna Fox: Photographs1983–2007 (Brighton: Photoworks, 2007), 11. 84 Fox, Cockroach Diary; Fox, My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words; Fox, 41 Hewitt Road 1996–1999. 85 Karen Knorr, “Vernacular Masquerades,” Photography and Culture 3, no. 1 (March 2010): 107, https://doi.org/10.2752/175145110X12615814378478. 86 Val Williams, “Foreward,” in Anna Fox: Photographs1983–2007, ed. Val Williams (Brighton: Photoworks, 2007), 12. 87 Patrice Petro, Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 93. 88 I discuss the role of handling and scale in relation to photobooks in detail in Chapter 5. 89 David Chandler, “Vile Bodies,” in Anna Fox: Photographs1983–2007, ed. Val Williams (Brighton: Photoworks, 2007), 16; Val Williams makes a similar, but more careful, claim than Chandler when she says that for Fox “documentary photography may also be a kind of autobiography, an intense peering into her own life as reflected through photography’s idiosyncratic mirror.” Williams, “Foreward,” 12. 90 Knorr, “Vernacular Masquerades,” 108. 91 Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos, “Introduction,” in The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 15. 92 Fox, Cockroach Diary. 93 Anna Fox, “Cockroach Diary (Artist’s Talk),” July 2, 2019, https://vimeo.com/345736772. 94 Val Williams, “Village Masquerades,” in Anna Fox: Photographs1983–2007, ed. Val Williams (Brighton: Photoworks, 2007), 219. 95 The repetition of 41 Hewitt Road, with its cumulative perspectives presented through the emails, and the repetition of scribbles, messes across domestic surfaces, is a mode of working again seen in Fox’s Notes From Home (2000–2003). This project consists of five separate handmade accordion books, each with their own focus: Making Cakes, Gifts From the Cats, Pete’s Food and Flowers, The Rise and Fall of Father Christmas and Super Snacks. 96 Anna Fox, “Introduction,” in 41 Hewitt Road 1996–1999 (London: The Photographers’ Gallery and Impressions Gallery, 2010). 97 Nola Farman, “The Humours of the Artists’ Book” (Ph.D., Bankstown, University of Western Sydney, 2007). 98 Anna Fox, “My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (Artist’s Talk),” July 2, 2019, https://vimeo.com/345737644.

References Baetens, Jan, Alexander Streitberger, and Hilde Van Gelder, eds. Time and Photography. Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2018. Baker, George. “The Absent Photograph.” In Speaker Receiver, by Moyra Davey, 53–100. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010. ———. Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980. Ben-Amos, Batsheva, and Dan Ben-Amos. “Introduction.” In The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life, 1–22. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020.

Domestic time 85 Birkmeyer, Karl M. “The Arch Motif in Netherlandish Painting of the Fifteenth Century: Part One.” The Art Bulletin 43, no. 1 (1961): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/3047928. Brannen, Julia. “Time and the Negotiation of Work – Family Boundaries: Autonomy or Illusion?” Time & Society 14, no. 1 (March 2005): 113–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X05050299. Bright, Susan. “Now and Then.” In Artist and Her Model, by Elina Brotherus, 15–19. Brussels: Caillou bleu, 2012. Brotherus, Elina. Carpe Fucking Diem. Berlin: Kehrer Verlag, 2015. Cardell, Kylie. Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. Chambers, Deborah. “Emerging Temporalities in the Multiscreen Home.” Media, Culture & Society 43, no. 7 (October 2021): 1180–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719867851. Chandler, David. “Vile Bodies.” In Anna Fox: Photographs1983–2007, edited by Val Williams, 15–25. Brighton: Photoworks, 2007. Craig, Layne Parish. “ ‘Soldiering On’: Social Media Representations of Infertility and Assisted Reproduction as Patient Narratives.” Literature and Medicine 38, no. 1 (2020): 88–112. https:// doi.org/10.1353/lm.2020.0004. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Daly, Kerry J. Families & Time: Keeping Pace in a Hurried Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996. Damkjær, Maria. “ ‘Split . . . Peas’: Mrs Beeton and Domestic Time, Decomposed.” In Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg, 59–74. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203762158-9. Davey, Moyra. “Burn the Diaries.” In Index Cards: Selected Essays, 123–47. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ———. “Empties.” In Index Cards: Selected Essays, 81. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ———. “Fifty Minutes.” In Index Cards: Selected Essays, 1–14. New York: W. W. Norton  & Company, 2020. ———. Index Cards: Selected Essays. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ———. Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays. Cambridge, MA, and New Haven: Harvard University Art Museums; Yale University Press, 2008. ———. “Notes on Photography & Accident.” In Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey, 79–119. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. ———. “Transit of Venus.” In Index Cards: Selected Essays, 15–17. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ———. “Wedding Loop.” In Index Cards: Selected Essays, 175–80. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. Dugan, Jess. “Conversation with Moyra Davey.” Big Red & Shiny, 2008, n.p. Farman, Nola. “The Humours of the Artists’ Book.” Ph.D., University of Western Sydney, 2007. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Fox, Anna. 41 Hewitt Road 1996–1999. London: The Photographers’ Gallery and Impressions Gallery, 2010. ———. “Cockroach Diary (Artist’s Talk),” 2020. https://vimeo.com/345737644. ———. “My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (Artist’s Talk),” 2019. https://vimeo. com/345737644. ———. Cockroach Diary. London: Shoreditch Biennale, 2000. ———. My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words. London: Shoreditch Biennale; Cornerhouse Miniature [distributor], 2000. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Hardyment, Christina. From Mangle to Microwave: The Mechanization of Household Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.

86  Domestic time Hareven, Tamara K. Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Hasting, Julia. Annunciation. New York: Phaidon, 2004. Heikka, Elina, and Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger. “The Rules of the Game.” In La Lumière Venue Du Nord/The Light from the North, Photographies/Photographs 1998–2015. Montpellier: Hazan et Le Pavillon Populaire, 2016. Herbert, Martin. “Moyra Davey: Hangmen of England.” Camera Austria, 2013. Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Horne, Stephen. “Taking Seed in Words: Moyra Davey.” Border Crossings 36, no. 2 (July 5, 2017): 36–42. Iversen, Margaret. “The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art After Barthes.” Art History 44, no. 4 (2021): 798–822. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12587. Kail, Ellyn. “ ‘Carpe Fucking Diem’: One Photographer’s Courageous Discussion of Involuntary Childlessness.” Feature Shoot, 2016. www.featureshoot.com/2016/01/carpe-fucking-diem-onephotographers-courageous-discussion-of-involuntary-childlessness/. Knorr, Karen. “Vernacular Masquerades.” Photography and Culture 3, no. 1 (March 2010): 107– 10. https://doi.org/10.2752/175145110X12615814378478. Kraus, Chris. “Description Over Plot.” In Speaker Receiver, edited by Moyra Davey, 37–52. Berlin: Sternberg Press, n.d. Kuhn-Osius, K. Eckhard. “Making Loose Ends Meet: Private Journals in the Public Realm.” The German Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1981): 166–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/405350. Lally, Elaine. At Home With Computers. Materializing Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Latimer, Quinn. “Woman of Letters.” Frieze, May 2012. Lidova, Maria. “Annunciation Imagery in the Making.” IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies 10 (January 2017): 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.IKON.4.2017005. Martin, Lauren Jade. “Pushing for the Perfect Time: Social and Biological Fertility.” Women’s Studies International Forum 62 (May 2017): 91–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.04.004. Molesworth, Helen. “Long Life Cool White: An Introduction to Moyra Davey.” In Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey, 11–19. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Mora, Gilles. “The Double Perspective.” In La Lumière Venue Du Nord/The Light from the North, Photographies/Photographs 1998–2015. Montpellier: Hazan et Le Pavillon Populaire, 2016. Moton, Fred. “Photopos: Film, Book, Archive, Music, Sculpture.” In Zoe Leonard: Survey, edited by Bennett Simpson and Rebecca Matalon, 144–47. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Petro, Patrice. Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pignarre-Altermatt, Thor-Oona. “What Approach to Flemish Annunciations?” Arts 11, no. 1 (February 10, 2022): 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11010033. Pink, Sarah. “Domestic Time in the Sensory Home: The Textures and Rhythms of Knowing, Practice, Memory and Imagination.” In Time, Media and Modernity, 184–200. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137020680_10. Power, Emma R. “Domestic Temporalities: Nature Times in the House-as-Home.” Geoforum 40, no. 6 (November 2009): 1024–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.07.005. Rak, Julie. “Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary.” In Phillipe Lejeune, On Diary, edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, 16–26. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009. Rose, Gillian. Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

Domestic time 87 Salmia, Tiina. “Marcello the Dog and More-Than-Human Family in Elina Brotherus’s SelfPortraits from the Series Carpe Fucking Diem.” TRACE∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies 7 (April 7, 2021): 46–68. https://doi.org/10.23984/fjhas.99338. Salvador-González, José María. “The Vase in Paintings of the Annunciation, a Polyvalent Symbol of the Virgin Mary.” Religions 13, no. 12 (December  2022): 1188. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13121188. Schwabsky, Barry. “Favorite Hallucination.” The Nation, May 20, 2014. Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford, England; Berg, 2003. ———. “Everyday Practice and the Production and Consumption of Time.” In Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk, 17–33. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Simon, Jane. “Documenting the Domestic: Chantal Akerman’s Experimental Autobiography as Archive.” Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 91–92 (April 3, 2017): 150–70. https://doi.org/10 .1080/08164649.2017.1357013. Smith, Shawn Michelle. American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Verhagen, Marcus. “Moyra Davey: Slack Time.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 29 (2012): 19–26. Walsh, Meeka. “A  Certain Kind of Distance.” Border Crossings 27, no. 4 (November  2008): 48–56. Williams, Val. Anna Fox: Photographs 1983–2007. Brighton: Photoworks, 2007. ———. “Foreword.” In Anna Fox: Photographs1983–2007, edited by Val Williams, 11–12. Brighton: Photoworks, 2007. ———. “Village Masquerades.” In Anna Fox: Photographs1983–2007, edited by Val Williams, 213–19. Brighton: Photoworks, 2007. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

4 Domestic selves Relationality and slow portraiture

Relational life Having discussed the role of domestic objects in still life, and the role of domestic time in diaristic photographic practices, I turn in this chapter to photographers who use portraiture in expansive ways that visualise the intertwining of life stories: Nigel Shafran (UK, b. 1964), Rinko Kawauchi (Japan, b. 1972), and Takahiro Kaneyama (Japan, b. 1971). Each of these photographers has distinct formal approaches and thematic concerns in their documentation of family life. When read together, their work presents an assortment of proximities and distances between self and familial other: some close, others more removed; all clearly intersubjective. Shafran, Kawauchi, and Kaneyama each harness photography in the domestic realm to produce relational life narratives that show the self is always produced in flux and in relation to other selves. They do this through what I’m calling “slow portraiture”: a cumulative approach to portraiture made over significant periods of time, often brought together in photobook form that produces relations between images and across time. In some ways, I’ve already implicitly been talking about relational life narratives in this book. In the last chapter, for example, I  described Moyra Davey’s practice of writing and citation, of seeking out exchanges with other photographs and other texts as a practice of relational autobiography, one that is relational across media, as well as between bodies. Similarly, intersubjectivity is also a key element of Anna Fox’s My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words, which I discussed in the previous chapter. Fox’s recording of her mother’s neatly arranged cupboard interiors, combined with her father’s cutting words and Fox’s own actions in recording her parents’ domestic practices, again produces knowledge about the self as implicated in a network of familial lives and practices. In this chapter, however, I look squarely at relational life narratives to argue that photography plays an active role in the production of relational lives. In this chapter, I specifically argue that the formal approaches of photographic portraiture don’t just reflect pre-existing relations between each photographer and their significant other/s. I suggest that the work of Shafran, Kawauchi, and Kaneyama articulates the oscillation between presence and absence, distance and proximity, that occurs between self and intimate other. To put it another way, they each show the unfixedness of the relational life, as always in formation through various attachments and detachments. I suggest that these three photographers use the affordances of the camera and the affordances of domestic spaces, objects, and technologies to produce new chains of relations and separations. DOI: 10.4324/9781003089148-4

Domestic selves 89 My ideas in this chapter are indebted to life writing scholars who emphasise how the life of the self always unfolds through relations with others.1 Feminist studies of auto/biography have paid particularly close attention to intersubjective modes of selfrepresentation and shifted focus away from a version of the self and identity as autonomous and self-determining.2 As Liz Stanley suggests, a life never unfolds in isolation. Rather,“[l]ives are composed by a variety of social networks of others that the subject of ‘a life’ moves between.”3 This approach positions life stories as always bound up with the stories of intimate others.4 This also means that focusing attention on the life stories of others also refracts the story of the person narrating that story. In this chapter I position these understandings of relational selfhood alongside photography theory, which highlights how the camera and practices of photography generate relationality. Ariella Azoulay’s insights into photography as an event and Margaret Olin’s emphasis on photography as a “gestural practice” that connects people are particularly useful here.5 Azoulay focuses on the relationality of lived experience, but with specific emphasis on the photographic.6 She argues that photography always involves encounters and proposes thinking about photography as “an event that always takes place among people.”7 Treating the photograph as an event works in two modalities for Azoulay: the first mode of event is connected to the camera, and the second to the photograph.8 Instead of seeing the photograph as a finished product, Azoulay positions it as one element in an infinite number of potential encounters as it circulates in different contexts. This means that the photograph as an event consists of the relational scene when a camera may be used to record a moment, but the photograph as an event also stretches out to include the ways in which it is seen and used by viewers in ever-unfolding relations. Olin makes a similar point. She emphasises that photographs perform a participatory role in relationships and communities.9 Understanding photography as a relational practice means considering photography as always more than the production of images and often about seeking encounters. The ontology of photography, as Azoulay describes, is “bound to the manner in which human beings exist – look, talk, act – with one another and with objects,” and the camera is implicated in this scene of human relations.10 Part of this framework involves recognising the roles of both human and non-human protagonists involved in photography and, importantly for my purposes here, acknowledging how the camera can generate relationality. Taking these understandings of intersubjectivity, the co-implication of self and other in life stories, and the role of the camera in generating relationality, what follows is an account of three photographers who each produce relational life narratives with a domestic bent. In her writing on family photography, Marianne Hirsch reminds us that “[f]amilial subjectivity is constructed relationally.”11 In my discussion of each artist and their photobooks in this chapter, I not only highlight, as Hirsch does, how family relationality is produced among selves, but I also emphasise how this relationality unfolds through and with domestic spaces, objects, and technologies. I begin with the work of Nigel Shafran. Shafran has documented his home life and photographed his partner Ruth for several decades. I  analyse Shafran’s photographs, including the photobooks Ruthbook and Ruth on the Phone as well as his more recent Dark Rooms, which centre around daily life at home with his partner.12 I argue that his photographs of home are a type of slow portraiture built serially through the passing of time and the accumulation of images. My discussion draws out how the relational self is produced not only through Shafran’s presence in the home with his camera but also through the role of the telephone, which is present in many of Shafran’s portraits of Ruth. I then discuss Rinko Kawauchi’s

90  Domestic selves photobook as it is alongside her earlier book Cui Cui.13 I examine how Kawauchi’s photographs and sequencing in both books sketch out the relationship between herself and her family members, through chains of looking produced through the camera’s everyday presence.14 Lastly, I discuss Takahiro Kaneyama’s photobook While Leaves are Falling . . . I position Kaneyama’s book as a cumulative relational family portrait centred around his mother and her experience of schizophrenia.15 I show how the presence of his camera creates spatial relations between himself, his mother, and two aunts. I also draw out how doorways, windows, and screens play a key role in producing the mutually constitutive, fluctuating relationship of distance and closeness between Kaneyama and his mother. Nigel Shafran: food scraps and sinks Shafran works with the serial image. This seriality and the cumulative format of the photobook are key to how domestic relationality is expressed in his photographs as slow portraiture. In photobooks, meaning is constructed across and between images, and sequencing is as important as any one single image. For this reason, Shafran often works with the book form, and it is his books that focus on his partner Ruth and their shared domestic realm that I discuss here in relation to domestic selves and relationality: Ruthbook, Ruth on The Phone, and lastly the integration of Ruth and the domestic with public spaces in the more recent Dark Rooms. In each of these, sequencing is crucial to the relational mode of selfhood that Shafran articulates through his photographs. Shafran’s many photobooks are invested in the non-spectacular realm of the domestic. His photographs often track the slow accumulation of lived domestic experience. For example, Shafran photographs his sink and dishes in the series Washing-up (2002) (see Figure  4.1), as well as the ever-changing bowls of scraps ready for his compost in his series Compost Pictures (2008–2009). Unlike the flash photography seen in Anna Fox’s and Motoyuki Daifu’s photographs of home life in Chapter 3, there is nothing particularly forensic about Shafran’s images of his home. His photographs are not only observational but also poetic examinations of daily life. Shafran regularly photographs staircases, bookshelves, building supplies, charity shops, and other everyday spaces and objects. His photographs are threaded through with what Shafran describes in an interview as “small politics,” that is, the habits, experiences, and material conditions that shape everyday ordinary life.16 Shafran’s photographs also regularly draw attention to the shapes, patterns, and form of domestic objects that are in his own living space. While his art practice has a steady focus on the daily domestic, Shafran has also maintained a significant presence in the fashion industry since the mid-1980s.17 While these two streams of works – personal/domestic and commercial/fashion – may seem distinct, even contradictory, in his work, there is sometimes a conversation between the two. For example, Shafran has recycled or reproduced some of his own domestic settings in fashion shoots. In a 1993 shoot for The Independent, Shafran positioned a model in his own kitchen to replicate a photograph he took years earlier of his partner, Ruth, in the same kitchen. Reflecting on this photograph he comments: “This is in my kitchen. I’d run out of ideas for this shoot, so I restaged pictures that I’d taken of my partner, Ruth. I basically copied myself.”18 This self-citation and replication of an image of his home life and partner for a commercial shoot speaks to the complicated relationship between the domestic and the public that I’m exploring in this book. This example shows again the

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Figure 4.1 Nigel Shafran, 4 January, 2000 Three bean soup, cauliflower vegetable cheese. Morning coffee and croissants, from the  Washing-up  series, 2000, original in colour, © Nigel Shafran, courtesy the artist

rippling effect of the personal and domestic realms and the way domestic images travel in unexpected ways. Shafran’s photographs of the domestic, often picturing the most banal of objects (bowls of compost), and habits (washing up), aren’t solely about the objects or habits themselves. Rather, and particularly when these images are understood as sequences, they unravel narrative fragments about Shafran’s own life, his mode of living, as well as a mapping of his relations and feelings. Shafran’s Washing-up 2000 (2000) series, for example, documents the stacks of dishes washed and drying after a meal eaten. At first glance, these don’t seem particularly personal or to have a connection to relationality. However, the titling of these images provides glimpses into Shafran’s way of life as lived with others. Each photograph is titled with a date and details of the food eaten, along with who Shafran ate with and where. For example, one title reads, “16 March, 2000 1.30pm Second photograph of the day. Breakfast crumpets and tea (mine with cottage cheese and honey, Ruth’s with marmite with José and Claudio who I think washed up).” Another title observes, “27 June, 2000 Muesli, cheese sandwich at darkroom, Ruth back from Leeds, vegetarian restaurant, Blah blah blah, Shephards Bush.” In the series Washing-Up 2000, the temporal setting of these daily, mundane details in the year 2000

92  Domestic selves is important: it was the year where the passage into the 21st century loomed large in the cultural imagination (see Figure 4.1). Shafran’s concentration on small personal habits in and around home is a comment on the experience of slow daily time amidst a larger sense of public shared time marked by the year 2000. The particularities of each photograph and title narrate food shared and eaten and suggest the presence of human subjects without depicting them. Speaking about the Washing-Up series, Shafran describes how the washing up pictures are “funny, tiny historic documents” that record domestic materiality at a particular time in history.19 But he also articulates wanting to show how he felt and how he was feeling through the photographs and describes, ultimately, the photographs as being “about me and Ruth and where we are.”20 Washing-Up 2000 is the result of time Ruth and Shafran spent together or with other people eating food, yet neither of them appears in the photographs. A similar presence coiled with absence is felt in Shafran’s series and photobook Dad’s Office (1997–1999).21 Here, Shafran photographs spaces where his father worked. These are images of bowls collecting water, small failures such as a chair without a seat base, and peeling wall surfaces, interspersed with small moments of relief such as light falling through curtains. Like Washing-Up, no human subjects appear, and yet these stilllife photographs congeal together to create a portrait of Shafran’s relationship with his father.22 Photographing Ruth I turn now to Shafran’s many photographs of his partner Ruth, where she is pictured directly through her figure and at times, indirectly through objects. RuthBook is a small publication focused around Ruth, taken across the period from June  1992 to January  1995.23 Martin Parr and Gerry Badger describe Ruthbook in their survey of the history of the photobook as a “family album or love poem.”24 The book includes photographs of Shafran and Ruth’s home space, where her presence is communicated through arrangements of objects that Ruth has left around the house; these too are portraits of Ruth. This is the domestic space envisioned through Shafran’s relationship with Ruth, and also through Ruth’s relationship with their shared domestic realm. The pattern of Ruth’s presence in the house represented through the residue of her activities is shown across a number of photographs. In one image (see Figure 4.2), four bed castors have been washed and hung up to dry in a bathroom: an example of what Charlotte Cotton describes in her discussion of Shafran’s work as “sculptural forms made up of domestic things.”25 Another photograph documents carefully arranged – presumably by Ruth – boxes in a garage. A  different image shows Ruth’s backpack underneath a Selfridges bag next to a pair of shoes. Other photographs document a pile of crumbs left on the kitchen shelf and a hair on a piece of soap. These photographs cumulatively narrate Ruth’s presence while also documenting everyday habits of their shared everyday live. There are, too, portraits that feature Ruth more directly. In one photograph, her head peers out of a bathtub, only just visible behind a bottle of shampoo. In another, she sits on a staircase blowing her nose, a floor sander at her feet. One black-and-white image offers a more traditional portrait of Ruth. Here, she stares direct into Shafran’s lens, bike helmet askew on her head, bag slung over her shoulder, against a background of patterned leaf wallpaper (see Figure 4.3). Here, Ruth is in the domestic realm but poised to leave, present but soon to be absent. This medium close-up portrait and the direct gaze

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Figure 4.2 Nigel Shafran, From Ruthbook, 1992–2004, original in colour, © Nigel Shafran, courtesy the artist

of Ruth into the camera suggest proximity and exchange while others suggest a more distant relationality. Sometimes Shafran’s images in Ruth Book are snapshots; other times, they are careful compositions. They all speak to living life with another person and their various idiosyncrasies, habits, and ways of being at home. Shafran’s photobook, Ruth on the Phone (1995–2004), is a series and book of photographs taken between 1995 and 2004. Ruth on the Phone is, like RuthBook, a love poem, this time with a lengthier duration and more specific contemplation: a ten-year documentation of Ruth talking on the phone in and around home.26 And, like RuthBook, Ruth on the Phone is about Ruth, but it is equally about Ruth and Shafran’s shared home life and is, in that sense, a deeply relational mode of life narrative. The photographs track these shifting dynamics between Shafran, Ruth, the phone, and the camera: a slow relational practice of portraiture. While the book is titled Ruth on the Phone, I argue that the book is equally a documentation of Shafran’s own presence in the home. Each photograph of Ruth holding the phone has a link back to Shafran holding his camera. Here, these two objects – phone and camera – play a significant role in the daily rhythms of the household and are entangled with Ruth’s and Shafran’s experiences of interpersonal home life (see Figure 4.4.).

94  Domestic selves

Figure 4.3 Nigel Shafran, From Ruthbook, 1992–2004, © Nigel Shafran, courtesy the artist

Figure 4.4 Nigel Shafran, From  Ruth on the Phone,  1995–2004, original in colour, ©  Nigel Shafran, courtesy the artist

Domestic selves 95 The telephone, like the camera, is of course a tool for making connections. The domestic telephone changed practices of conversation and daily interactions in homes.27 Recent work on the social history of landline telephone practices highlights how the technology impacted upon “how conversations unfold, their spatial and temporal limits, and our understanding of private or public talk.”28 Other researchers highlight how the landline telephone operated as a bridge between public and private spheres.29 The use of the domestic landline telephone was a practice that also enabled what Mette Simonsen Abildgaard and Lee Humphreys describe as “intimacy at a distance.”30 These observations about how the landline telephone shifted practices of listening and talking in the home all point to the porosity between private and public spaces and the shifting spatial connections within and beyond the home. The camera is relational, and the telephone is relational too, as demonstrated by these studies of the landline telephone that provide useful context for analysing the theme of the presence and the absence and the connection between the camera and the phone in Ruth on the Phone. Ruth, whose action of talking on the phone remains the anchor across this series, ages and changes over this decade, and the telephones themselves change from the coiled corded handsets to the smaller cordless phones, which allow Ruth to roam more freely about the space. The photographs also capture the changing landscape of their home as walls are painted and rooms renovated. Ruth appears sometimes with short hair, sometimes longer, sometimes pregnant, and mostly not returning the camera’s gaze. The photographs accumulate: there is Ruth in the rocker chair, Ruth at the table, Ruth in the kitchen, Ruth chewing her fingernails, Ruth laughing, and Ruth wearing overalls with paint tins stacked behind her. Ruth is everywhere in this series, changing and ageing as the portraits build up to create a rich portrait across and between images. Present absence Shafran’s photographs of Ruth speaking and listening on the phone document her simultaneous presence and absence. They also communicate the ever-shifting intimacies and distances in co-habiting relationships. Shafran, through his camera, and the viewer, through the photograph, both observe Ruth’s physical presence in the home. Clearly, she is present and in view. But in each photo, there is also the echo of Ruth’s absence: she is also part of another conversation with another person elsewhere, echoing the “separateness and mutuality” that occurs with telephone usage in domestic spaces.31 In one photograph, Ruth is not directly shown, but her presence is implied by the length of coiled phone cord that disappears around a corner. The once common practice of dragging the long cord of a home telephone into a different part of the house (now superseded by cordless home telephones and, largely, mobile phones) was a tactic to seek privacy or quiet within a shared domestic space.32 In one photograph, Ruth is standing next to the rocker chair, but we only see her legs and feet. Her one leg is bent, and one foot rests on the other, nested inside a slipper, alongside the phone cord. In another photograph, the camera follows Ruth around a corner, and we see her sitting on the floor, mid-conversation, and smiling back in acknowledgement of the camera. Many of the photographs capture her mid-conversation and usually unselfconscious (see Figure  4.4). In one image, her head is bowed as she jots down notes or directions. In another, she is relaxed into a chair, looking out the window and listening through the phone: a portal to the outside world held up to the ear. By photographing Ruth in their shared domestic space while she is caught in conversation with others outside of the space, Shafran documents moments that are both distant and intimate.

96  Domestic selves The final photographs of Ruth on the Phone were taken in the hospital – one of the few times where Ruth isn’t represented in a home space. Here, Ruth is speaking into a mobile phone. She has a newborn on her lap and is looking down and gently tracing her child’s arm with her finger. The arrival of Shafran and Ruth’s son Lev marks the end of this series and the start of an expanded relationality. Shafran’s Flowers for______ (2004/2008) operates as a kind of epilogue to Ruth on the Phone.33 In the book, Shafran again focuses on Ruth in their domestic space, and again this book feels like a poem for, and about, Ruth, but this time including their son Lev. The photographs in this publication include photographs of bunches of flowers, portraits of Shafran and Ruth’s young son, and their domestic space. The photographs document everyday sculptures of washing on racks, folded clothes, and packets on top of benches. The “Flowers For” in the title refers to the bunches of flowers the family received when Lev was born, that were placed into biscuit tins and other odd containers.34 Yet, this book, which is clearly both about and for Ruth and Lev, is also about Shafran and his view of this domestic world. Flowers for______ records his personal realm, his personal relationships, and his own particular perceptions of it: an archive of attachments. The camera is a tool for looking through and outward, but it is also a mechanism for reflecting back on one’s self. Both of these observational modes are clearly shown in Shafran’s slow domestic portraits. The final book by Shafran that I discuss here is Dark Rooms (2016).35 This photobook includes a series of supermarket checkouts, another of women on escalators in Paddington leading into the underground, and a series of shops selling mobility aids.36 Among these series, Shafran includes meditative photographs of home life, appearing at intervals – between and within – these more public zones of the subway and the grocery shop queue. This book also includes, unusually for Shafran, two photographs in which the photographer himself appears, albeit obliquely. In the first of these, Self-portrait in a blank screen (2010), Shafran’s reflection, solemn and taking up a minor portion of the frame, is captured on his dark computer screen – a dark room of its own – his hand barely perceptible holding and pressing the release button on the remote shutter cable. The second is an image titled My hand with ‘Dad’ written on it (2013). This photograph is a close-up of Shafran’s hand. In the frame, his pale skin and blue veins are stark against a dark background. The word “Dad” is written on his hand in faded blue pen ink. David Chandler’s essay in Dark Rooms reveals that Shafran wrote the note to remind himself to visit his Dad in hospital, where he died a few weeks after the photograph was taken. Both Shafran’s father and mother died during the making of Dark Rooms.37 Shafran’s low-key photographs in the book gesture towards loss and slide amongst the presences and absences of his family in the home. Here, the domestic is not a docile space but rather, like the escalator and the moving checkout lane, a portal to somewhere else. Where Ruth appears in this book, she is often sleeping or resting, her body present but her mind likely wandering in another place and time (a nod, perhaps, back to Ruth on The Phone) (see Figure 4.5). Shafran’s son, Lev, is present largely through objects. His presence is felt through photographs of his Lego, a drawing pinned to the wall, and a string “trap” he has constructed between a chair and a door. But he is also pictured sleeping in one of the final sequences in the book. These moments of solitude and reprieve from the external world – Ruth eyes closed on the couch and Lev lying on his back in bed in slumber – are connected to the transient spaces of the supermarket checkout and the escalator. For these too are spaces – or “non-places,” to use Marc Augé’s term to describe those in-between realms – that often enable a sinking into solitude and removal.38 The

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Figure 4.5 Nigel Shafran, From Dark Rooms, 2016 © Nigel Shafran, courtesy the artist

very first image of Ruth sleeping is placed in the middle of a sequence of photographs of supermarket conveyor belts. Some of these conveyor belts are empty, some overflowing with food; each is a still life, and each is also a landscape of the loneliness evoked by the supermarket queue. Ruth, pictured asleep on the couch (see Figure 4.5), is also – in a way – moving forwards on the conveyor belt of time. This sequencing evokes Augé’s argument that “places and non-places intertwine and tangle together.”39 Through his arrangement of images, Shafran intersects these public spaces of collective solitude with the personal and intimate. In this way, Shafran’s photographs produce ideas not only about relationality between familial selves but also about the co-implication between collective and personal moments of solitude. Rinko Kawauchi: familial selves In this section, I  focus on two of Kawauchi’s photobooks: Cui Cui (2005), and as it is (2020).40 Kawauchi’s prolific output of photobooks – to date she has published 26 books – is all informed by her very particular mode of attention to the world, but Cui Cui and as it is have the most direct relationship to her own domestic life. Both of these books, like Shafran’s, have a range of autobiographical registers rather than a singular narrative. Cui Cui and as it is record the intertwining of Kawauchi’s life with those around her, especially her grandparents in Cui Cui and her young daughter in as it is.

98  Domestic selves Kawauchi’s photobook Cui Cui brings together a “collection of snapshots,” as Kawauchi describes in the book’s epilogue, taken between 1992 and 2005.41 Cui Cui is a French word and onomatopoeia for the twitter sound made by birds. This title indicates the book’s focus on small cumulative moments. The book is composed of 232 untitled photographs and a short epilogue. The photographs, tracking across a 14-year period, feature her grandparents and other family members interspersed with images of daily domestic life: this is slow, cumulative portraiture of Kawauchi’s family. Everyday home life is also central to Kawauchi’s as it is. There are 113 photographs in as it is, taken between 2016 and 2020 and interleafed with short pieces of writing by Kawauchi. Both Cui Cui and as it is feature her family members interspersed with images of her daily domestic life. Cui Cui disregards linear time in the sequencing of images taken over a 14-year period. Photographs of Kawauchi’s grandfather’s funeral, for example, precede photographs of her grandfather alive: we see his body being prepared for the funeral, family members gathering for the funeral, and then he reappears gazing into the camera later in the book. This is not a book about life as progress, but an endless series of starting over, a constant present. Kawauchi’s as it is similarly presents a mode of domestic time that hovers in the daily present, this time focused on her connection to her young child: again, Kawauchi harnesses the cumulative nature of the photobook to produce a slow, relational portrait of the first few years of her child’s life. Elsewhere I’ve argued that Kawauchi’s Cui Cui is not about a cohesive life story, but rather that Kawauchi’s practice has produced an “autobiography of seeing and contemplation.”42 I’ve suggested that by harnessing the cumulative mode of the book and the fragmentary nature of photography, Kawauchi’s photographs provide a way of thinking about self-representation that moves past autobiography as “the narrative of ‘a’ singular life and, through its modes of looking, allows us to reflect on ‘life.’ ”43 I  return to Cui Cui here and place it alongside her more recent as it is, to draw out the relational and intersubjective self that Kawauchi expresses through her photographs. Like most of the photographers I discuss in this book, Kawauchi’s practice compels a re-examination of taken-for-granted ideas of what constitutes self-representation in photographs. Selfrepresentation, in Kawauchi’s photographs, is often produced through the portrayal of daily rituals, rhythms, and objects. I extend upon my previous ideas about Kawauchi’s autobiographical mode of seeing by focusing here on how Kawauchi emphasises connections between familial selves in Cui Cui, her relational mode of looking through and with her daughter in as it is, and the role of the camera in generating this relationality. Intergenerational relations While as it is documents Kawauchi’s new relationship to her daughter, Cui Cui is defined by Kawauchi’s connections to her grandparents at the other end of the life cycle. Both books are marked by intergenerational ties and both carry the marks of loss as well as renewal. Cui Cui documents Kawauchi’s aging grandparents and the death of her grandfather alongside children being born, and other family celebrations. These more eventful occasions are sequenced among photographs of everyday domestic scenes, flowers leaning towards the light, and food being grown, prepared, served, eaten. as it is maintains the close attention to the small and the proximate seen in Cui Cui. In as it is, Kawauchi has sequenced together photographs of hands squeezing orange juice, a foot sticking out of a pram, the view from a kitchen window, hands cradling her baby. In one photograph in the book, Kawauchi’s daughter sits on the floor pulling on her nappy. A few pages

Domestic selves 99 later, she appears at a family funeral. The shifts in Cui Cui and as it is between the significant and the non-event are not at all jarring. If anything, the books – through their sequencing and rhythm – create a meditative space where the eventful and the daily are presented with an equivalence of attention. The shift in both books, from the everyday to the more momentous, reflects what I describe as Kawauchi’s “levelled gaze” at both events and non-events using the cumulative power of the photobook.44 The intersubjective relationship between Kawauchi and her young daughter is documented not only through individual photographs in as it is but also through the sequencing of images, which draws out the range of connected looks and relations between them both. Kawauchi describes as it is as a record of the new relationship between herself and her child. She explains her experience of being pregnant as “like having an alien inside of me, conquering me, as though someone else besides myself had control.”45 She then goes on to comment that even once her daughter was born, this also produced a new – clearly intersubjective – sense of selfhood: “[e]ven after birth, I was someone else’s food. From my breast, that person was half connected to me. A self connected to someone who is not yourself – this book is a document of that relationship.”46 I suggest that the book’s sequencing and connections across photographs are key to how Kawauchi documents this experience of the intersubjective. The form of the photobook relies on the accretion of photographs and careful sequencing. It is through sequencing, placing photographs in conversation with one another, that the relationality between subjects – and the connective tissue between those selves represented – is communicated. For example, in Cui Cui and as it is, the relationship between babies and grandparents, birth and death, the new and the old, becomes clear, not just through individual photographs but also through considered editing. One page spread in Cui Cui brings together a photograph of Kawauchi’s grandmother lying on the floor, head on the pillow, legs curling up, and on the opposite page is a photograph of a young baby having a bath (see Figures 4.6 and 4.7). The two photographs are positioned so that they are head to foot, which suggests they are part of the same whole. The framing of these two images, taken from above, gazing down at the young and old, both in their domestic cocoons, and the motif of being held – the baby’s head is held afloat by an adult’s hand, and the grandmother’s head rests on a pillow, her own hand on her head – create a symmetry, a charge of connection between these two lives. In another pairing in Cui Cui, Kawauchi’s grandfather, restful in death, lies in his coffin all in white – typical of a Shinto funeral – surrounded by flowers, and this photograph is paired with a photograph of a young child in an exterior scene looking at a passing dog. This connection between the death of a loved one and the curious gaze of a child is echoed again in as it is, where Kawauchi’s daughter is pictured in a sequence of three photographs peering into a coffin at a funeral. There is a matter of factness about this sequence: the funeral here is presented as just one moment among many where Kawauchi’s child is pictured looking with interest at the world around her: she observes the funeral casket with the same curiosity with which she stares at a tiny green frog in one photo or gazes at the feathery leaf of a plant in another.47 This focus on death and birth, or the explosion of life seen in a flower opening or vegetables growing, is linked to Kawauchi’s broader emphasis on temporality across many of her photographs and books. In Cui Cui, by focusing on her extended family and the ageing of her grandparents, Kawauchi’s photographs develop what I’ve termed slow portraits, portraits based on cumulative images made over lengthy time frames. Kawauchi’s circular timeframe involves death and birth, but this is not a sentimental

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Figure 4.6 Rinko Kawauchi Untitled, from Cui Cui, 2005, © Rinko Kawauchi, courtesy the artist

Figure 4.7 Rinko Kawauchi Untitled, from Cui Cui, 2005, © Rinko Kawauchi, courtesy the artist

Domestic selves 101 framing of family. Indeed, “her gaze is at times penetrating and almost cold, as exemplified by the rather confronting combination of photographs of a pile of discarded bicycles and a diagonally offset photo of a dinner of her extended-family.”48 The editing of both Cui Cui and as it is draws out Kawauchi’s exploration of the constant flow between life and death. as it is, while it appears, on the surface, to be a straightforward mother’s documentation of her child’s first few years, is “less a catalog of daily life and more of a philosophical investigation into the distinction between human and inhuman, skin and surface, caress and corpse.”49 I  would add that it is also an investigation into the coimplication of self and other in parent-child relationships. This co-implication is generated in part through the camera, which plays a key role in what I call Kawauchi’s “chains of looking”: intangible connections between Kawauchi’s gaze and that of her child. Kawauchi’s mode of observing and contemplating the world has been linked to a child’s view of the world, full of wonder and astonishment.50 Kawauchi herself has admitted to having a childlike sensibility in her way of looking at the world.51 She describes this approach to observing the world as linked to her own experiences as a child: “I remember being saved by small things and events when I was little. So when I create my work, I attach great significance to listening to small voices and valuing small things. That’s probably based on my childhood experience.”52 Kawauchi’s emphasis on the childlike mode of observation and looking in her photographs suggests a mode of subjectivity and self-representation that is not about a fully formed self or indeed a fully formed view of the world. The mode of child-like looking at the world that Kawauchi’s photographs regularly invoke is also often accompanied by images of children in her work who appear engrossed in their own looking. These children are looking at something, as seen in the image in Cui Cui where Kawauchi has photographed a small child mesmerised by a dog walking down the street. This chain of looking, where Kawauchi looks through her view-finder at a child looking at something else, serves to bind a connection with other pictures where things are often presented for our attention and scrutiny, that magnifying-glass view that asks us to look closely, and to look again – as a child might – at something both familiar and strange.53 Because of this, David Chandler argues that children may operate as “surrogates” for Kawauchi in her photographs, that they “become a way for her to inhabit her own pictures.”54 The look of the child is part of Kawauchi’s autobiography of seeing. These chains of looking in Cui Cui are also key to how as it is establishes the relationality between Kawauchi and her child. The connection between Kawauchi and her daughter is produced through links between the daughter’s mode of looking and Kawauchi’s own mode of seeing. For example, Kawauchi photographs multiple translucent soap bubbles floating in the air. One hangs in the air above a table. In another photograph, a bubble has floated onto a patch of green grass. She also photographs her daughter gazing at bubbles in separate photographs: arms reaching out to pop them in one photograph, and in another, she gazes up mesmerised. This happens repeatedly in the photobook: there is a photograph of a tiny frog on glass, and then a few pages later, there is a photograph of Kawauchi’s daughter observing another tiny green frog. Another page spread shows the daughter in a field of dried grass looking skyward, and the photograph on the opposite page shows a single bird in flight high in the sky. This pattern of photographs highlights the relationality of looking and the shared attention between Kawauchi and her child.

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Figure 4.8 Rinko Kawauchi Untitled, from as it is, 2020 © Rinko Kawauchi, courtesy the artist

They both turn their focus to small things: leaves, bubbles, a tiny frog, moments of light refracted. The images don’t just document this look; rather, the act of photographing produces this shared focus. In another image, Kawauchi has photographed her daughter taking a photograph, holding the camera up to the sky (see Figure 4.8). This photograph neatly brings together these patterns by showing us the very instrument that has played a key role in generating relationality through looking: the camera. While I’ve emphasised the relational in Kawauchi’s slow portraiture in Cui Cui and as it is, this is not a static mode of relationality but rather one of shifting proximities and distances. While as it is, for example, demonstrates the shared mode of looking or attention as a key site of connection between Kawauchi and her daughter, the sequencing of the book also continually references the tension between proximity and distance in their relationship. Many photographs in as it is document Kawauchi’s daughter at close range, and many of the photographs are close-up images of dew, flowers, and spider webs that are suggestive of close and tactile proximity. At the same time, the book intersperses these moments of closeness with photographs of Kawauchi’s daughter taken at a far distance, or of her daughter running away from Kawauchi and her camera, rather than towards her. There is one photograph of Kawauchi’s daughter that is sequenced towards the middle of the book, which was taken at long range. In this image, Kawauchi’s daughter appears as a tiny figure, standing in a river, her hands held by another carer. Unlike most of Kawauchi’s images, which are awash with light, this photograph is dark; the

Domestic selves 103 river is almost black, and the surrounding foliage merges with the darkness of the water. Kawauchi’s daughter is far away but still seen, and in the subsequent pages she is back in close range, and here the sequencing operates as a wave oscillating between near and far, distance and intimacy. Similarly, in Cui Cui Kawauchi’s photographs suggest both closeness and remoteness between herself and her family members. Sometimes the proximity is at extreme close range, close enough that facial stubble and skin wrinkles fill the photographic frame, while other images shift towards a more distant mutuality. The motif of moving away that I noted in as it is is also present in Cui Cui through the photographs of her grandmother walking away or sitting at the edge of her house with her back to Kawauchi’s camera. Here again, the camera is part of a scene of relationality with its variable attachments and detachment. Takahiro Kaneyama’s generations of selfhood Like Shafran and Kawauchi, Kaneyama also explores the tensions between intimacy and distance in familial relationships. This tension is heightened in Kaneyama’s relationship with his family, which unfolds against the backdrop of his mother’s mental illness. Kaneyama’s depictions of family life in his photobook While Leaves are Falling . . . documents his mother and two aunts over a lengthy period, from 1999 to 2016.55 The book also includes a small sequence of family photographs from Kaneyama’s childhood in the 1970s. These photographs feature Kaneyama’s mother prior to her diagnosis with schizophrenia. These home family photographs destabilise and interrupt the continuity of the narrative, providing a glimpse of her life pre-diagnosis. Kaneyama’s own photographs observe his family over a 17-year period. During this time, his aunts and mother visibly age, and his mother’s condition deteriorates slowly over the course of the book. Across the photographs, Kaneyama’s mother’s appearance shifts as she responds to different drugs, gets older, changes hairstyle, and her illness fluctuates over time. This is a slow cumulative portraiture of ageing with schizophrenia and a rare visualisation of mental illness from the proximate perspective of a family member.56 I explore how visual motifs of separation, both literal and emotional, recur throughout While Leaves are Falling . . . and reiterate the friction between proximity and distance in Kaneyama’s connection to his mother and aunts, as well as between the three sisters.57 My discussion of Kaneyama’s work also articulates the role of the camera and photography in their familial landscape and how the presence of his camera creates spatial relations between his mother and two aunts. Detached attachments While Kaneyama’s photographs provide an intimate glimpse into his family life, there is a gentle reserve in Kaneyama’s depictions of his mother and aunts – what Eric Shiner has described as “a sense of intimacy fraught with indifference.”58 There is a guardedness present in some of these photographs in While Leaves are Falling . . . but there is also a critical sentimentality. That is, there is an emotional attachment between Kaneyama and the subjects of his photographs, but this attachment is combined with techniques of careful composition and framing. This results in measured photographs that reflect the emotional distancing needed for Kaneyama to navigate his mother’s experiences with

104  Domestic selves schizophrenia and his own personal response to his mother’s diagnosis and constantly shifting behaviour. Kaneyama confesses that his move to New York came about partly because he couldn’t deal with his mother’s diagnosis, but he also reveals that he now knows that “physical distance would never equal emotional distance; I had a hard time separating myself from my thoughts and emotions about my mother’s mental illness, whether I  was in New York or Tokyo.”59 This tension between distance and proximity in both a spatial and emotional sense informs Kaneyama’s photographs of his family as well as the form and sequencing of the photobook itself. The visual motif of separation and the movements between presence and absence that track across many of the book’s photographs is also echoed in the book design of While Leaves Are Falling . . . Upon opening the book, for example, the first two pages are barely visible prints on transparent paper. The first page has a bare trace of the photobook’s cover image, and the second page has the title and Kaneyama’s name printed on it, both barely visible on the page. The printing on these initial pages is discernible only when light catches the page being turned: a translucent photograph and title that are almost beyond sight. This tension between showing and not showing is threaded throughout the book in both its sequencing and design as well as across specific photographs. While the photobook is autobiographical, there are no physical or easily identifiable photographs of Kaneyama in the photographs. While he does appear as a child in an early family photograph of his mother lying next to him as a baby in My Mother (1971) and again as a toddler in My Grandmother, Me, and My Younger Aunt Noriko (1974), most of the photographs feature his two aunts and his mother. However, Kaneyama’s own presence manifests in his – at times detached – look at his mother shown in his photographs of her. Kaneyama’s own looking is implied through many of the photographs as part of the network of familial looking between himself, his mother, and his aunts. His presence is also palpable in photographs that document his own spaces, such as My Room, Tokyo (2003), or photographs taken of sites from his past as in Trees Outside a Department Store My Family Used to Frequent, Tokyo (1999). The autobiographical lens is clear too, in the titling of many of the photographs, where Kaneyama uses the possessive pronoun ‘my’ to indicate the subjective nature of the images. For example, My Mothers’ Feet (2005), My Mother at Her Hospital (2012), My Family and Mt Fuji, Hakone (2007), My Aunts in Kamakura (2008), and My Mother in Pain (2015). While Leaves Are Falling . . . begins with Kaneyama’s mother in her own domestic space. The first photograph shows her sitting up in bed, photographed from the side, staring straight ahead. The second photograph titled My Mother Smoking at Home 1 (1999) represents Kaneyama’s mother as a figure crouched on the floor at the end of a hall. She is viewed through a doorway, and the photograph is taken through a cloth separating the rooms. This means that the mother’s figure is shown through her outline, but we can’t see her features; she is both present but removed. In My Mother Smoking at Home 2 (1999), the cloth barrier is gone, and Kaneyama’s mother is again crouching on the floor. This time his mother looks directly at the camera, and the shadows and vague shapes of My Mother Smoking at Home 1 are replaced with the sharper focus and more direct vision. This shifting in and out of sight continues across the book. In a photograph of a hotel interior, Kaneyama’s aunts and mother are photographed through a sheer curtain in My Family in a Hotel in Hakone (2016). Here, the figures are recognisable but obscured through the haze of the curtain and darkness. The following photograph, Mother in a Hotel Room in Hakone (2016), is a portrait of Kaneyama’s mother staring

Domestic selves 105 directly into the camera. This photograph is taken in full daylight with sharp focus and her features are sharply defined. The next image, View From a Hotel Room in Hakone, indicates the reprieve of looking away from his family to the expanse of green hills and clouds beyond the hotel. The reprieve is followed by a more confronting view of Kaneyama’s mother’s bare back in My Mother Repeatedly Trying to Take a Shower at the Hotel in Hakone (2016). This sequencing is driven by Kaneyama’s pattern of looking through his camera: looking through a screen, looking directly at his mother, looking away (at exterior sights), and interspersed with his direct gaze at his mother’s agitation or pain associated with her experience of schizophrenia. Through its cumulative family portraiture, While Leaves Are Falling .  .  . cleaves together home and travel. When Kaneyama would return to Japan, he would often travel with his mother and aunts for short trips, and many of the photographs document his family members in hotel rooms and local travel destinations such as Nikko, Lake Ashinoko, Fukushima, and Kinugawa. He is returning to a place of origin, but often travelling with his mother and aunt. In this way, his family members are also in the temporary realm of displacement, of being away from home in many of the photographs. Interspersed with his photographs taken of these trips, are portraits of Kaneyama’s mother at home and at hospital. The photographs taken of Kaneyama’s mother in her domestic space feature her watching television, smoking, sipping tea, staring into space. Sequencing travel photographs together with home and hospital photographs offers glimpses into relational life unfolding amidst interior spaces: hotel rooms, living rooms, and hospital rooms. Many of the photographs in While Leaves Are Falling . . . taken during their travels in Japan include hotel interiors and scenes not typically included in family travel photographs. The hotel, like the escalator and the supermarket checkout discussed earlier in Shafran’s photographs, is another example of Marc Augé’s non-place, or in-between realm, “spaces where people cohabit or coexist without living together.”60 The hotel is a space of transition that both halts and enables movement and produces a kind of “unhomely domesticity.”61 In their discussion of hotel interiors in films, David Clark, Valerie Pfannhauser, and Marcus Doel describe hotels as liminal spaces that dismantle the distinctions between public and private as well as between belonging and being out of place.62 Kaneyama uses the liminal space of the hotel to further frame his exploration of being both home and away while he visits Japan and also to frame his relationship with his family as a similar type of “stopping place” where he and his family are together in their dislocation. In one of the travel photographs, My Family in Kinugawa (2014), Kaneyama photographs the trio from the exterior of a building, looking in and photographing through the glass. Kaneyama’s mother and one of his aunts sit inside, looking out through a corner glass window, with the corner join creating a dividing line between them. His other aunt stands alone looking out through a separate window. Each of the three women has their own frame within the frame of the photograph, and while they are all looking outside, none of them are gazing directly at Kaneyama and his camera. Here, Kaneyama and his family are not only together but also apart, separated through glass, with the three women visually framed as separate from one another. Kaneyama’s photographs in While Leaves Are Falling . . . repeatedly use the motif of windows and screens to examine the tension between family connections and disconnections. Kaneyama photographs his family through the front pane of a car window and through a number of windows in hotel buildings, at home, and at hospital. I suggest that

106  Domestic selves Kaneyama’s many windows in his photographs point to his self-reflexive use of photography as both a mode of representation and a representation of the unstable barriers – the shifts between connection and disconnection – between himself and his mother. Kaneyama’s recurring use of windows in his portraits of his mother and aunts draws attention to the process of framing and taking a picture.63 As Karen Hellman points out in her discussion of windows in photography, “all photographs are windows in a certain sense.”64 She explains the symbolic link between the window and the literal mechanism of the viewfinder in photography. In other words, “a photograph of a window is a representation of how a camera sees, a ‘view of a view.’ ”65 While Kaneyama does include photographs from the interior looking out at the exterior view, many of his photographs that use windows as a framing device are concerned with the view from the opposite angle: looking in. Another photograph taken from a position of exteriority is titled My Family in our House (2007) (see Figure 4.9). In this photo, the three sisters stand looking out from the interior. In one window frame, Kaneyama’s mother stands alone, and in another window frame, his two aunts stand looking out with Kerry, their small dog. This use of the two windows visually separates Kaneyama’s mother from her two sisters, framing her as the isolated figure in the family. Kaneyama, in this configuration, remains separate,

Figure 4.9 Takahiro Kaneyama, My Family in Our House,  2007, original in colour, From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . . ©Takahiro Kaneyama, courtesy the artist

Domestic selves 107 outside with his camera but looking in. If we take Olin’s suggestion that the “taking of a picture acts out a relationship,” then the relationality in this particular scene is one of both distance and connection.66 Kaneyama is outside, at a distance from his mother and aunts. But the direct chain of looking between Kaneyama with his camera and his family, who are posing at the window and responding directly to the camera, is suggestive of connection. A similar motif of spatial separation combined with connected gazes between Kaneyama and his family is used in the photograph My Family at a Hotel in Hakone (2015), where the three sisters are shown at a distance on a hotel balcony. Kaneyama photographs them from below, and they appear as small figures enclosed in repetitive rows of white hotel balconies. In an earlier photograph My Family in Nikko (2000), the three sisters sit on separate benches. They are all facing the camera, Kaneyama’s mother in the centre and closer to the camera. Her two sisters sit on either side of her on benches that are further behind her: a visual representation, perhaps, of the family dynamic of the two sisters acting in supporting role to Kaneyama’s mother. In both My Family in Hakone (2009) and My Family in Hakone (2014), the three sisters stand posed in a line. In the 2014 photograph, they are behind a layer of tiny glass lights and in the 2009 photograph, they are behind large soap bubbles that float in the air between the camera and its subjects: a moving translucent screen between Kaneyama and the three sisters. Towards the end of the photobook, these screens have become more rigid, more institutional, as Kaneyama photographs his mother through the small window that looks into his mother’s isolation room at the hospital. In these examples, seats, doorways, windows, curtains, and shifting screens produce varying relations of nearness and distance between Kaneyama and his mother. At the end of his photobook While Leaves are Falling .  .  . Kaneyama includes five excerpts from his mother’s diary entries written between 2005 and 2010.67 These are interspersed with Kaneyama’s own recollections about his matrilineal kinship: his mother, grandmother, and two aunts. Kaneyama tells his readers, “I was raised by four women: my mother, my grandmother and two aunts who never married. My mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was a teenager.”68 He writes about his mother’s water intoxication and her repeated delusion that she has a job as a professional singer. He includes a list of input numbers and karaoke song titles that his mother likes to sing. He also writes about his grandmother’s death when he was 28 years old and how this death compelled him to take more photographs of his family on his visits to Japan from New York, where he now lives. His mother’s voice breaks through his recollections with the excerpts from her diary, which speak of discomforts, delusions, and paranoia. For example, the entry dated June  21st reveals “I have electric shock sensations running through my body. I  can’t breathe. I might die soon. It must be the Emperor [of Japan] that is doing this to me.”69 Another entry dated August  5 begins: “My child and I  have flown to Earth. The sun behaves badly sometimes. I have been having a chest pain for a week now, but it happens to everyone. When I can’t endure the pain, I fly to Earth.”70 This written collection of thoughts, Kaneyama’s reflections interrupted with his mother’s diary entries, reveal a relational life narrative girded with the reality of serious mental illness. The interweaving of his mother’s diary excerpts with Kaneyama’s own memories produces two very different depictions of a period during which Kaneyama’s mother was increasingly hospitalised following her diagnosis with schizophrenia. The photographs in While Leaves

108  Domestic selves are Falling . . . and the afterword in the text position selfhood as generated through the landscape of family relationships. It also shows how this landscape is a shifting, unstable one that is experienced differently by each family member. At home with the television I turn my focus now to Kaneyama’s photographs of his mother in her own domestic space to compare two photographs taken in the same room, 12 years apart: My Mother at Home Watching Television (2001) and My Mother at Home (2013) (see Figures 4.10 and 4.11). In both photographs, Kaneyama’s mother is shown in the same space, with the same floral curtains hanging at the window and a television in the corner of the room. The persistence of the domestic objects and fabrics is mapped across the 2001 and 2013 images.71 The same wood furniture sits solemnly, while Kaneyama’s mother clearly changes – and ages – as Kaneyama observes this slow-changing scene between himself and his mother in the same room over a 12-year trajectory.72 In the earlier photograph, Kaneyama’s mother holds tea and sits at floor level and domestic daily objects surround her: a bin, a bucket, a hanging clothesline. A fan is in the foreground, and another fan whirs in the background signalling the warm weather, as does her summer outfit. She appears engrossed in a television show; Kaneyama is here

Figure 4.10 Takahiro Kaneyama, My Mother at Home Watching Television, 2001, From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . . ©Takahiro Kaneyama, courtesy the artist

Domestic selves 109

Figure 4.11 Takahiro Kaneyama, My Mother at Home, 2013, original in colour, From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . . ©Takahiro Kaneyama, courtesy the artist

observing her observing, and a man’s face is frozen on the television screen. We watch her look at him, and he appears to gaze out of the screen directly at the viewer. This creates a chain of looks from the camera to the subject, to the television, and to the frozen face that looks blankly out of the frame of the television screen. In the 2013 photograph My Mother at Home, the television has been replaced by a newer model with a larger screen. Kaneyama frames his mother more centrally in this image. Here, she sits in a lounge chair and is photographed from behind, so we see just her elbow, foot, and leg, and her head turned sideways with the light coming through the window catching her grey hair. Kaneyama’s framing of this photograph is more proximate than the 2001 photograph; the photographer is closer to the subject here, just as Kaneyama’s mother is closer to the television screen than in the earlier photograph. While Kaneyama’s mother’s hands aren’t visible in this photograph, the image on the television screen shows two hands typing on a computer, which produces a kind of strange, disembodied mirroring. That is, the frozen image on the television screen is a close-up of hands with no body or head, while Kaneyama’s mother is shown as a body sitting in a chair, but her hands are not shown. This echoes the motif of showing/not showing elsewhere in the photobook. While in the earlier image (as indicated by the title itself), Kaneyama’s mother is watching television, in the 2013 image she is simply at home: the television is turned on, but she isn’t directly gazing at it. Like the telephone held to Ruth’s ear in Shafran’s Ruth on the Phone, the television too can operate as a portal between inside and outside. In the context of postwar Japan, however, the television was never a technology that intruded into a pre-existing personal

110  Domestic selves “closed” domestic realm. Rather, as Shunya Yoshimi has articulated in his work on television culture and audiences in Japan, “the postwar sense of the intimate sphere of the home itself (pleasant time spent with the family [ikka danran]) was produced through the medium of television.”73 That is, the television didn’t disrupt the domestic intimate realm, but rather its presence played a key role in generating it, by gathering family members together and prompting new conversations and shared pleasures. As Yoshimi describes, television is a “simultaneously public and private system of relating.”74 I’m highlighting this here because these domestic interior scenes in which Kaneyama has brought the camera out, and where his mother sits with the television, do not, I argue, present as a display of disconnection, but rather these are scenes that communicate the relationality between technologies and selves. Both the television and the camera play an active role here in how Kaneyama and his mother relate to one another. They both mediate the familial look between Kaneyama and his mother and both technologies offer capacities for absence and presence, proximities, and distance in how they relate.75 The slow portraiture in the three photographs My Mother In Bed at Home, My Mother at Home, and My mother Watching TV at Home all show the same room from a similar angle, with his mother in front of windows framed by floral curtains, and the television in the corner. However, My Mother with My Grandmother’s Daily Tear-off Calendar Showing the Last Day My Grandmother Was Home (2009) provides a different perspective on the space (see Figure 4.12). This photograph is taken from the same room, and a corner of the television is captured in the foreground of the right-hand bottom corner of the photograph. Repeating the view of being outside looking in, this photograph is taken from one room looking into another and shows his mother sitting on the edge of a bed, her hands clasped in her lap. Her clothing – a brown and beige striped jumper – blends with the brown tones of the wooden furniture. Kaneyama’s concern with the passing of time is clear in the framing of this photograph. There is a calendar in the foreground that marks the last date when Kaneyama’s grandmother was at home before her death. The passing of time is shown in the face of his mother and the photograph captures the slowness of domestic time, shown through the many accumulated objects in the room: the jars and bottles on the cluttered dresser, as well as the piles of clothes and fabric on a chair in this lived-in space. The indexing of time captured in My Mother with My Grandmother’s Daily Tear-off Calendar Showing the Last Day My Grandmother Was Home reflects the book’s wider attention to the course of time. Relational photography While I’ve emphasised the role of windows, screens, and other permeable barriers in both producing and representing the distance between family members in Kaneyama’s photographs, it is also the case that the camera itself plays a key role in creating scenes of relationality. Kaneyama notes in the written section of While Leaves are Falling . . . , that “[p]hotographing my family was made possible through collaboration with them. This collaboration became a way for us to strengthen our relationship.”76 In other words, here the camera operates as a conduit between himself, his mother, and his aunts. Rather than the camera being a mechanism for removing himself from a scene (“hiding behind the camera”) or distancing himself, the camera and the act of photographing became a shared family project with the camera functioning as a relational tool. Kaneyama’s photographs taken at home, as well as the exterior scenes which don’t feature human subjects, are carefully composed. The photographs of Kaneyama’s mother

Domestic selves 111

Figure 4.12 Takahiro Kaneyama, My Mother with my Grandmother’s Daily Tear-off Calendar Showing The Last Day My Grandmother Was Home, 2009, original in colour, From the series While Leaves Are Falling . . . ©Takahiro Kaneyama, courtesy the artist

and aunts on their travels are not casual travel snaps. These are beautifully curated scenes in which it is clear the photographer has played some role in directing his subjects. Shiner positions While Leaves are Falling . . . in his accompanying essay as “an autobiographical record that is both fully controlled and carefully orchestrated.”77 At the same time, there is agency and involvement on the part of Kaneyama’s mothers and aunts: their role in these choreographed scenes is not passive but generative. The camera doesn’t just reflect the reality of Kaneyama’s relationship with his aunts and mother: the camera is implicated in and co-constitutive of that reality. As Ariella Azoulay suggests, the mere presence of a camera impacts how an encounter between humans may unfold, even in circumstances where a photograph isn’t produced. While the camera is a conduit that can produce certain charges amongst family members, Kaneyama’s description of photographing his family as collaborative resonates with Azoulay’s insistence that the language of photography needs to shift from a focus on the omniscient photographer towards acknowledging the interdependency between the person holding the camera and other people in a photographic encounter. “The photographed person,” Azoulay highlights, “is always there and participates in the making of the photograph.”78

112  Domestic selves Conclusion In the broader context of everyday family photography practice, and key to my focus in this book, there is also a rich history of photographic art that has challenged ideas about what family life looks like. Often these works challenge ideas about gender roles and motherhood and expose family dynamics and hierarchies.79 My specific focus in this chapter has been on photographic art that shows how the domestic intersects with relational life narrative: where the stories and identities of each photographer are bound up with the stories and selves of others. By drawing attention to the relationality amongst selves in domestic spaces, I show how photographic representations of intimate others are also a mode of self-representation that registers the photographer’s subjectivity. The photographs of Shafran, Kawauchi, and Kaneyama highlight a mode of relational selfhood that is co-implicated in the habits, experiences, and narratives of those around them. I argue that they also reveal how domestic scenes are relational in other ways too. Phones, televisions, and cameras, as well as doorways, screens, and windows and other parts of the domestic assemblage also produce a set of relations. Taken together, the self and familial other work in tandem with domestic technologies and spaces and create relational selves and stories. Shafran’s, Kawauchi’s, and Kaneyama’s photographs visualise Anna Poletti’s insight that “life, as well as the meanings we may attach to it or the significance that might adhere to experience, is not distinct from the media forms and objects with which it is entangled.”80 This is seen in the intersections between Ruth and her phone, and Shafran and his camera, between the chains of looking that emerge between Kawauchi, her daughter, and the camera, and the conduit between Kaneyama, his camera, his mother and aunts, and an array of domestic frames, barriers, and entries. The intersection of photography, intimacy, and relational selfhood in the work of Shafran, Kawauchi, and Kaneyama is marked not only by presence and familiarity but also by detachment, absence, and the unknown. The photographer and their camera, interior spaces, domestic technology such as the phone and television, as well as familial selves, generate modes of relationality with shifting proximities and distances. Through long periods of time, often spent in domestic spaces, Shafran, Kawauchi, and Kaneyama have produced slow relational practices of portraiture. This slow portraiture shifts focus away from the meaning found in a single photograph, to focus instead on cumulative meaning built across a number of images. This cumulative portraiture is developed through the photobook form, which creates new interactions between and across photographs through sequencing. Notes 1 Paul John Eakin, “Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story of the Story,” in True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern, eds. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998), 63; Nancy K. Miller, “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 544, https://doi.org/10.1632/ pmla.2007.122.2.537; Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). 2 Anna Poletti, “Reading for Excess: Relational Autobiography, Affect and Popular Culture in Tarnation,” Life Writing 9, no. 2 (June  2012): 157–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528. 2012.667363; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Introduction,” in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–26; Liz Stanley,

Domestic selves 113 “From ‘Self-Made Women’ to ‘Women’s Made-Selves’? Audit Selves, Simulation and Surveillance in the Rise of Public Woman,” in Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, eds. Tess Coslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 40–60. 3 Liz Stanley, “On Auto/Biography in Sociology,” Sociology 27, no. 1 (February  1993): 50, https://doi.org/10.1177/003803859302700105. 4 As Miller describes, “the relational is not optional.” Miller, “The Entangled Self,” 544; See also, Stanley, “On Auto/Biography in Sociology.” 5 Ariella Azoulay, “What Is a Photograph? What Is Photography?” Philosophy of Photography 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): 9–13, https://doi.org/10.1386/pop.1.1.9/7; Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A  Political Ontology of Photography, trans. Louise Bethlehem (London: Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2012); Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 6 Azoulay’s discussions of photography are embedded in debates about modern political philosophy. Many of her writings on photography are informed by her experience of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. My discussion of her work here draws from a much larger set of ideas she puts forward about photography as a political tool. 7 Azoulay, “What Is a Photograph?” 13. 8 Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 9. 9 Olin, Touching Photographs, 15. For discussion of photography as a relational medium, see also Melissa Miles, “Introduction: Photography’s Publics,” in Photography’s and Its Publics, eds. Melissa Miles and Edward Welch (London: Routledge, 2020), 1–17. 10 Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 18. 11 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9. 12 Nigel Shafran, Ruthbook (London: Self-Published, 1995); Nigel Shafran, Ruth on the Phone (Amsterdam: Roma publications, 2012); Nigel Shafran, Dark Rooms (London: MACK Books, 2016). 13 Rinko Kawauchi, As It Is (Tokyo: Torch Press, 2020); Rinko Kawauchi, Cui Cui (Tokyo: Foil, 2005). 14 Kawauchi, Cui Cui. 15 Takahiro Kaneyama, While Leaves Are Falling (Tokyo: AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2017), n.p. 16 Photoworks, “Nigel Shafran in Conversation with Francis Hodgson,” April 20, 2017, https:// vimeo.com/214032418. 17 For an expansive view of Shafran’s commercial work, see Nigel Shafran, The Well (Marseille and London: Loose Joints, 2022). 18 Shafran, The Well, 102–3. 19 Paul Elliman and Nigel Shafran, “Nigel Shafran Interview with Paul Elliman” in Fig-1: 50 Projects in 50 Weeks (London: Spafax Publishing in Association with Tate: Art Magazine, 2000), http://nigelshafran.com/interview-with-paul-elliman-fig-1/. 20 Ibid. 21 Nigel Shafran, Dad’s Office (London: Self-Published, 1999). 22 Charlotte Cotton puts this in similar terms when she describes the series as a narration of a father and son’s relationship. See Charlotte Cotton, Photographs by Nigel Shafran, 1992–2000 (Tokyo: Taka Ishii Gallery, 2000). 23 Shafran, Ruthbook. 24 Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A  History, vol. 3 (London: Phaidon Press, 2014), 261. 25 Cotton in Charlotte Cotton, “Interview: Nigel Shafran and Charlotte Cotton,” in Edited Photographs 1992–2004, ed. Nigel Shafran (Göttingen: Photoworks, 2004), 121. 26 Shafran, Ruth on the Phone. 27 See, for example, Robert Hopper, Telephone Conversation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Ian Hutchby, Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 28 Mette Simonsen Abildgaard and Lee Humphreys, “Landline Natives: Telephone Practices Since the 1950s as Innovation,” Technology and Culture 61, no. 3 (2020): 924, https://doi. org/10.1353/tech.2020.0079.

114  Domestic selves 29 Hazel Lacohée and Ben Anderson, “Interacting with the Telephone,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 54, no. 5 (May 2001): 680, https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.2000.0439. 30 Abildgaard and Humphreys, “Landline Natives,” 943. 31 Roger. Silverstone and Eric Hirsch, Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 104. 32 For some discussion of cultures of domestic telephone use in the United Kingdom during the late 1990s, see Lacohée and Anderson, “Interacting with the Telephone,” 683. 33 Nigel Shafran, Flowers for ____________ (London: Koenig Books, 2008). 34 Diane Smyth, “Everyday Beauty with Nigel Shafran,” British Journal of Photography, May 3, 2018, https://www.1854.photography/2018/05/shafraninterview/ 35 Shafran, Dark Rooms. 36 Ibid. 37 Photoworks. 38 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1995). 39 Ibid., 107. 40 Kawauchi, Cui Cui; Kawauchi, As It Is. 41 Kawauchi, Cui Cui. 42 Jane Simon, “Contemplating Life: Rinko Kawauchi’s Autobiography of Seeing,” in Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, eds. Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty (New York: Routledge, 2018), 119. 43 Ibid. 44 Jane Simon and Mio Bryce, “The Labour of Light: Gender, Technology and the Domestic in the Photography of Nagashima Yurie and Kawauchi Rinko,” Women’s History Review 31, no. 4 (June 7, 2022): 661, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2021.1944351. 45 Kawauchi cited in, Moeko Fujii, “Rinko Kawauchi: The Shape of Things,” Aperture, 2022, 121, https://issues.aperture.org/article/2022/01/01/rinko-kawauchi-2. 46 Fujii, “Rinko Kawauchi,” 121. 47 As Iizawa Kōtarō points out, Kawauchi’s work often weaves together life and death, using lightness and darkness as counterpoints. Iizawa Kōtarō, “Kawauchi Rinko: Nichijō kara eien o tsukamitoru manazashi,” Nippon.com, 2020, www.nippon.com/ja/images/i00053/. 48 Simon and Bryce, “The Labour of Light,” 656. 49 Fujii, “Rinko Kawauchi,” 121. 50 Caroline Baker, “Sensuous Photographies: Living Things Explored Through Phenomenological Practice,” in Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements, ed. Penelope Dransart (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 97; David Chandler, “Weightless Light,” in Illuminance, ed. Rinko Kawauchi (New York: Aperture, 2011), n.p.; Boris Friedewald, Women Photographers: From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman (Munich: Prestel, 2014), 111. 51 As cited in Baker, “Sensuous Photographies,” 97. 52 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Rinko Kawauchi Contemplates the Small Mysteries of Life,” SFMOMA, March 2016, www.sfmoma.org/watch/rinko-kawauchi-contemplatessmall-mysteries-life/. 53 Chandler, “Weightless Light.” 54 Ibid. 55 Family connections and disconnections and personal history are recurring themes in Kaneyama’s practice. Before publishing While Leaves are Falling . . . , for example, he made a series and photobook Shumafura. This documented his trip to meet his great uncle who lived in a small fishing village on the Shimokita Peninsula on the northern tip of the main island Honshu, for the first time. Both Shumafura, and While Leaves are Falling . . . have thematic overlap: they both involve travel in relation to (re)connecting with an older generation of family members and both explore the role of photography in the construction and retelling of family stories. 56 For a discussion of how mental illness is more broadly (and often inaccurately) represented in visual culture, see Jennifer Eisenhauer, “A Visual Culture of Stigma: Critically Examining Representations of Mental Illness,” Art Education 61, no. 5 (September 2008): 13–18, https:// doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2008.11518991. 57 There are also, as Eric Shiner points out in his essay that accompanies the photobook, resonances here between Kaneyama’s relationship with his mother and his broader social relationship with

Domestic selves 115 Japan since moving to New York: both marked by connection as well as detachment. Eric Shiner, “Memory Mapping,” In While Leaves Are Falling, ed. Takahiro Kaneyama (Tokyo: AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2017), n.p. 58 Shiner, “Memory Mapping.” 59 Takahiro Kaneyama, While Leaves Are Falling. . . (Tokyo: AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2017), n.p. 60 Augé, Non-Places, 94. 61 Kornelia Boczkowska, “Dwellers That Do Not Belong, Dwellings That No Longer Exist: Staging Hotel Interiors and (Unhomely) Domesticity in Experimental Documentary Film,” Home Cultures 17, no. 1 (January 2, 2020): 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2020.1757382. 62 David B. Clarke, Valerie Crawford Pfannhauser, and Marcus A. Doel, eds., “Checking In,” in Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film (Lanham and Lexington Books, 2009), 1–2. 63 In an earlier series called Shumafura, Kaneyama also uses the window as a way to bring together multiple views of a view. Here, he has taken a photograph of a photograph of his mother found at his great uncle’s house, titled My Mother at the Age of 19 (2009). The small black-and-white photograph of his mother has been placed directly next to a windowpane and Kaneyama photographs the photograph within the frame of the window view. This creates a double view: an out-of-focus view of the greenery beyond the window and the view of the photograph of his mother, who appears poised sitting in an armchair in a domestic interior. 64 Karen Hellman, The Window in Photographs (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 14. 65 Ibid., 7. 66 Olin, Touching Photographs, 12. 67 I am focusing on the photobook version of While Leaves Are Falling . . . in this chapter. However, the series is ongoing post the publication of the photobook. 68 Kaneyama, While Leaves Are Falling, n.p. 69 Italics in original Kaneyama, While Leaves Are Falling, n.p. 70 Ibid. 71 There is an even earlier photograph from 1999 taken in the same room, titled My Mother in Bed at Home. In this image, his mother sits upright and alert on a futon bed, the television is present, but this time is not switched on. It remains a blank screen, and Kaneyama’s mother gazes straight ahead her hands resting in her lap. My Mother and Kerry (2008) features the same domestic space. In this image, Kaneyama’s mother sits forward casually in a robe on her bed, touching the small dog’s face. The television is on here in the background, as Kaneyama photographs this small moment of intimacy between his mother and the small dog. 72 Kaneyama’s photography centred around his own family has resonances with what Michael Renov describes as “domestic ethnography.” Renov uses the term domestic ethnography to refer to a mode of personal documentary film which centres around intimate family relationships. Renov describes domestic ethnography as “always relational, a pas de deux between a self and a familial other rather than an outright self-examination.” See Michael Renov, “Family Secrets: Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business and the (American) Jewish Autobiographical Film,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49, no. 1 (2008): 57, https://doi.org/10.1353/frm.0.0007. 73 Shunya Yoshimi, “From Street Corner to Living Room: Domestication of TV Culture and National Time/Narrative,” trans. Jodie Beck, Mechademia 9 (2014): 137, https://doi.org/ 10.5749/mech.9.2014.0126. 74 Ibid., 127. 75 With these photographs that include television screens in domestic photographs, Kaneyama is also tapping into a small but significant pool of photographic art, which engages with the connections between television and photography (often intersecting with domestic family life), for example, Lee Friedlander’s series ‘The Little Screens,” or William Eggleston’s many photographs from the 1970s which features television sets (too many to name here). See Saul Anton, Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 76 Kaneyama, While Leaves Are Falling. 77 Shiner, “Memory Mapping.” 78 Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “Ariella Aïsha Azoulay – Unlearning, An Interview with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay,” Análise Social 55, no. 235 (June 30, 2020): 423, https:// doi.org/10.31447/AS00032573.2020235.08.

116  Domestic selves 79 For some examples of literature discussing photographic art that does this work, see Susan Bright, “Motherlode: Photography, Motherhood and Representation,” in Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood, ed. Susan Bright (London: Art Books, 2013), 9–23; Cherine Fahd, “The Mother Thing in Pictures: From Antagonism to Affection,” Photographies 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 3–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2021.1986855; Andrea Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Simon and Bryce, “The Labour of Light”; Sophie Spencer-Wood, ed., Family: Photographers Photograph Their Families (London: Phaidon Press, 2005). 80 Anna Poletti, Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book (New York: NYU Press, 2020), 60.

References Abildgaard, Mette Simonsen, and Lee Humphreys. “Landline Natives: Telephone Practices Since the 1950s as Innovation.” Technology and Culture 61, no. 3 (2020): 923–47. https://doi. org/10.1353/tech.2020.0079. Anton, Saul. Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London and New York: Verso, 1995. Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Civil Imagination: A  Political Ontology of Photography. Translated by Louise Bethlehem. London: Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2012. ———. “What Is a Photograph? What Is Photography?” Philosophy of Photography 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): 9–13. https://doi.org/10.1386/pop.1.1.9/7. Baker, Caroline. “Sensuous Photographies: Living Things Explored Through Phenomenological Practice.” In Living Beings: Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements, edited by Penelope Dransart, 91–110. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Boczkowska, Kornelia. “Dwellers That Do Not Belong, Dwellings That No Longer Exist: Staging Hotel Interiors and (Unhomely) Domesticity in Experimental Documentary Film.” Home Cultures 17, no. 1 (January 2, 2020): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2020.1757382. Bright, Susan. “Motherlode: Photography, Motherhood and Representation.” In Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood, edited by Susan Bright, 9–23. London: Art Books, 2013. Chandler, David. “Weightless Light.” In Illuminance, edited by Rinko Kawauchi, n.p. New York: Aperture, 2011. Clarke, David B., Valerie Crawford Pfannhauser, and Marcus A. Doel, eds. “Checking In.” In Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film, 1–12. Lanham and Lexington Books, 2009. Cotton, Charlotte. “Interview: Nigel Shafran and Charlotte Cotton.” In Edited Photographs 1992–2004, by Nigel Shafran, 120–21. Göttingen: Photoworks, 2004. ———. Photographs by Nigel Shafran, 1992–2000. Tokyo: Taka Ishii Gallery, 2000. Eakin, Paul John. “Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story of the Story.” In True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern, edited by G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg, 63–82. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998. Eisenhauer, Jennifer. “A Visual Culture of Stigma: Critically Examining Representations of Mental Illness.” Art Education 61, no. 5 (September 2008): 13–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125. 2008.11518991. Elliman, Paul, and Nigel Shafran. “Nigel Shafran Interview with Paul Elliman Nigel Shafran.” In Fig-1: 50 Projects in 50 Weeks. London: Spafax Publishing in Association with Tate: Art Magazine, 2000. http://nigelshafran.com/interview-with-paul-elliman-fig-1/. Fahd, Cherine. “The Mother Thing in Pictures: From Antagonism to Affection.” Photographies 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 3–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2021.1986855. Friedewald, Boris. Women Photographers: From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman. Munich: Prestel, 2014.

Domestic selves 117 Fujii, Moeko. “Rinko Kawauchi: The Shape of Things.” Aperture, 2022. https://issues.aperture. org/article/2022/01/01/rinko-kawauchi-2. Hellman, Karen. The Window in Photographs. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hopper, Robert. Telephone Conversation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Hutchby, Ian. Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Iizawa, Kōtarō. “Kawauchi Rinko: Nichijō kara eien o tsukamitoru manazashi.” Nippon.com, 2020. www.nippon.com/ja/images/i00053/. Kaneyama, Takahiro. “Memory Mapping.” In While Leaves Are Falling, n.p. Tokyo: AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2017. ———. While Leaves Are Falling. Tokyo: AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2017. Kawauchi, Rinko. as it is. Tokyo: Torch Press, 2020. ———. Cui Cui. Tokyo: Foil, 2005. Lacohée, Hazel, and Ben Anderson. “Interacting with the Telephone.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 54, no. 5 (May 2001): 665–99. https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.2000.0439. Liss, Andrea. Feminist Art and the Maternal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Lowndes Vicente, Filipa, and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. “Ariella Aïsha Azoulay – Unlearning, An Interview with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.” Análise Social 55, no. 235 (June  30, 2020): 417–36. https://doi.org/10.31447/AS00032573.2020235.08. Miles, Melissa. “Introduction: Photography’s Publics.” In Photography’s and Its Publics, edited by Melissa Miles and Edward Welch, 1–17. London: Routledge, 2020. Miller, Nancy K. “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 537–48. https:// doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.2.537. Olin, Margaret. Touching Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Parr, Martin, and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History. Vol. 3. London: Phaidon Press, 2014. Photoworks. “Nigel Shafran in Conversation with Francis Hodgson,” April  20, 2017, https:// vimeo.com/214032418. Poletti, Anna. “Reading for Excess: Relational Autobiography, Affect and Popular Culture in Tarnation.” Life Writing 9, no. 2 (June  2012): 157–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2012. 667363. ———. Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book. New York: NYU Press, 2020. Renov, Michael. “Family Secrets: Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business and the (American) Jewish Autobiographical Film.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49, no. 1 (2008): 55–65. https://doi.org/10.1353/frm.0.0007. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Rinko Kawauchi Contemplates the Small Mysteries of Life.” SFMOMA, March  2016. www.sfmoma.org/watch/rinko-kawauchi-contemplatessmall-mysteries-life/. Shafran, Nigel. Dad’s Office. London: Self-Published, 1999. ———. Dark Rooms. London: MACK Books, 2016. ———. Flowers for ____________. London: Koenig Books, 2008. ———. Ruth on the Phone. Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2012. ———. Ruthbook. London: Self-Published, 1995. ———. The Well. Marseille and London: Loose Joints, 2022. Silverstone, Roger, and Eric Hirsch. Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Simon, Jane. “Contemplating Life: Rinko Kawauchi’s Autobiography of Seeing.” In Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, edited by Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty, 119–31. New York: Routledge, 2018.

118  Domestic selves Simon, Jane, and Mio Bryce. “The Labour of Light: Gender, Technology and the Domestic in the Photography of Nagashima Yurie and Kawauchi Rinko.” Women’s History Review 31, no. 4 (June 7, 2022): 645–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2021.1944351. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction.” In Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, 1–26. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Smyth, Diane. “Everyday Beauty with Nigel Shafran,” British Journal of Photography, May  3, 2018, https://www.1854.photography/2018/05/shafraninterview/ Spencer-Wood, Sophie, ed. Family: Photographers Photograph Their Families. London: Phaidon Press, 2005. Stanley, Liz. The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. ———. “From ‘Self-Made Women’ to ‘Women’s Made-Selves’? Audiot Selves, Simulation and Surveillance in the Rise of Public Woman.” In Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, edited by Tess Coslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield, 40–60. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. “On Auto/Biography in Sociology.” Sociology 27, no. 1 (February 1993): 41–52. https:// doi.org/10.1177/003803859302700105. Yoshimi, Shunya. “From Street Corner to Living Room: Domestication of TV Culture and National Time/Narrative.” Translated by Jodie Beck. Mechademia 9 (2014): 126–42. https:// doi.org/10.5749/mech.9.2014.0126.

5 Domestic display Proximity and the handheld

Introduction: couches and books In Moyra Davey’s essay “Notes on Photography  & Accident,” she describes how she prefers to experience images. She writes, “I shun the formal encounter via the institutions of galleries and museums and gravitate to books and journals.”1 My focus on the domestic, the everyday, and a critical mode of self-representation in interiors connects with the drive of Davey’s photographs and writing, as I’ve explored earlier in Chapter 3. Davey’s preference for the handheld experience of photographs through books and journals reflects her own art practice that gravitates towards the book as a key mode of circulation. In an interview in her book Speaker Receiver, Davey writes about the importance of proximity in experiencing her work: I don’t concern myself enough with the exhibition space: I  see my work contained principally within the frame of the image, the frame of the screen, the frame of the text, the book . . . it’s a kind of intimacy I imagine for the work, which is also why I like to have a couch in the viewing room.2 Having a couch in the gallery encourages a slower and more informal engagement with her artwork: a soft furnishing of the domestic world colliding with the hard walls of the gallery. In her published series of letters with the writer Ben Lerner, Davey further explains her approach to exhibition spaces and her use of the book form to disseminate her images: I probably do think of the book as a gallery, and of the films as books. For me the white cube gallery is the opposite of the book. I always feel slightly at odds with art spaces, whereas I am completely at home with the book and with filmmaking.3 Davey’s description of the book as a gallery and her films as books indicates that the link across both forms is, in part, about enabling a closeness between the viewer and her work. This chapter has a two-pronged approach. Firstly, it is interested in photographic artists who bring the domestic into the gallery space in very concrete ways, through sitespecific experiences that embody the intimate texture of everyday domesticity.4 Secondly, it also explores artists who explore the role of tactility and the handheld in their use of small-scale prints and photobooks. Many of the artists who I’ve already discussed in this book do both the above. That is, they bring the domestic into the gallery space as well as DOI: 10.4324/9781003089148-5

120  Domestic display explore the potential of the handheld in the way they circulate and publish their images. For example, Sian Bonnell, Motoyuki Daifu, Zoe Leonard, Rinko Kawauchi, Anna Fox, Nigel Shafran, Elina Brotherus, Catherine Opie, and Takahiro Kaneyama have all published photobooks that feature everyday domesticity. Thus, their work implicitly provides a broader context for a discussion of the domestic and the handheld photobook. This chapter, however, is explicitly interested in three artists who harness the domestic and the handheld in ways that explicitly foreground handling to encourage a close engagement with their work: Dayanita Singh, Simryn Gill, and Moyra Davey. I discuss works by Singh, Gill, and Davey that have created intimate spaces of experience – often associated with the domestic – alongside or within the realm of public or collective engagement in galleries and museums. I bring these artists together to suggest a relationship between modes of self-representation and domestic interiors and what I’m calling modes of intimate display that enable a proximate relationship between photographs and viewers. Before I discuss the work of Singh, Gill, and Davey, I first consider questions of format, display, and the role of domestic space in framing our experience of photography. I examine modern museum and galleries’ shift away from the domestic interior as their model towards more cavernous spaces.5 This provides background to my focus on handheld, small-scale formats and proximate encounters between photographs and viewers. These modes of display include the photobook as well as installations that draw on the habits, proximities, and furnishing of domestic space. This chapter focuses on artists who explore the potential of the handheld alongside their focus on everyday domestic life. I argue that Singh, Gill, and Davey build into their display and circulation of photographs a particular approach to correspondence and exchange.6 Correspondence itself has links to the domestic: epistolary practices such as diary or letter writing have traditionally been linked to bedrooms or other interior domestic spaces.7 Davey approaches correspondence through her “mailers,” Singh through her Sent a Letter (2008), and also through her encouragement for others to curate their own museum of her work in Museum Bhavan (2017). Similarly, Gill’s approach in Inland (2009) is to build a collaborative correspondence not only with the people whose domestic interiors she photographs during her road trip but also with visitors to the Inland exhibition who are able to rifle through her small photographs.8 Each of these artists uses the intimacy of the handheld as a structuring device, and their practices of correspondence create chains of proximity that are yoked to domestic practices and spaces. Cubes and closets Before I talk about the artists who bring together work that intersects in various ways with the topics of the handheld, the small-scale, and the domestic, I firstly unpack some background about how the space of the gallery and exhibition design have been positioned in relation to domestic space. Brian O’Doherty’s influential – and polemical – Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, was first published in 1976.9 It laid out how the gallery space, as a modernist “white cube,” operated as a detached, autonomous site and mode of display practice, one detached from the meaning and context of the art itself.10 O’Doherty observes that the white cube, with its autonomous display practice, adhered to the following rules: The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished

Domestic display 121 so that you click along clinically, or carpeted, so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, “to take on its own life.”11 Contemporary exhibition practices are much less restrained than those laid out and critiqued by O’Doherty in the 1970s. There has been an increasing focus on making gallery spaces more participatory for visitors, and much thoughtful work has been done in museum studies around gallery design that envisages a more complex relationship between exterior and interior than the type of display practice and its associated ideologies that O’Doherty was critiquing.12 Theorising since the 1990s around both participatory art practices and relational aesthetics has also propelled a shift towards exhibition practices that reject the idea of a “neutral” exhibition space.13 There are also broader links to be made, of course, to the shift from a more “objective” curator led experience of art galleries to the more subjective and participatory practices that have been increasingly common in exhibition design and curatorial practice.14 While O’Doherty’s intentionally polemical piece papers over the nuances of gallery design and exhibition practices in the 1970s, his description of the classic modernist gallery as “the limbo between studio and living room, where the conventions of both meet on a carefully neutralized ground,” [italics added]15 highlights the same tension that Charlotte Klonk untangles in her book Spaces of experience: art gallery interiors from 1800 to 2000.16 Klonk examines the friction between the exhibition as a space of personal contemplation and the exhibition as a public space of collective experience. She observes, “[m]useums are peculiarly situated on the border between the public and the private – the contemplation of art is supposed to be a rather intimate and personal act, while museums as institutions have a public responsibility.”17 Giuliano Bruno also broaches this tension in her book Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts where she examines “the intimate trajectory of public exhibition.”18 Bruno draws out how modes of experiencing cinema have influenced the “imaginative space of the museum, in as much as both are public-private affairs.”19 In both the space of the cinema and the museum installation, personal experiences, as Bruno points out, occur in the midst of a “community of strangers.”20 Writing in 2002, amidst his discussion on size and scale in photographic art, Geoffrey Batchen notes that “modern gallery spaces long ago abandoned the domestic interior as their model and have adopted instead the scale and antiseptic aesthetic of the showroom or the warehouse.”21 Reesa Greenberg makes the same observation earlier in 1996 when she notes the paradigm shift in displays of contemporary art away from “domestic-like structures to buildings associated with commerce and industry.”22 While this is certainly true in a general sense, there have also been pockets of display practice that draw on the potential of domestic space in a manner similar to that laid out in Klonk’s study of the role of interiority and intimacy in late 19th-century exhibition design. Josiah McElheny, for example, along with Tom Eccles and Lynne Cooke, curated an exhibition titled “If you lived here, you’d be home by now” at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art in 2012. This exhibition was curated and designed to promote “ways of engaging with artworks that are usually deemed personal. – via the inner worlds both of the domestic (often coded as feminine) and of the inner self.”23 The exhibition itself included a number of artworks from Marieluise Hessel’s own private collection, works that Hessel has lived with in her own private domestic space for many years, as well as contemporary artworks that engage with ideas about interiority. The curation of this exhibition aimed to bring the experience of viewing art in a private home into the experience of viewing art in a collective public space.24 Part of this

122  Domestic display exploration included constructing living spaces – a bedroom, living room, dining room, and study – and including a range of furniture in the rooms that gallery visitors were encouraged to use that had been explicitly designed with the function of looking at art.25 This approach, an open invitation to relax and linger, created for the gallery visitors a “self-conscious sense of how different it is to encounter an object resting, reclining, or idling.”26 An invitation to linger and contemplate taps into Davey’s preference for having a sofa in the art gallery, which I noted at the beginning of this chapter. Greenberg offers useful commentary on the slow disappearance of seating in galleries in the 1960s and 1970s and highlights how this seemingly inconsequential detail – the offer of a place to seat – indicated a “telling change in the interiors of the new [gallery] spaces.” She argues that: This absence of seating is an index of changed attitudes towards the gallery as a temporary “home” for art and its transformation into a place of and for work. Chairs or sofas in which one could contemplate art connote the comfort of a living room and a leisurely aesthetic experience. Standing to look, especially when reading extensive text, is more physically demanding, more work.27 Experiences and meanings of art objects change when we consider them in spaces outside of the gallery or museum, or when we look at them lying down or sitting as opposed to standing. This idea courses through this chapter’s focus on artists and photographers who bring the domestic into the gallery or museum, and who bring photographic art into hands and homes through the form of the photobook. I note echoes between discussions of exhibition spaces and the offer of a chair to engage with artworks and discussions of the conditions of looking offered by the handheld photobook. Greenberg, for example, in her discussion of the evolution of gallery spaces, argues that the elimination of chairs and seating for visitors in exhibition spaces “speaks of more than merely a changed spatial relationship between viewer and art. . . . Without the invitation extended by seating to linger in an assignation with art, the encounter becomes pedestrian.” She insists that “[s]eating is conducive to the prolonged gaze, its absence encourages a passing glance.”28 This emphasis on not just proximity to the art object but also the speed at which a viewer encounters it aligns with discussions of the photobook form. Thinking about the “deceleration imposed by the photobook”29 is key to the relationship between the handheld and the personal that is established in the work of Singh, Davey, and Gill. Notes on scale and photobooks Having given some background into the shifting role of the domestic in exhibition displays in galleries and museums, I  now turn to the question of photographic scale to examine the juncture between the handheld proximity of the photobook and the way artists such as Gill, Davey, and Singh bring together this proximity and tactility in their art works and exhibiting practices. Contemporary photographic art trends towards the large and the epic.30 When Geoffrey Batchen laments the disappearance of photographic intimacy between a photograph and a viewer – a disappearance enabled by the popularity of the large-scale print – he makes the important point that “modern gallery spaces long ago abandoned the domestic interior as their model and have adopted instead the scale and antiseptic aesthetic of the showroom or the warehouse.”31 The gallery as showroom with massive photographic

Domestic display 123 prints is also ridiculed by Davey who views it as “the art world at its most absurd: Mount Rushmore-scale pieties, dwarfed only by the deafening ka-ching of the cash register.”32 The influence of galleries is one factor that impacts the scale of imagery.33 The need for photographic art to be noticed amidst the epic scale of works displayed in large international art festivals is another reason for the tendency for photographic art to be large. And, of course, changes in photographic printing technologies, which have made printing larger sizes easier, have facilitated the shift towards large-scale photographic artworks.34 While photographs are reproducible to various sizes, “in actuality they usually come to us with quite particular dimensions, for quite particular reasons (technical, commercial, aesthetic).”35 Photography’s relationship to scale is, as Andrew Fisher reminds us, a key element of the “broader technical, material and phenomenological condition of all encounters with photographs, tactile and kinaesthetic as well as visual.”36 A photograph can be printed at various scales or sizes, but the camera also sets up other scaled relations through different lenses and proximities or distances between the camera and subject. A small object may be photographed in close-up and result in an immense image, or a huge building may be photographed at a great distance to appear small scale. “Photography’s various scales,” Fisher observes, “have always been crucial in combining to give photographic acts, modes of perception, and uses their setting and sense.”37 And yet, they are often not part of the conversation. Often, particular dimensions of photographs have to do with commercial imperatives and the hustle of the art market, although of course specific works and artists do employ large-scale prints thoughtfully. Davey, for example, highlights Hannah Wilke’s Intra-Venus series with its enormous photographs of the effects of cancer treatment on Wilke’s own body as “one of the rare instances where large-scale photography seems to be justified.”38 Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman make a case that Edward Burtynsky’s and Andreas Gursky’s “big pictures are attempts to map the big picture,” by using massive scale to force viewers to confront the immense effect of globalisation.39 And Michael Fried – in relation to the work of Jeff Wall and others – is insistent that the emergence of tableau-sized photographs is linked to aspirations to draw on the “beholder-addressing significance of paintings.”40 While the above examples speak to the desire to claim a viewer’s attention through large-scale photographs in galleries, a different mode of attention is asked for by artists who are drawn towards the book form as a means for a more intimate, hands-on experience of photography beyond the walls of the museum or art gallery. Photobooks, like large-scale photographs, are of course not immune to the commerce of the art world; they are collectible objects that are part of the speculative art market. However, their scale may be less driven by the concerns of the gallery showroom. Holding a book in one’s hands is a much more intimate and personal experience than viewing photographs in galleries and museums. In an editorial titled “Why the ‘Photobook Phenomenon’ Is More than Just a Fad,” Clément Chéroux points out that in an exhibition “the photograph is looked at mostly vertically, while in the book, held in one’s hands, placed on a table or on one’s lap, the photograph tends to be appreciated horizontally.”41 The mode of viewing a photobook also involves the direct physical act of turning pages, imposing a “deceleration” in consuming images, and the viewer has the potential to return to the book in different contexts not limited to the opening hours and spaces of the gallery. The photobook is, as Chéroux declares, “a complex and coherent container.”42

124  Domestic display Dayanita Singh: books, museums, interiors Dayanita Singh (b. 1961, India) has a long-standing interest in the photobook form and modes of exhibiting her work, which stray from the clinical and instead embrace the contemplative. She describes herself as “a bookmaker working with photography.”43 In 2022, Singh was awarded the prestigious Hasselblad Award in recognition of her achievements in the realm of photographic art.44 In 2013, she represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. During her career, Singh has quietly worked away, publishing 13 photobooks. Singh’s successful career as a photographer and book artist began as a photojournalist, which she quickly diverted away from to move towards more flexible modes of photographic storytelling. Singh felt uncomfortable with photojournalism, feeling it was “earning a living from the distress of others.”45 She also found the genre limiting “because many prescribed topics were only meant to confirm existing clichés about India.”46 Instead, Singh shifted focus and chose instead to creating portraits of families and empty spaces.47 Alice Powers situates Singh’s photographs as having an “intersubjective aesthetic” built upon long-term ethical engagement with her photographic subjects, one marked by “intimacy, depth and duration.”48 This approach is clear, for example, in Singh’s much celebrated project and photobook published in 2001, Myself, Mona Ahmed.49 This book was the result of a decade-long collaboration between Singh and Mona Ahmed, who identified as a hijira and lived between genders.50 As the title indicates, this project is deeply invested in the intersubjective connection between Sing and Ahmed, and the book is composed of photography by Singh and text by Ahmed compiled from her long emails that pieced together her life story. A  subsequent photobook, published in 2003, Privacy, shifted focus to photographing the domestic interiors of Singh’s upper-middle-class friends and family.51 Singh describes this shift to photographing middle- and upper-class families in their homes, a world which she understood best, being born into it and one to which I  belonged, for better or for worse. I also realised how seldom this class is documented in India. . . . I suppose you could call it a personal document of the world to which I belong – with all the implications of photographing that which one is closest to.52 Both Myself, Mona Ahmed and Privacy, as Powers suggests, have a “similar dedication to representing her subjects as they wish while simultaneously expressing something essential about Singh’s own subjectivity.”53 The way Singh describes herself in relation to her images is clearly intersubjective and relational: she sees herself in her subjects she is photographing. For example, she comments on how she pictures herself in several photographs where her own figure doesn’t appear in a literal sense, yet she still sees herself in the figures represented: Mona and myself – the finger pointing is my mother and as I am sure I said to you, the girl on the bed is who I sometimes am, the jumping girl is who I could have been and the lady in the sari is who I hope to be. (Pheroza Vakeel, swimming instructor at 84)54 Relationality is key to Singh’s practice. Connections between her subjects and herself, between and across individual photographs and series, and between photography’s

Domestic display 125 meaning and its mode of circulation are all crucial components of her method. Kajri Jain emphasises various inseparable aspects that are key to Singh’s approach: aesthetic experience; multiple yet overlapping economies of value and efficacy; technologies of display and circulation; performance and ritual as the making, remaking and unmaking of selves; and, perhaps above all, the sociality of images and objects in all of their aspects.55 Part of this relationality, the sociality of photography, is forged in and through domestic spaces, particularly in her approach to documenting families across multiple generations, with Singh’s “stays in their homes akin to artist residencies where she reciprocates their gift of hospitality with a gift of images. These then turn into permanent domestic exhibitions and family archives.”56 It is important to note that these family portraits are valued deeply by Singh. While they sit outside the value system of the commercial art world, the relationships they communicate and their lives in domestic spaces carry meaning and value beyond the formal authority of the museum or gallery. As Singh declares, “If at the end of my life there are three hundred family portraits hanging in three hundred Indian homes that, to me, is exhibition enough.”57 Singh’s photographs are carefully produced and formally interesting in terms of content. Some of this content is gathered during travels with friends, as in the seven-volume series of travel diaries Sent a Letter (2008); sometimes it is focused on pieces of furniture, as in the book Chairs (2005); and sometimes on paper archives, as in File Room (2013).58 However, for Singh, the issue of how photographs circulate and the conditions in which they are received and viewed is just as important to photography as the content of a photograph.59 Singh articulates very clearly that her work is “not about what is in the image.”60 Rather than situating single photographs as finished pieces, Singh uses her photographs as building blocks to make new objects, which subsequently travel into museums, but also homes and bookshops. Singh’s book objects/photo-architectures Singh questions “Why should photography be this thing stuck on the wall?”61 She goes on to articulate her curiosity about a “third space,” one that is not limited by the restrictions of the gallery/museum or the publishing house. This third space is in a home where, as she describes, “I haven’t become a book in your bookshelf, I’m not a print on your wall,” but rather, the “artwork is alive in your house.”62 Elsewhere Singh describes, I do feel that when a work goes into a museum setting, it is as though it is being held hostage by the museum, and I can’t access it, I can’t move things, I can’t rearrange things. I think this feeling comes from years of working within that structure, and not being able to pin it down, but always being uncomfortable with it. That’s why the preference for my books with Steidl.63 Singh’s emphasis on relationality and connection, her use of the photobook form, and her development of “photo-architectures” – wooden structures or cases that allow for resequencing and that sometimes fold open like large-scale book pages – challenge and creatively explore the tension between private and public in exhibition spaces. Her practice

126  Domestic display is constantly expanding how we experience museums and collections of photographs. While Singh does – regularly – exhibit in gallery or museum spaces, her emphasis is on making books, often in collaboration with Gerhard Steidl.64 Singh describes the book form as “very intimate” and insists that “it’s the best way to look at photography. . . . I cannot bear the glass that comes between the print and me. So I love the book, I love that you can handle it.”65 Increasingly, Singh uses exhibitions to display her books rather than prints. In the case of her book-object File Room (2013), for example, Singh developed a wooden frame structure which the book File Room can slide in and out of, which means the book can sit on the wall as though framed but it can also be taken out and handled.66 Singh’s books are always, Kajri Jain argues, “an invitation to handle, feel, encounter, and exchange, as much as to look, read, and think.”67 While Singh uses the book form to enable a close relationship between the viewer and the images, she also intentionally creates proximity between her images, “proximity sparking new connections.”68 As Claire Raymond observes: Her [Singh’s] point in creating these portable museums for her work is to disrupt the gallery or museum experience so that the viewer and the image are never in a one-toone correspondence; that is, the viewer never gazes at a single image without awareness of its relationship to many other images.69 Along with bringing her books onto museum walls, Singh also brings furniture into exhibition spaces. In the case of Museum of Shedding (2016), furniture forms an integral part of the artwork: there are wooden pieces to store and display prints, but some are functional as wooden furniture to sit or lie upon: a bench, a bed, a desk, and stools. Christophe Gallois describes, for example, how “domestic space is at the heart of the wooden elements that make up Museum of Shedding.”70 He suggests that by bringing domestic space into conversation with the exhibition form, Museum of Shedding “holds two closely related facets: a private (the home) and a public (the museum) realm, both of which can be arranged in different ways.”71 Through the inclusion of wooden furniture, Singh brings elements of home into the museum. She states, “I  built it for myself, so I would be able to live inside it.”72 Singh’s 2017 small book museum, Museum Bhavan again experimented with alternative modes of exhibiting and circulating her photographs (see Figure  5.1).73 The word bhavan can refer to a large house or building, making this project of Singh’s both “museum and house in one.”74 Aveek Sen translates Museum Bhavan slightly differently, as “Mansion of Museums.”75 Singh’s Museum Bhavan contains nine individual accordion books that sit within a small clamshell box (that is, a box that doesn’t have a separate lid, but opens and closes as a single structure). Each of the accordion books folds out to a distance of over two metres; thus, each book can create a long paper gallery (or museum) of photographs. Singh describes these books as “pocket museums,” and measuring only 9 × 13.7 cm, they do indeed fit into a pocket. While they can be exhibited in their open form, they also – as individual books to be held in the hand – are suggestive of the experience of looking through small family albums. The black-and-white photographs in Museum Bhavan are collated from across Singh’s career. Each book is its own miniature museum. Museum Bhavan contains the following individual titles: Godrej Museum, Museum of Men, Little Ladies Museum, Museum of Photography, Museum of Furniture, Printing Press Museum, Ongoing Museum, Museum of Machines, and Museum of Vitrines.

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Figure 5.1 Photograph of Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan exhibited on a kitchen table in a Sydney home, 2022, © Jane Simon, courtesy of the author

Craft traditions are key to Singh’s practice. She uses leatherwork, woodwork, and fabric in her photo-architectures.76 These carefully used materials play a central role in the framing, circulation, and reception of her photographs.77 The fabric that covers the boxes of Museum Bhavan, for example, is called achaara and is a fabric that is used as an underlayer beneath other materials during the block printing process.78 This means that Museum Bhavan straddles the realm of the unique (in that each box is different because the ink and pattern are distinct across the different fabrics used to cover the boxes) while also being mass-produced (in that there were 3,000 published copies of Museum Bhavan).79 The use of achaara is suggestive of the printing process (which is relevant to both photography and book making) and also the idea of the trace or the imprint.80 The Museum Bhavan series of books had an earlier life in another project also titled Museum Bhavan, this time nine wooden structures (each a “museum”). Each of these movable wooden structures with hinged panels that can open out a bit like a book is tall, mobile, and comes with benches, stools, and tables. The images can be moved around into different combinations, and the structures can also work as storage containers. This version of Museum Bhavan brings together, as Singh describes, “display and storage, inside and outside, image and structure.”81 While Singh had envisaged that these structures would eventually live as a complete set inside her own apartment, museums and art institutions began to collect them. Singh’s response to this, and out of disappointment that the pieces wouldn’t live together as a complete set, was to construct the book version of Museum Bhavan (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2). This version allowed the museums to continue to be viewed as part of a complete set.

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Figure 5.2 Photograph of Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan exhibited on a kitchen table in a Sydney home, 2022, © Jane Simon, courtesy of the author.

In a 2018 radio interview, Singh suggests that with Museum Bhavan, she is ultimately calling on the viewer to participate in its circulation and display: I’m inviting you – you – to be the curator of my work. And certainly, when you have an exhibition of my work in your house it’s a great privilege for me. It’s a privilege to be in a museum, but it’s also a privilege to be in a domestic space.82 In this brief comment, Singh brings together multiple threads woven into this chapter: art that moves into homes and a rearticulation of the value of domestic space as a site for experiencing photography. Jain describes Singh’s use of books, postcards, and portable museum displays as a “democratizing release of images from the gallery into domestic spaces.”83 She goes on to argue: All this constitutes an explicit engagement, in the tradition of conceptualism, with the restricted, impersonal, and class-based conditions of viewing in the gallery space. But this is not just a reactive immanent critique of the gallery space: it is equally informed by seeing printed images in people’s homes.84 Singh’s approach constitutes a focused attempt to challenge the constraints of the gallery exhibition space. It also recalibrates the value attached to photography as it lives in domestic spaces and home (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2).

Domestic display 129 Singh intentionally dismantles boundaries between museums and homes and between herself as a photographic artist and as a curator. Singh is always making museums through her books and bringing herself into the space between artist, gallerist, and viewer in very material ways. Singh’s physical presence is often part of her gallery exhibition. Sometimes, for example, she uses a wooden book-cart to sell her photobooks at openings, disrupting the distance between artist and viewer or artist and purchaser.85 To give another example, when exhibiting Museum of Chance, a book that has 44 unique covers, each with their own pairing of photographs, the book was available for sale, but only at exhibitions that Singh held at various locations around the world. At these exhibitions, Singh would sit at a table and sell books to collectors, sitting across from them in dialogue, stamping each book, and placing it into a tote bag for the new owner.86 Here, Singh’s intention was, as Simrat Dugal summarises, to “create an intimate encounter in which every element – from the book-object to the stamping, the bags, and the furniture – was infused with a specific trace or memory of the atmosphere of the event and exchange.”87 Singh positions herself at the crossroads of her art, its display, and its commerce. Her direct involvement in the sale of her books and related objects at her exhibitions effectively muddles the idea of a clear distinction between art and its commerce.88 While Singh plays an active role in the distribution of her books, she also positions her own self as inseparable from her artworks. For example, in a performance she calls My Life as a Museum (2018), Singh wears a long sleeveless jacket that has been designed and made with nine pockets with a place for each of the books that make up Museum Bhavan (see Figure  5.3). On the back of the jacket, the words “my life as a museum” have been embroidered in capital letters. Wearing the jacket “turns the wearer into a mobile museum. The jacket becomes the storage, and the person becomes the display (when the books are unfurled and stretched with both hands, the wearer becomes a human vitrine).”89 Singh’s use of “my” in My Life as a Museum needs to be understood within her broader philosophy about herself in relation to what and how she photographs and communicates through her photobooks and exhibitions: “You see, it’s not me,”. . . . “It’s always in conversation with someone.”90 At the same time, Singh also aligns her own life very closely with the life of her artworks: “I think of myself as a living artist and the work ends when I end. So, these two kinds of life have to remain joined together.”91 Small interior epiphanies: Simryn Gill Simryn Gill (b. 1959 Singapore) is an artist who uses a range of media and sees photography as just one element of her art practice.92 Gill provides the following rationale for this promiscuous approach to form: “I think medium is beside the point. I’m quite sure I do the same thing in different materials. I’m not interested in iconic images, but in how we are informed through detail.”93 Gill was born in Singapore, raised in Malaysia, and spent many years living and moving between Sydney, Australia, and Port Dickson, Malaysia. Gill’s work has been much celebrated, her work is in major museums collections, and her work was exhibited in the Australian Pavilion at part of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.94 While Gill works with writing, sculpture, printmaking, and photography, my focus on her work in this chapter is primarily concerned with her photographic works. My discussion centres around her 2009 series Inland and also considers her framing of domestic interiors in the photographic series Dalam (2001), Power Stations (2004), and Distance (2003).

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Figure 5.3 Emilia Hesse/Steidl, Dayanita Singh wearing her “Pocket Museum,” 2021, original in colour © Emilia Hesse/Steidl Publishers courtesy Emilia Hesse/Steidl Publisher

Much of the critical literature on Gill’s practice is marked by comparative phrases that suggest her work is difficult to pin down. For example, in a recent artist’s profile, Anna Johnson describes Gill’s art as “precise, but anti-clinical” and Ray Langenbach describes her work as “playful and humorous, but also probing and disturbing.”95 Her work is often read as tackling issues around colonialism, expansion, and inheritance.96 Equally, critics have noted her focus on the ambiguous space of the domestic.97 Gill describes her own practice as driven by the search for what she calls “small epiphanies” found in the mundane and the everyday.98 Gill’s series Dalam (2001) consists of 260 colour photographs printed to a small size of 23.5 × 23.5 cm. This series documents the interior space of Malaysian homes, the result of Gill knocking on strangers’ doors over a two-month period and asking if she could come inside to photograph their living rooms.99 The title “Dalam” has various overlapping meanings: Lilian Chee notes that it means variously “ ‘inside’, ‘within’, ‘interior’,

Domestic display 131 ‘deep’, ‘profound’, and by extension, ‘intimate’ and ‘rooted’.” Leon Goh translates it as “deep” or “underneath the surface.”101 Chee observes that Dalam “draws on the boundaries between not just inside and outside but emphasizes relationality and separation.”102 The interiors contain no human subjects, but they are full of objects, textures, and colours that speak to a range of diverse households and occupants. When Dalam is exhibited, the 260 photographs are displayed on the wall in grids. Because the size of the prints is quite small, each measuring 23.5 × 23.5 cm, the viewer needs to be relatively proximate to the photographs to observe detail. The combination of the sheer number of images and the need to stand close to the photographs to see them properly invokes “a kind of intrusion into the private realm.”103 The viewer literally peers inside the photographs of living rooms. The collation of these 260 photographs presents, “a broad yet uncannily intimate survey of Malaysia – a nation of disparate ethnicities, religions, ideologies and allegiances and the various subjectivities that make up the multicultural mosaic.”104 Each living room photograph in Dalam is empty of people but full of colour, objects, and domestic textures that range from luxurious to kitsch: 100

[T]he viewer comes across brocade curtains, plastic flowers, countless mountain-andlake landscapes, religious altars, Bollywood posters, cabinets filled with never used china, repetitive sofa sets, expensive marble and cheap linoleum floors, plain or florid surfaces, neutral or gaudy colour scheme.105 In one of the images, the sunlight catches on a red plastic washing basket and a painting of dolphins leaping out of the water sits above a cherry wooden table and chairs. Fake flowers hang on the wall. In another, school bags lean against surfaces, piles of books lean against each other, and items are crammed into shelves. In another photograph from the series, there is hardly any clutter, the surfaces are shiny and immaculate, and the furniture has decorative gold edges. Across the expanse of 260 photographs, these details forge a tapestry of tastes, wealth, and status. Each image is its own world, but the series needs to be understood collectively: the meaning emerges as much from the relationship between – and differences among – the images as it does from any singular photograph. In this way, Gill’s focus on the relationality between the images is similar to Singh’s refusal to elevate the single image in her books and installations. In Dalam, Chee argues, “the domestic sphere is revivified as modernism’s anxious and subversive phantom.”106 Centring attention on the domestic realm and its many kitsch and ornamental objects, and mundane daily matter (children’s toys, books, tablecloths, cushions, and so on). Dalam speaks back to a version of avant-gardism that positions the domestic as antithetical to the realm of art. While Dalam does deploy the conventions of the architectural interior photograph, it also challenges “any nostalgic or essentialized perceptions of home.” Rather, the pristine interior is “stained by domesticities cramped with Technicolor kitsch objects . . . the cult of ornamentations.”107 While the photographs in Dalam are colour prints, for Power station (2004), Gill presents her own family home in Port Dickson, Malaysia, in black and white. There are 13 of these domestic interior black-and-white panoramic images, each paired with a colour panoramic image of the interior of a power station, which is adjacent to the family home.108 Here, familiar domestic spaces and objects are juxtaposed with the large colourful pipes and shapes of the industrial power station. I’m reminded here of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s grids of black-and-white photographs of industrial structures, such as

132  Domestic display gasworks, water towers, and blast furnaces.109 Like the Becher’s, Gill finds odd beauty in the industrial power station, but it is notable that Gill takes her viewers inside the power station; it is the unseen interiors here that are her focus. The combination of industrial interiors with domestic interiors positions both as strange and mundane; both fuel the everyday world. Handheld interiors: Inland Like Dalam, although at a less epic scale, Gill’s Inland (2009) includes photographs of domestic interiors of other people’s homes that Gill has visited (see Figure 5.4). This time the photographs were collected during a road trip through New South Wales and South Australia. During this trip, Gill took photographs of 80 living rooms in homes which – again like Dalam – included a cross section of class and cultural background, this time in regional Australia.110 Gill explains of this process: [w]hen I asked people if I could photograph their homes, I described what I was doing as “trying to photograph the interior through interiors”. So perhaps the pictures of the insides of homes and the pictures of the out-there, the landscape, if you like, are both versions of interiors.111 Along with these layered images of interiors, Gill also made tiny cibachromes of rocks and pebbles she collected during the road trip, as well as black-and-white photographs

Figure 5.4 Simryn Gill, Selection from Inland, 2009, original in colour, © Simryn Gill, courtesy the artist

Domestic display 133 of cracked earth, horizons, and other exterior views. Some of these exterior photographs were taken with formal composition, and others were made without looking through the camera lens. The photographs of the rocks and stones were photographed in a studio, and the images feature Gill’s hands holding the rocks. These three sets of photographs (162 images in total) of domestic interiors, rocks and stones, and exterior landscapes correspond, as Naomi Cass observes in her catalogue essay for the exhibition of Inland, with “different ways of knowing the world through the camera: looking through the lens, not looking through the lens and a studio set-up.”112 Gill’s exhibition of Inland (2009) included a table and a chair and the set of photographs in small piles (see Figure  5.4).113 There is, as Leon Goh notes in his exhibition review, “an overt materiality to how this series is presented.”114 Gill printed the square-format photographs at a small handheld scale of 13 × 13 cm and presented them unframed on the top of the table. Visitors were able to touch and rifle through the small piles of photographs (albeit wearing white gloves).115 Gill’s reasoning for exhibiting in this format was as follows: When I was looking at initial test prints of the photos, picking them up, putting them down, shuffling, arranging, I realised that that was how I wanted them to be seen, with that same physical proximity, the same access, and also that tenderness.116 This resonates with Singh’s reasoning for the small scale of many of her photographs as stemming from her use of contact prints: what is “handled, pored-over, stored.”117 The small size of the images, as well as their casual installation in piles on a table top, invited slow absorption. Rather than wandering past images on a wall, here visitors could be stilled by handling and spending time with each pile: sifting, comparing, laying out, putting back into piles, perhaps re-ordered. This mode of installation is a far cry from the mammoth prints that Geoffrey Batchen critiques in his discussion of photography and scale. Instead, in Inland, Gill calls for “slow interactive looking,” a mode Daniel Palmer notes is more akin to doing archival research or being immersed in a book.118 The slowness of the looking is encouraged not only by the piles of photographs but also by the inclusion of a seat and a table: the re-introduction of seating that, as I discussed earlier in the chapter, has increasingly been removed from gallery spaces. The type of slow engagement that Gill provides the conditions for in Inland has also been present in her other works.119 In reference to Dalam and Power Station, Chee notes that the two series ask for a vision from audiences that is “intrusive and unhurried.”120 Kevin Chua, to give another example, points out that Gill’s series of photographs titled Forest (1996–1998) lulls the viewer into a kind of slow absorption.121 In Forest (1996– 1998), Gill sliced text from books, wove them amongst tropical plants, and then photographed the scenes.122 This series produces a strange sense of proximity and distance at the same time: the proximity of leaning in close to read the small lines of texts interspersed amongst trunks and trees, and also the distance of stepping back to absorb the large-scale photographs.123 Gill’s books Like both Singh and Davey, books have played a key role in Gill’s art practice. While Gill works across a range of media, books have consistently remained important to her art practice, and she has published a number of photobooks.124 She collaborates closely on

134  Domestic display the design of her exhibition catalogues.125 She has published her own books and, in 2019, started a small art press called Stolon Press in Sydney in collaboration with a writer, Tom Melick.126 Stolon Press has published some of Gill’s work, but also the work of others, using photocopiers and other do-it-yourself materials. One book published by Stolon Press is called Silver Street, a collaboration between Gill and Melick based on a collection of magnolia petals collected from a street in Marrickville and photocopied.127 The photocopier picks up the creases and shapes from the fleshy petals, translating them to blackand-white shapes on paper to be sold in a small edition of 40 with staples for binding. While Dalam and Inland involved photographing the domestic interiors of other people’s homes, for Distance (2003), a small photobook in an edition of five, Gill trained her gaze and camera closely on her own interior space in her Marrickville home in Sydney, Australia. Distance is a small-scale accordion-style book that brings Gill’s own domestic interior into the intimate space of the book.128 This project began as an attempt to meticulously document her own domestic interior for her sister in Malaysia and a close friend in Finland who had never visited Gill’s Sydney home. Gill took 135 photographs of her home from the spaces in which she would talk to her sister and friend.129 Distance came out of this attempt to capture the experience of being inside Gill’s home, but for Gill, “the final result is almost like an incoherence, it’s too close, there is too much information, and no cracks for the imagination and one’s own projections to slip in and take over.”130 Hence the title Distance can be read as referring to the physical distance between Gill and her sister and friend, but also the gap – or distance – between the experience of a place and its photographic representation, no matter how comprehensively one tries to capture it. Like the accordion book museums in Singh’s Museum Bhavan, Distance folds out and can be displayed – stretched open – at variable expanses depending on how tightly the folds are positioned. There is a lack of preciousness about the use of books in Gill’s practice. Pre-existing books are sometimes used as the material to make new objects, new materials.131 In Pearl (1999–), Gill invites someone she knows to select a book. Gill then transforms the books, removing the pages and using the paper to create a string of paper pearls, a new object which she then returns to the original book owner, who sometimes offers a photograph of the pearls in exchange.132 Gill describes this series as driven by “a logic that doesn’t incorporate galleries, museums or even display.” She continues that this is connected to, how I often think about looking at photographs -in their “objectness” as things you put away in drawers and boxes, and their very private qualities, which I love. So that was the first line of thinking that led me to my Pearls. But there is also a kind of violence in the beads, in the dismembering of books and remaking them to be worn like trophies, or fetishes.133 This production of small handheld objects, paper pearls, creates a mode of circulating art that circumvents the museum or gallery in a similar way to Singh’s books. It reflects Gill’s impetus to find ways for her work to move beyond the art circuit. Folds, tape, the letterbox and the gallery: Moyra Davey’s mailers Like Gill, paper is important to Moyra Davey (b.1958, Canada). She regularly photographs paper scraps of notes and tickets.134 At other times, she photographs pages of books, stacks of paper diaries, and envelopes. She admits, in a conversation with Matthew

Domestic display 135 Witkovsky “I love paper.” With a nod to this love of the material photograph, and her resistance to the “kid-gloves approach” to art, since 2007, Davey has taken to printing her photographs and then folding them into a mail-out/aerogramme with address written and stamps and tape added directly onto the folded photograph. These are then mailed to friends or to a gallery or museum and often exhibited directly on the wall in large groups or grids. Davey’s mailers have a similar emphasis on correspondence as with Singh’s Sent a Letter, which arose out of individual photo diaries Singh made and sent to her friends, and also with Gill’s work with postcards and stamps.136 Davey’s practice of “turning a photograph into a letter, into a kind of aerogram, a giant postcard”137 ensures that the photographs have been held – indeed handled – by many hands before they land on the gallery wall. The mailers bear the creases of being handled by Davey, by the postal workers, by the recipients, and then again by Davey as she returns them to the original flatness of paper and exhibits them. The mailers are then exhibited, and their history of being folded, taped, stamped, and written on becomes part of the material image. As Dalie Giroux describes: 135

[Davey’s] use of ‘snail mail’ is deliberate. The mail system, as a process, leaves traces of interaction: the tape tears, postal ink smudges, folds and creases become soiled. As an object, the mailed photograph preserves and communicates interactions between people and circumstances, highlighting how divorced communication has become from human contact in the digital age.138 The process of producing the mailers, Davey says, is about “the accretion of time and wear on the object, returning the photograph to its status as paper .  .  . and the idea of exchange with a specific person.”139 Letters are typically written with an individual recipient, not a wide audience, in mind. Using the postal service as a mechanism to exchange art is, of course, not new.140 Mail art or postal art has a long and rich history.141 However, what Davey is doing is unique in terms of how her mailers bring together her interest in the materiality – the objectness – of photography, the overlaps between writing and photography, and her discomfort with some of the mechanisms of the art market. Each of Davey’s mailers marks a moment of exchange, of relationality forged through the material photograph passing hands. “I like containment, I  like intimacy with the object,” Davey notes.142 Davey’s mailers involve both of these aspects. Davey’s re-use or recontextualising of her own photographs (where she, for example, takes photographs from earlier series and then deploys them as mailers, sometimes choosing to rephotograph already existing photographs) has resonance with Singh’s own approach to re-using her images in new contexts creating new relationships between and across images. Again, with this approach of Davey and Singh, there is a lack of concern for the singular image or wall print, which resonates with Gill’s emphasis on seriality and her disinterest in singular iconic images. For example, Davey redeploys black-and-white photographs from her Empties series (1996–2000), consisting of 55 black-and-white photographs of empty whisky bottles in Davey’s home, as a book published in 2013.143 Empties also has a new reiteration as a set of mailers (2017), which were subsequently exhibited, pinned directly to the wall in a grid with each photograph bearing the markings of its travels: ink, postage stamps, address stickers, and tape (see Figure 5.5). The Empties series, which I mentioned briefly in Chapter  3, consists of photographs Davey has taken of each bottle of whisky once

136  Domestic display

Figure 5.5 Moyra Davey, Detail from Empties, 2017, 55 archival inkjet prints on epson enhanced matte paper, aluminium tape, postage, ink Each 30.5 × 45.7  cm, overall dimensions 155 × 508 cm (variable), courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

the last drop has been poured. This is drinking that happens at home over a five-year period, and the bottles appear on top of tables, in front of fridges, firmly ensconced in the domestic. In response to receiving one of Davey’s mailed photographs, Ben Lerner comments on how this format has resonance because of how it crosses over between “looking and touching.”144 The mailer that Lerner has received from Davey is constructed from a photograph that Davey has taken in an archive of a torn envelope that housed a letter from Alice B. Toklas written to Mercedes de Acosta. Lerner describes, how ones must touch the photos, to unfold it (and the creases bear witness to that tactile history). . . . I opened an image of an opened enveloped, my hand thereby in implied relation to the phantom hand of the original recipient.145 Davey’s response to Lerner again brings up hands, and her reasoning for the mailers: You conjure the image of hands through time: Alice’s, Mercedes’s mine, yours . . . and the envelope within an envelope that I  mailed to you. My hand folding the photo paper is a big part of why I still make photographs. At a certain point I’d reached my

Domestic display 137 limit with photography and wanted to write and work with the moving image. I came back to it in 2009 via the folded, mailed photograph because it allowed for a “handson,” object-oriented treatment of the image and a way to admit subjects that were more inadvertent.146 This lack of preciousness around the material object is also seen in Davey’s practice of cutting up books she is reading so that they are easier to carry and handle. Like Gill, Davey will slice into a book: they are not objects too precious to change. Davey photographed these books and then used that photograph as a mailer to her friend Alison Strayer, in Cut Books (2013) (see Figure 5.6). In this photographic object, Davey’s small, neat handwriting of Strayer’s address sits at the bottom right corner of the photograph of a small number of cut books, some with new paper covering held upright between two bookends near a window frame. Three coloured stamps and the tabs of green tape that held the photograph’s folds in place remain as marks of the photograph’s travels between the United States and France. The chains of handling across the cut books, their reproduction in a photograph, and their subsequent use as a mailer are relevant for this chapter, which turns its focus away from self-representation and the domestic interior within images and towards the role of domestic display and intimate handheld experiences with photographs. While the viewer in a gallery does not get to handle these photographic objects, the very fact that they have folds, tape, and stamps reveals their history of being handled. It is hard to look at the mailers without thinking of all the ways they have been handled in a world outside of the gallery.

Figure 5.6 Moyra Davey, Cut Books, 2014, C-print with tape, postage, ink (original in colour), courtesy the artist.

138  Domestic display Conclusion: seeking hands Singh, Gill, and Davey are all invested – each in their own unique way – in providing contexts for looking at photographs in ways that enable slow contemplation and handheld moments of proximity. I  argue that these artists use the handheld and the photobook to explore the tension between individual contemplation and relationality. That is, they each create the space for a viewer to have a hands-on, intimate connection with the artwork, but this is also about exchange and connection. While the emphasis on slow contemplation and the handheld in the work of Singh, Gill, and Davey has been observed in their work, I highlight here the generative function of reading these three artists alongside each other through their links to the domestic. Thinking about the work of these three artists against the backdrop of the relationship between domestic space and the gallery or museum, debates about photographic scale, and the genre of the photobook provides context for understanding the ways in which Singh, Gill, and Davey each approach photographic representation and display. In her reading of Gill’s work, Chee suggests Gill “reactivates a mobile feminist subjectivity.”147 Gill does this, she argues, by bringing together the space of the domestic with the space of the exhibition and by probing the theme of the “domestic residue” that “furtively engages geographical, historical, material and relational boundaries of the home and the self – to articulate a middle-ground version of feminist mobility.”148 There is a similar emphasis on movement and mobility in Singh’s photographs that are designed to move, to travel and take “nomadic journeys that are in their very nature, and to seek encounters and relationships with other images and people through books, exhibitions, cabinets, shop windows, postcard, garments, cushions, diaries, performances, more hands.”149 The seeking of hands to hold photographs is also, of course, present in Davey’s mailers, which have their own journey through the post before they land on a gallery wall. Lerner aptly describes this as Davey’s hands being “on both sides of the image” or as “shooting the image from behind the lens and then also handling it, launching it into circulation.”150 Similarly, Gill’s installation of Inland seeks the hands of the viewer, extending her own rifling through the images, in the experience of gallery visitors who are asked to do the same. Thus, while Singh, Gill, and Davey each engage with the domestic in theme and practice, they also bring the domestic into the public galleries of museums and produce artworks and books that travel into the viewer’s own domestic spaces. Each of these three artists place value on the role of images and practices that emerge from the domestic. “I really love things that finish up in domestic spaces,” says Gill. She continues “and how they grow and shrink and break and get stained and thrown away or become precious. Putting your own patina on the things that you own is like an act of love.”151 Singh, in a connected vein, speaks about her joy at her photo objects and books entering other people’s domestic spaces and sees the domestic as a privileged space for her photographs to live. Davey’s attraction to books and mailers has a similar drive, one that values the handheld, the intimate exchange through photographic paper, and the possibilities of the domestic. The emphasis in this chapter on the material object and the handheld is not a refusal of the digital. Indeed, the profusion of photographs through social media is partly what has provided the necessary conditions for the constraints of the photobook to thrive.152 While writing this chapter, I see on Instagram that Davey has received Gill’s most recent book Clearing.153 In this post, Davey photographs the accordion book folded out amidst Davey’s

Domestic display 139 own furniture and belongings. Davey also includes a video of herself leafing through the book, her hands slowly turning the pages. The Instagram post is liked by Singh. This is not uncommon: the world of photographic art and artists is not a large one, and social media is one way that connections are forged in this community of practice. But this post by Davey, talking about a book published by Gill, that is then viewed and shared by Davey from her own interior space and subsequently seen and liked by Singh, supports my focus on bringing these three artists together via their shared approach to the anti-monumental, the everyday, and ways of providing intimate experiences of their work. The circulation of photobooks is linked to the types of exchanges enabled, in part, through digital modes of circulation and networks. But these networks and modes of viewing are themselves often tied to domestic spaces and position the domestic space as a crucial site for viewing photography, but not in a way that is isolated from a collective experience. Slow contemplation in a domestic space is not always reduced to an individualist mode of viewing or to stasis. As Jain notes of Singh’s work and her use of a book cart to sell her books (a wooden structure that Singh had originally made to house her saris in her living room), this was the material expression of a two-way traffic between public and domestic space, like the friendships flowing into and out of her work and like the images flowing out, often from the home, through the photograph, and then back into it through the book and/as portable museum.154 [my italics added] All of this is to say, as with so many of the examples in this book, the domestic is not separate from a discrete public, but is part of the logic of movement of selves and photography. Notes 1 Moyra Davey, Index Cards: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton  & Company, 2020), 43. 2 Adam Szymczyk, “Accidents Among the Slow Things: Adam Szymczyk Interviews Moyra Davey,” in Speaker Receiver, ed. Moyra Davey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, n.d.), 146. 3 Moyra Davey and Ben Lerner, “Letters: Moyra Davey  & Ben Lerner in Conversation,” in Moyra Davey (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2019), 142. 4 I am talking about intimacy here in terms of daily familiar proximities. There is nothing inherently more intimate about the domestic than other realms, as shown by the range of scholarship on intimate publics. See, for example, Lauren Gail Berlant, Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant,” Biography 34, no. 1 (2011): 180–87; Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, Writing Architecture Series (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Alison Dean, “Intimacy at Work: Nan Goldin and Rineke Dijkstra,” History of Photography 39, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 177–93, https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2015.10 38109; Shannan L. Hayes and Max Symuleski, “Counterpublic and Counterprivate: Zoe Leonard, David Wojnarowicz, and the Political Aesthetics of Intimacy,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 3 (September 2, 2019): 256–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0740770X.2019.1671104. 5 Geoffrey Batchen, “Does Size Matter?” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 72, no. 4 (December 2003): 250, https://doi.org/10.1080/00233600310021360. 6 Dalie Giroux has written specifically about Davey’s practice as one of connections and correspondences. See Dalie Giroux, “Correspondences: Notes on the Art of Moyra Davey,” in I Confess, ed. Moyra Davey (Chicago: National Gallery of Canada, 2020), 141–49.

140  Domestic display 7 Tom Crook, “Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain,” Body & Society 14, no. 4 (December  2008): 23, https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X08096893; Teri Higgins, Attention to Detail: Epistolary Forms in New Melodrama (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 102, https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048555116-006. 8 Gill has also worked with postage stamps and postcards in Interloper (1997) and Grassy Weeds (1998). See Jain for discussion of these, Kajri Jain, “Pause,” in Here Art Grows on Trees: Simryn Gill, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Gent: Australia Council for the Arts and MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2013), 167. 9 O’Doherty’s own position, not only as an art critic but also a conceptual artist, is important background in understanding his critique of the supposed neutrality of the white cube. 10 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, 1st bk. ed. (Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 1986). 11 Ibid., 15. 12 See, for example, David Dernie, “Exhibition Design: Reflections,” in The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, eds. Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 239–50; Tiina Roppola, Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience, Routledge Research in Museum Studies (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203070284; Anna Maria Tammaro, “Participatory Approaches and Innovation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums,” International Information & Library Review 48, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 37–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2016.1146040; James Voorhies, Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form Since 1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). 13 Claire Bishop, Participation, Documents of Contemporary Art Series (London: Whitechapel, 2006); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb32115.0001.001; Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods, and Mathieu Copeland, Collection Documents Sur l’art (Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 2002); Matthew Holt, “Transformation of the Aesthetic: Art as Participatory Design,” Design and Culture 7, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 143–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2015.1051781; Eva Knutz and Thomas Markussen, “Politics of Participation in Design Research: Learning from Participatory Art,” Design Issues 36, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 59–76, https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00575. 14 Much has been written about this topic. See, for example, Dernie, “Exhibition Design.” 15 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 76. 16 Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors From 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 17 Ibid., 3. 18 Bruno, Public Intimacy, 42. 19 Ibid., 34. 20 Ibid., 35; The tension between personal experience and collective viewing is also drawn out in Alessandra Mauro’s discussion about the curation of photography exhibitions. Mauro points out that the practice of curating photography exhibitions involved “skillfully working on proximity and distance, in accordance with the construction of an itinerary . . . in order to define the exhibition narrative as an intimate personal experience.” Alessandra Mauro, “The Photographic Display: A Short History,” in The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture, ed. Moritz Neumüller (New York: Routledge, 2018), 312, https://doi. org/10.4324/9781138604391. 21 Batchen, “Does Size Matter?” 250. 22 Reesa Greenberg offers commentary that considers the intersection between the timing of changing practices around gallery spaces amidst a period of cultural transformation in the 1970s and the increasing presence of feminist politics in the art world. Greenberg notes the “migration from the domestic-like interior as the setting for displaying art to a factory-like space.” She explains that the shift towards more women exhibiting in galleries coincided with the shift away from smaller-roomed gallery spaces as sites of pleasure towards larger warehouse sites which carried connotations of masculinity and the realm of work Reesa Greenberg, “The Exhibited Redistributed: A Case for Reassessing Space,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. Bruce W. Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg, and Sandy Nairne (London: Routledge, 1996), 350. 23 Lynne Cooke, “Introduction,” in Interiors, eds. Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke, and Josiah McElheny (Annandale-on-Hudson and Berlin: Center for Curatorial Studies and Sternberg Press, 2012), 14.

Domestic display 141 24 Hessel Museum of Art, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now,” CCS Bard, accessed November  29, 2022, https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/9-if-you-lived-here-youd-behome-by-now. 25 Cooke notes that these pieces were specifically designed by artist-architects, including Donald Judd and Frederick Kiesler, and by other artists who explore the connections between furniture and art, making the inclusion of these pieces an interesting example of the collapse between art, design and décor. 26 Cooke, “Introduction,” 14–15. 27 Greenberg, “The Exhibited Redistributed,” 351. 28 Ibid., 351. Greenberg goes on to observe that “Seating also gradually disappeared from museum galleries but reappears in the nineties. It is arranged so that its focus is not the art. Beside the usually hard chairs or benches or in front of them is placed a catalogue and other, varied reading materials. The pleasure of sitting and looking at art has been replaced by the task of reading about it. The work ethic prevails.” 29 Clément Chéroux, “Why the ‘Photobook Phenomenon’ Is More Than Just a Fad,” Aperture, 2021, https://aperture.org/editorial/has-the-photobook-become-more-interesting-than-photo graphs-themselves/. 30 Batchen, “Does Size Matter?”; Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Jane Simon, “An Intimate Mode of Looking: Francesca Woodman’s Photographs,” Emotion, Space and Society, Researching Intimate Spaces, eds. Elspeth Probyn and Clifton Evers, vol. 3, no. 1 (May  2010): 28–35, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.01.013. 31 Batchen, “Does Size Matter?” 250. 32 Davey, Long Life Cool White, 114. 33 Liz Wells, The Photography Reader/Edited by Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), 291. 34 Alexandra Moschovi, “Changing Places: The Rebranding of Photography as Contemporary Art,” in Photography between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art, eds. Hilde Van Gelder and Helen Westgeest (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), 146. 35 Batchen, “Does Size Matter?” 253. 36 Andrew Fisher, “Photographic Scale,” Philosophy of Photography 3, no. 2 (December  1, 2012): 313, https://doi.org/10.1386/pop.3.2.310_1. 37 Ibid., 312. 38 Davey, Long Life Cool White, 95. 39 Imre Szeman and Maria Whiteman, “The Big Picture: On the Politics of Contemporary Photography,” Third Text 23, no. 5 (September  2009): 554, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820 903184658. 40 Michael Fried, “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (2007): 495. 41 Chéroux, “Why the ‘Photobook Phenomenon’ Is More than Just a Fad.” 42 Ibid. 43 Singh cited in The Art Institute of Chicago, “Artist Profile: Dayanita Singh,” The Art Institute of Chicago, n.d., www.artic.edu/artists/107078/dayanita-singh. 44 “Hasselblad Award Winner Dayanita Singh Honoured at Ceremony,” Hasselblad, October 20, 2022, www.hasselblad.com/press/press-releases/2022/hasselblad-award-winner-dayanitasingh-honoured-at-ceremony/www.hasselblad.com/press/press-releases/2022/hasselblad-awardwinner-dayanita-singh-honoured-at-ceremony. 45 Singh cited in Liz Jobey, “Dayanita Singh: ‘Why Should Photography Be Stuck on the Wall?’,” Financial Times, September 20, 2019, www.ft.com/content/037d165e-d9a5-11e9-8f9b-77216 ebe1f17. 46 Thomas Weski, “On the Photography of Dayanita Singh,” in Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022), 90. 47 Simrat Dugal, “Book Timeline,” in Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022), 99. 48 Alice Sophia Powers, Intimate Durations: Reimagining Contemporary Indian Photography (Los Angeles: University of California, 2018), 191, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4161z2pg. 49 Dayanita Singh, Myself Mona Ahmed (Zurich: Scalo, 2001). 50 Ibid. 51 Dayanita Singh, Privacy (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2003).

142  Domestic display 52 Dayanita Singh, “About Photographing People,” India International Centre Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1994): 132–33. 53 Powers, “Intimate Durations,” 104. 54 Singh, cited in Stephanie Rosenthal, “Dancing With My Camera,” in Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022), 38. 55 Kajri Jain, “Photography Beyond the Photograph: Dayanita Singh’s Theory of Photography,” in Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022), 55. 56 Ibid., 57. 57 Dayanita Singh, Book Building (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022), 93. 58 Dayanita Singh, Chairs (Boston and Göttingen: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum  & Steidl Verlag, 2005); Dayanita Singh, Sent a Letter (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2008); Dayanita Singh, File Room (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2013). 59 Ahona Palchoudhuri, “To Play a Piece of Photography,” in Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022), 76. 60 Singh in, Dayanita Singh, Gerhard Steidl, and Aveek Sen, “Conversation Chambers,” in Museum Bhavan, 1st ed. (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017), 39. 61 Singh cited in Jobey, “Dayanita Singh.” 62 Ibid. 63 Singh in, Dayanita Singh, Steidl, and Sen, “Conversation Chambers,” 35. 64 Gerhard Steidl established the publishing house Steidl, which focuses on art and photograph books. He is known for his meticulous oversight of each publication, “each Steidl book literally passes through his hands”. Steidl Verlag, “About Steidl,” n.d., https://steidl.de/Pub lisher-0211122830.html. 65 Singh, cited in Rosenthal, “Dancing with My Camera,” 34. 66 Dugal, “Book Timeline,” 103. 67 Kajri Jain, “In Your Hands,” in Book Building, ed. Dayanita Singh (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022), 10. 68 Rosenthal, “Dancing With My Camera,” 35. 69 Claire Raymond, Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2017), 210. 70 Christophe Gallois, “Museum of Shedding and Painted Photos,” in Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022), 184. 71 Ibid. 72 Dayanita Singh, “Box of Shedding,” 2016, https://dayanitasingh.net/box-of-shedding/. 73 Dayanita Singh, Museum Bhavan, 1st ed. (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017). 74 Holly Shaffer, “Museum Bhavan,” in Book Building, ed. Dayanita Singh (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022), 132. 75 Aveek Sen, “Dayanita Singh,” Aperture, no. 231 (2018): 48. 76 Jain, “Photography Beyond the Photograph,” 63. 77 For a discussion of the portable format of Suitcase Museum and the leather luggage that holds twenty-two book objects, see Claire Molloy, “Suitcase Museum,” in Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022), 134–36. 78 Fabric plays an important role in other works by Singh. For example, Sent a Letter (2008) is also contained in a fabric covered clamshell box. This time the box is covered in an unbleached material called Markin, a type of industrial cotton which is similar to the type of cloth used as a covering for sending parcels in India. For Pothi Box (2018), Singh wrapped each book-object (a wooden box structure containing 30 photographs printed on separate cards) in embroidered muslin. 79 Singh, Book Building, 23. 80 The achaara, Holly Shaffer notes “like the box itself, is secondary. It supports making other products, in a similar way to how the box sustains its contents.” Shaffer, “Museum Bhavan,” 132. 81 Singh, Book Building, 21. 82 Singh, as interviewed by Bilal Qureshi, “This Photographer Wants to Put a Museum in Your Pocket,” NPR, April  10, 2018, sec. Photography, www.npr.org/2018/04/10/601142938/ this-photographer-wants-to-put-a-museum-in-your-pocket.

Domestic display 143 83 Kajri Jain, “Go Away Closer: Photography, Intermediality, Unevenness,” in Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction, eds. Kevin Coleman and Daniel James (London: Verso, 2021), 86. 84 Ibid. 85 Simrat Dugal, “Living with Books: Book-Cart, Bookshop, Book Posters, Book Walls,” in Book Building, ed. Dayanita Singh (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022), 56. 86 Singh held similar rituals of exchange with her book File Room, Simrat Dugal, “File Room,” in Book Building, ed. Dayanita Singh (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022), 45. 87 Simrat Dugal, “Museum of Chance,” in Book Building, ed. Dayanita Singh (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022), 36. 88 In Jain’s words: “If life is ‘private’ and art is ‘public’, Singh’s commerce mediates between them to show that life, commerce and art are inseparable, and are all therefore both private and public.” Jain, “Photography Beyond the Photograph,” 58. 89 Simrat Dugal, “Museum Bhavan,” in Book Building, ed. Dayanita Singh (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022), 23. 90 Singh cited in Jyoti Dhar, “The Architecture of a Conversation: Dayanita Singh,” Art Asia Pacific 87 (2014): 70. 91 Singh in, Dayanita Singh, Steidl, and Sen, “Conversation Chambers,” 55. 92 Brian Massumi, Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays in the Occurrent Arts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 159, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvpwhdm8; Anna Johnson, “Wood for the Trees: Simryn Gill,” Artist Profile, 2022, 62; Naomi Cass, “How We Are in the World: The Photography of Simryn Gill,” in Simryn Gill: Inland (Fitzroy: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2009), n.p. 93 Gill in, Naomi Cass and Simryn Gill, “Simryn Gill: Inland,” NETS Victoria, 2009, 2016, https://netsvictoria.org.au/exhibition/simryn-gill-inland-2/. 94 For example, Gill’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 95 Johnson, “Wood for the Trees,” 56; Ray Langenbach, “Malaysiatropia: The Art of Simryn Gill, Liew Kung Yu and Wong Hoy Cheong,” in Media, Culture and Society in Malaysia, ed. Seng-Guan Yeoh (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 204, https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203861653. 96 Langenbach, “Malaysiatropia,” 204; Daniel Palmer, “ ‘Asian’ Photography in Australia,” Photographies 14, no. 1 (January 2, 2021): 115, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2020.18 56713. 97 Lilian Chee, “The Domestic Residue: Feminist Mobility and Space in Simryn Gill’s Art,” Gender, Place & Culture 19, no. 6 (December 2012): 750–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966 369X.2012.674924; Lilian Chee, “Housekeeping: Domestic Views by Simryn Gill and Tino Djumini,” in Picturing Relations: Simryn Gill and Tino Djumini (Singapore: National University of Singapore Museum, 2007), 24–31. 98 Massumi, Architectures of the Unforeseen, 156. 99 Daniel Palmer, “Photography as Social Encounter: Three Works by Micky Allan, Sophie Calle and Simryn Gill,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 14, no. 2 (July 3, 2014): 208, https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2014.973011. 100 Chee, “The Domestic Residue,” 760. 101 Leon Goh, “Simryn Gill: Inland: Centre for Contemporary Photography 13 October – 12 December 2009 [Review],” Photofile, no. 89 (n.d.): 71, https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.2010 05327. 102 Chee, “The Domestic Residue,” 760. 103 Ibid. 104 Louis Ho, “Simryn Gill: Hugging the Shore,” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 94 (n.d.): 105, https://doi. org/10.3316/ielapa.439332326741571. 105 Chee, “The Domestic Residue,” 760. 106 Chee, “Housekeeping,” 26. 107 Ibid. 108 For a discussion of Power Station, see Cass, “How We Are in the World”; Chee, “The Domestic Residue,” 761. 109 See, for example, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Industrial Landscapes, English language ed (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Bernd & Hilla Becher:

144  Domestic display Typologies (München: Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, 1999); Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher, and Heinz Liesbrock, Coal Mines and Steel Mills (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2010), http://catdir.loc.gov/ catdir/enhancements/fy1312/2010498982-d.html. 110 Cass, “How We Are in the World.” 111 Gill in, Cass and Gill, “Simryn Gill.” 112 Cass, “How We Are in the World.” 113 This exhibition titled Simryn Gill: Inland, was held at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne in 2009 and curated by Naomi Cass. The exhibition included a number of Gill’s works that involved photography, including Dalam (2001), Distance (2003–2009), Power Station (2004), and Inland (2009) as well as earlier works Forest (1996–1998), Vegetation (1999), and Rampant (1999). 114 Goh, “Simryn Gill,” 71; As cultural geographer Katherine Brickell notes, the informality of this gallery arrangement “allows visitors to hold, touch, and re-arrange them [the photographs], much like moving into a new house – the participant is forced to deal with someone else’s prior arrangement before constructing his or her own.” Katherine Brickell, “Home Interiors, National Identity and Curatorial Practice in the Art Photography of Simryn Gill,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 3 (July 2014): 530, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013487486. 115 Brickell, “Home Interiors, National Identity and Curatorial Practice in the Art Photography of Simryn Gill,” 530. 116 Gill in, Cass and Gill, “Simryn Gill” Originally published 2009 in Flash Issue 3, Centre for Contemporary Photography. 117 Jain, “In Your Hands,” 10. 118 Palmer, “Photography as Social Encounter,” 209. 119 Jain describes this “slowness and stillness in being with and seeing the work” in relation to Gill’s Where to draw the line (2001–2012). Jain, “Pause,” 174. 120 Chee, “The Domestic Residue,” 763. 121 Kevin Chua, “Simryn Gill and Migration’s Capital,” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (December 2002): 16, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2002.10792132. 122 For a discussion of Forest, see Chua, “Simryn Gill and Migration’s Capital.” 123 As Chua explains, “the slowness of reading and looking (and the slowness of the blurring of reading with looking, their mutual interlacing and separation); the slow absorption of the beholder into the picture, even the slowness of nature as it reveals itself to us. The viewing habits of a casual museum-goer are transformed into the slow looking we rely on when we are out in nature, pondering and wandering.” Chua, “Simryn Gill and Migration’s Capital,” 16. 124 For a discussion of the connections between books, photography, and paper in Gill’s practice, see Carol Armstrong, “Words – Paper – Insects – Photographs,” in Here Art Grows on Trees: Simryn Gill, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Gent: Australia Council for the Arts and MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2013), 95–117. 125 Johnson, “Wood for the Trees,” 64. 126 Simryn Gill and Tom Melick, Stolon Press – a Publisher of Books and Pamphlets Based in Sydney (Stolon Press), accessed December 30, 2022, https://stolonpress.com/. 127 Simryn Gill and Tom Melick, Silver Street (Sydney: Stolon Press, 2020). 128 Although, in installations, unlike the rifling through of photographs from Inland, Distance has been installed in vitrines, to be looked at, but not held in the hands. 129 Chee, “The Domestic Residue,” 762. 130 Singh, cited in Natasha Bullock, Hibberd, and Simryn Gill, “Simryn Gill: In Conversation with Natasha Bullock and Lily Hibberd. [Paper in: Shifting Ground. Bullock, Natasha and Hibberd, Lily (Eds).],” Photofile (2005): 17, https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.200601326. 131 See Armstrong, “Words – Paper – Insects – Photographs’; Jain, “Pause.” 132 Lee Weng Choy, “Present and Unread: Simryn Gill’s Where to Draw the Line,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 33 (June 2013): 82, https://doi.org/10.1086/672022; See also Armstrong, “Words – Paper – Insects – Photographs,” 101. 133 Gill, cited in Bullock, Hibberd, and Gill, “Simryn Gill,” 21. 134 Margaret Iversen, “The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art After Barthes,” Art History 44, no. 4 (2021): 807, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12587. 135 Moyra Davey and Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Rescripted: After a Conversation Between Moyra Davey and Matthew S. Witkovsky,” Aperture, no. 217 (2014): 55.

Domestic display 145 36 For discussion of these, see Jain, “Pause,” 167. 1 137 Moyra Davey and Elisabeth Lebovici, “The Made or The Making: Moyra Davey & Elisabeth Lebovici in Conversation,” in Moyra Davey (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2019), 180. 138 Giroux, “Correspondences,” 123. 139 Szymczyk, “Accidents Among the Slow Things,” 146. 140 For a discussion of mail art in the 1950–1970s in New York, see Seeta Peña Gangadharan, “Mail Art: Networking Without Technology,” New Media  & Society 11, no. 1–2 (February 1, 2009): 285–90, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444808099581. 141 See, for example, Michael Crane and Mary Stofflet, Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity, 1st ed., vol. 2., Contemporary Documents (San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1984); Chuck Welch, Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995). 142 Davey in Davey and Lerner, “Letters,” 142. 143 Moyra Davey, Empties (Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2013). 144 Davey and Lerner, “Letters,” 139. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 140. 147 Chee, “The Domestic Residue,” 767. 148 Ibid. 149 Jain, “In Your Hands,” 10. 150 Lerner in Davey and Lerner, “Letters,” 140–41. 151 Gill cited in Michael Fitzgerald, “Against Blankness: The Inhabiting Spaces of Simryn Gill,” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 82 (n.d.): 91, https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.201217419. 152 Michael Hagner, “Hyperpresence and Reflection: The Photobook Under Digital Conditions,” in The Photobook in Art and Society: Participative Potentials of a Medium, eds. Montag Stiftung Kunst und Gesellschaft (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2020), 407–13; Chéroux, “Why the ‘Photobook Phenomenon’ Is More Than Just a Fad.” 153 Davey, Moyra (@moyradavey) 2022. ‘Clearing, a new Simryn Gill production with her signature rhyzomatic writing about silverfish, paper dust, trees, and entropy.’ Instagram. December 18, 2022, www.instagram.com/p/CmRpZToLKzs/?hl=en. 154 Jain, “Go Away Closer,” 90.

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146  Domestic display Brickell, Katherine. “Home Interiors, National Identity and Curatorial Practice in the Art Photography of Simryn Gill.” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 3 (July  2014): 525–32. https://doi. org/10.1177/1474474013487486. Bruno, Giuliana. Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. Writing Architecture Series. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. Bullock, Natasha, Lily Hibberd, and Simryn Gill. “Simryn Gill: In Conversation with Natasha Bullock and Lily Hibberd. [Paper in: Shifting Ground. Bullock, Natasha and Hibberd, Lily (Eds).].” Photofile, 2005. https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.200601326. Cass, Naomi. “How We Are in the World: The Photography of Simryn Gill.” In Simryn Gill: Inland. Fitzroy: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2009. Cass, Naomi, and Simryn Gill. “Simryn Gill: Inland.” NETS Victoria, 2009, 2016. https://nets victoria.org.au/exhibition/simryn-gill-inland-2/. Chee, Lilian. “The Domestic Residue: Feminist Mobility and Space in Simryn Gill’s Art.” Gender, Place  & Culture 19, no. 6 (December  2012): 750–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663 69X.2012.674924. ———. “Housekeeping: Domestic Views by Simryn Gill and Tino Djumini.” In Picturing Relations: Simryn Gill and Tino Djumini, 24–31. Singapore: National University of Singapore Museum, 2007. Chéroux, Clément. “Why the ‘Photobook Phenomenon’ Is More Than Just a Fad.” Aperture, 2021. https://aperture.org/editorial/has-the-photobook-become-more-interesting-than-photogra phs-themselves/. Choy, Lee Weng. “Present and Unread: Simryn Gill’s Where to Draw the Line.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 33 (June 2013): 78–87. https://doi.org/10.1086/672022. Chua, Kevin. “Simryn Gill and Migration’s Capital.” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (December  2002): 4–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2002.10792132. Cooke, Lynne. “Introduction.” In Interiors, edited by Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke, and Josiah McElheny, 12–16. Annandale-on-Hudson and Berlin: Center for Curatorial Studies and Sternberg Press, 2012. Crane, Michael, and Mary Stofflet. Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity. 1st ed. Vol. 2. Contemporary Documents. San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1984. Crook, Tom. “Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain.” Body & Society 14, no. 4 (December 2008): 15–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X08096893. Davey, Moyra. Empties. Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2013. ———. Index Cards: Selected Essays. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ———. Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Davey, Moyra, and Elisabeth Lebovici. “The Made or The Making: Moyra Davey  & Elisabeth Lebovici in Conversation.” In Moyra Davey, 177–84. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2019. Davey, Moyra, and Ben Lerner. “Letters: Moyra Davey & Ben Lerner in Conversation.” In Moyra Davey, 129–44. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2019. Davey, Moyra, and Matthew S. Witkovsky. “Rescripted: After a Conversation Between Moyra Davey and Matthew S. Witkovsky.” Aperture, no. 217 (2014): 50–56. Dayanita Singh. Museum Bhavan. 1st ed. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017. Dayanita Singh, Gerhard Steidl, and Aveek Sen. “Conversation Chambers.” In Museum Bhavan, 1st ed., 1–55. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017. Dean, Alison. “Intimacy at Work: Nan Goldin and Rineke Dijkstra.” History of Photography 39, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 177–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2015.1038109. Dernie, David. “Exhibition Design: Reflections.” In The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, edited by Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal, 239–50. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Dhar, Jyoti. “The Architecture of a Conversation: Dayanita Singh.” Art Asia Pacific 87 (2014): 68–77.

Domestic display 147 Dugal, Simrat. “Book Timeline.” In Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 99–113. Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022. ———. “File Room.” In Book Building, edited by Dayanita Singh, 43–48. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022. ———. “Living with Books: Book-Cart, Bookshop, Book Posters, Book Walls.” In Book Building, edited by Dayanita Singh, 53–59. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022. ———. “Museum Bhavan.” In Book Building, edited by Dayanita Singh, 20–25. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022. ———. “Museum of Chance.” In Book Building, edited by Dayanita Singh, 33–37. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022. Fisher, Andrew. “Photographic Scale.” Philosophy of Photography 3, no. 2 (December 1, 2012): 310–29. https://doi.org/10.1386/pop.3.2.310_1. Fitzgerald, Michael. “Against Blankness: The Inhabiting Spaces of Simryn Gill.” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 82 (n.d.): 82–91. https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.201217419. Fried, Michael. “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (2007): 495–526. Gallois, Christophe. “Museum of Shedding and Painted Photos.” In Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 184–85. Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022. Gangadharan, Seeta Peña. “Mail Art: Networking Without Technology.” New Media & Society 11, no. 1–2 (February 1, 2009): 279–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444808099581. Gill, Simryn, and Tom Melick. Silver Street. Sydney: Stolon Press, 2020. ———. Stolon Press – a Publisher of Books and Pamphlets Based in Sydney. Stolon Press. Accessed December 30, 2022. https://stolonpress.com/. Giroux, Dalie. “Correspondences: Notes on the Art of Moyra Davey.” In I Confess, edited by Moyra Davey, 141–49. Chicago: National Gallery of Canada, 2020. Goh, Leon. “Simryn Gill: Inland: Centre for Contemporary Photography 13 October – 12 December 2009 [Review].” Photofile, no. 89 (n.d.): 71. https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.201005327. Greenberg, Reesa. “The Exhibited Redistributed: A  Case for Reassessing Space.” In Thinking About Exhibitions, edited by Bruce W. Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg, and Sandy Nairne, 349–67. London: Routledge, 1996. Hagner, Michael. “Hyperpresence and Reflection: The Photobook Under Digital Conditions.” In The Photobook in Art and Society: Participative Potentials of a Medium, edited by Montag Stiftung Kunst und Gesellschaft, 407–13. Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2020. Hasselblad. “Hasselblad Award Winner Dayanita Singh Honoured at Ceremony.” October  20, 2022. www.hasselblad.com/press/press-releases/2022/hasselblad-award-winner-dayanita-singhhonoured-at-ceremony/www.hasselblad.com/press/press-releases/2022/hasselblad-award-win ner-dayanita-singh-honoured-at-ceremony. Hayes, Shannan L., and Max Symuleski. “Counterpublic and Counterprivate: Zoe Leonard, David Wojnarowicz, and the Political Aesthetics of Intimacy.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 3 (September 2, 2019): 256–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/07407 70X.2019.1671104. Hessel Museum of Art. “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now.” CCS Bard. Accessed November 29, 2022. https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/9-if-you-lived-here-youd-be-home-by-now. Higgins, Teri. Attention to Detail: Epistolary Forms in New Melodrama, 89–104. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048555116-006. Ho, Louis. “Simryn Gill: Hugging the Shore.” Art Asia Pacific no. 94 (n.d.): 105. https://doi. org/10.3316/ielapa.439332326741571. Holt, Matthew. “Transformation of the Aesthetic: Art as Participatory Design.” Design and Culture 7, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 143–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2015.1051781. Iversen, Margaret. “The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art After Barthes.” Art History 44, no. 4 (2021): 798–822. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12587.

148  Domestic display Jain, Kajri. “Go Away Closer: Photography, Intermediality, Unevenness.” In Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction, edited by Kevin Coleman and Daniel James, 74–100. London: Verso, 2021. ———. “In Your Hands.” In Book Building, edited by Dayanita Singh, 9–11. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022. ———. “Pause.” In Here Art Grows on Trees: Simryn Gill, edited by Catherine de Zegher, 163–76. Gent: Australia Council for the Arts and MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2013. ———. “Photography Beyond the Photograph: Dayanita Singh’s Theory of Photography.” In Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 55–68. Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022. Jobey, Liz. “Dayanita Singh: ‘Why Should Photography Be Stuck on the Wall?’ ” Financial Times, September 20, 2019. www.ft.com/content/037d165e-d9a5-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17. Johnson, Anna. “Wood for the Trees: Simryn Gill.” Artist Profile, 2022. Klonk, Charlotte. Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors From 1800 to 2000. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Knutz, Eva, and Thomas Markussen. “Politics of Participation in Design Research: Learning from Participatory Art.” Design Issues 36, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1162/ desi_a_00575. Langenbach, Ray. “Malaysiatropia: The Art of Simryn Gill, Liew Kung Yu and Wong Hoy Cheong.” In Media, Culture and Society in Malaysia, edited by Seng-Guan Yeoh, 197–225. London: Routledge, 2010. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203861653. Massumi, Brian. Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays in the Occurrent Arts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvpwhdm8. Mauro, Alessandra. “The Photographic Display: A Short History.” In The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture, edited by Moritz Neumüller, 309–17. New York: Routledge, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781138604391. Molloy, Claire. “Suitcase Museum.” In Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 134–36. Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022. Moschovi, Alexandra. “Changing Places: The Rebranding of Photography as Contemporary Art.” In Photography Between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art, edited by Hilde Van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, 143–55. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008. O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. 1st bk. ed. Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 1986. Palchoudhuri, Ahona. “To Play a Piece of Photography.” In Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 71–85. Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022. Palmer, Daniel. “ ‘Asian’ Photography in Australia.” Photographies 14, no. 1 (January 2, 2021): 109–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2020.1856713. ———. “Photography as Social Encounter: Three Works by Micky Allan, Sophie Calle and Simryn Gill.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 14, no. 2 (July 3, 2014): 199–213. https://doi. org/10.1080/14434318.2014.973011. Powers, Alice Sophia. Intimate Durations: Reimagining Contemporary Indian Photography. Los Angeles: University of California, 2018. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4161z2pg. Qureshi, Bilal. “This Photographer Wants to Put a Museum in Your Pocket.” NPR, April 10, 2018, sec. Photography. www.npr.org/2018/04/10/601142938/this-photographer-wants-to-put-amuseum-in-your-pocket. Raymond, Claire. Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2017. Roppola, Tiina. Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience. Routledge Research in Museum Studies. London: Taylor and Francis, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203070284. Rosenthal, Stephanie. “Dancing With My Camera.” In Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 6–39. Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022. Sen, Aveek. “Dayanita Singh.” Aperture, no. 231 (2018): 48–55.

Domestic display 149 Shaffer, Holly. “Museum Bhavan.” In Book Building, edited by Dayanita Singh, 132. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022. Simon, Jane. “An Intimate Mode of Looking: Francesca Woodman’s Photographs.” Emotion, Space and Society, Researching Intimate Spaces, edited by Elspeth Probyn and Clifton Evers, vol. 3, no. 1, 28–35, May 2010. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.01.013. Singh, Dayanita. “About Photographing People.” India International Centre Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1994): 132–33. ———. Book Building. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2022. ———. “Box of Shedding.” Dayanita Singh, 2016. https://dayanitasingh.net/box-of-shedding/. ———. Chairs. Boston and Göttingen: Isabella Stewart Gardner museum & Steidl Verlag, 2005. ———. File Room. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2013. ———. Myself Mona Ahmed. Zurich: Scalo, 2001. ———. Privacy. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2003. ———. Sent a Letter. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2008. Szeman, Imre, and Maria Whiteman. “The Big Picture: On the Politics of Contemporary Photography.” Third Text 23, no. 5 (September 2009): 551–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820903184658. Szymczyk, Adam. “Accidents Among the Slow Things: Adam Szymczyk Interviews Moyra Davey.” In Speaker Receiver, edited by Moyra Davey, 141–50. Berlin: Sternberg Press, n.d. Tammaro, Anna Maria. “Participatory Approaches and Innovation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums.” International Information & Library Review 48, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 37–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2016.1146040. Voorhies, James. Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form Since 1968. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Welch, Chuck. Eternal Network: A  Mail Art Anthology. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995. Wells, Liz. The Photography Reader. London: Routledge, 2003. Weski, Thomas. “On the Photography of Dayanita Singh.” In Dancing With My Camera: Dayanita Singh, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal, 87–96. Berlin: Gropius Bau and Hatje Cantz, 2022.

Conclusion Windows, doorways, footpaths

Windows and doorways I started this book with the story of Catherine Opie heading off on a road trip to document lesbian households in the United States to produce a counter history of domestic life.1 That road trip led to Opie’s Domestic series and included Eleanor and Megan, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1998) (see Figure 1.1), whose layering of windows generated a view of looking in and looking out at the same time. While Domestic features Opie’s documentation of lesbian households she has been invited into, Opie’s later series In and Around Home (2004–2005) shifts focus to Opie’s own home life in West Adams in Los Angeles. I’m revisiting Opie’s photographs at the conclusion of this book because her work articulates many of the ideas explored in these pages. In and Around Home presents the domestic realm as not so much a space of retreat, although it is clearly that in some photographs, but as part of a continuum between inside and outside. Photographs of Opie’s son playing at home are presented in the same photographic narrative that documents a nearby Martin Luther Kind Parade. Moments of domestic intimacy are punctured by the presence of news reportage filtered into the house through the television. The series is suffused with events outside of the home via the presence of television screens, newspapers, as well as local protests and gatherings in her local neighbourhood. To be in the home is always of necessity to also be around the home: that is, rather than there being a clear threshold between inside and outside the home, there is an ever-shifting sense of where the outside ends and the inside begins. This collection of photographs creates, as Jessica Hough points out in her accompanying essay to the series, “a tangled web of issues, personal and political, local and international – every one thing intertwined with, and inextricable from, the next.”2 These entanglements visualise the porosity of the home to its exterior realm, to local politics, and to community. Layers of privacy Opie conveys the fractal layers of the privacy of home life visually in a number of ways in In and Around Home. She uses windows and doorways as framing devices that present multiple viewpoints within a single frame. She also draws attention to the practices of both looking in and looking out, querying the boundaries of the personal and the public, the interior and exterior and positioning the neighbourhood as a key part of an individual home life. Opie also occasionally uses a Polaroid camera – an intimate handheld domestic technology – to capture public events as they are broadcast on her television. DOI: 10.4324/9781003089148-6

Conclusion 151 Opie’s photographs in In and Around Home regularly feature doorways and windows. These domestic frames highlight the viewpoint from which the photograph has been taken: looking in, looking through, or looking out. In the photograph Me and Nika by Julie (2005), in which – unlike most photographs in the series – Opie’s face is clearly featured, Opie sits on the floor, wearing pyjamas and Ugg boots, with a dog on her lap (see Figure 6.1). The photograph is taken from the porch looking in, with Opie framed by the doorway and daylight spilling inside. She is surrounded by domestic objects: a Halloween doormat, a folded-up beach umbrella, and a patterned rug. Here Opie is relaxed, and comfortable, but the viewer is made aware, through the use of the doorway as a framing device within the frame of the photograph, that we are outside looking in.

Figure 6.1 Catherine Opie, Me and Nika by Julie, 2005, C-print, 24 × 20 inches (61 × 50.8 cm) original in colour © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples

152  Conclusion In another photograph, one of the most well-known from the series, Oliver in a Tutu (2004), Opie’s young son stands on top of a chair next to a washing machine, wearing a pink tulle skirt and silver crown. He looks directly at the camera and stands in front of a wide-open doorway, through which you can see the outside, where a woman is sweeping and a dog’s face sniffs the breeze, and in the far distance, the sky and trees. This use of deep space positions the realm of the interior with its whitegoods and colourful alphabet magnets, and a child’s play, as an extension of the exterior; there is no clear-cut boundary here between inside and out. And here, as so often in Opie’s photographs, formal aesthetics accompany what appears at first glance to be a typical family snapshot. While this is a family photograph, it is one with echoes of circular forms and quiet care for composition: the inside table curve, the round mouth of the washing machine, the child’s table on the deck. Sunday Morning Breakfast (2004) is again a photograph taken from one room looking into another (see Figure 6.2). Here, the photograph is taken from the kitchen table, with the remains of breakfast out of focus in the foreground. The kitchen doorway, situated deeper in the photograph and ensconced between fridge and cabinets, frames Oliver sitting with two dogs in the next room, light spilling in from windows and catching his pale blond hair. Sunday Morning Breakfast and Oliver in a Tutu visualise the variability of what constitutes inside and outside, private and public, using doorways and windows to highlight the multiple interiors in each scene. Christmas West Adams (2004) also visualises the moveable and contingent thresholds between inside and out, public and private. This photograph features a view from inside the house, looking outwards onto the street. In this photograph, a rainbow flag hangs across the porch, bearing words that have to be read from behind: “SAY NO To The Bush Agenda.” The inside of the room, the space from which the photograph has been taken, is dark. It has a barely visible Christmas tree to the left of the frame, with small lights and the shine of a few baubles. The view through the window opens out to a green front garden and the brightly lit street. The three planes of the interior, the garden, and the exterior of the street are yoked together by the flag, a sign from Opie’s home but directed at people outside. The darkness of the interior, combined with the frame of the window and the well-lit exterior scene, has the quality of a cinema screen, a world outside to watch from the dim interior. The Christmas tree in the photograph (and indeed, pictured in countless family snapshots) is suggestive of the idealisation of the traditional family often associated with Christmas time. The decorated Christmas tree in combination with the flag’s message brings together the realm of political activism with domestic home life: they aren’t separate, Opie reminds us. There is a bare glimpse of a footpath in Christmas West Adams, through the window and past the greenery of the front garden beyond the flag. In and Around Home shows the in-between space of the footpath as a site for memorials, celebrations, protests, newsreporting, and, in one photograph, for a teenage girl to be caught with stolen Converse. These footpaths, with their daily dramas and micro-narratives, weave around the homes of West Adams. The footpath is a conduit – veins running through a community of homes. Opie’s inclusion of events broadcast on her television also gives a sense of the home’s porosity. Opie documents news reports and current events broadcast on her television at home using instant Polaroids. The Polaroid images document news about President Bush and the 2004 presidential election, the war in Iraq, the death of Pope John Paul, and the intense media interest in the case of Terry Schiavo and the right to die movement.3

Conclusion 153

Figure 6.2 Catherine Opie, Sunday Morning Breakfast, 2004, C-print, 20 × 16 inches (50.8 × 40.6 cm) © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples

These pockets of news that enter the home through the frame of the television are captured and presented in their small contained white frame of the Polaroid: a mode of photography with a complex history of cultural value.4 The use of instant Polaroids to photograph television screens creates blurry low-quality images that contrast with the warmth, intensity of colour, and clarity of the other photographs in the series. Opie uses a Polaroid camera to create singular photographic objects of moments of mass-media broadcast on a television screen. Polaroids are small, singular photographic objects that are held, and Polaroid images, as Peter Buse argues in his cultural history of the brand and practice, signify intimacy.5 The Polaroids in Opie’s usage perform the function of encapsulating the pull between the intimate and the public and the connection between

154  Conclusion them that drives In and Around Home. At the same time, Opie uses a medium-format camera to produce high-quality prints of domestic scenes and local community gatherings. Here, the more professional camera is used to look at the domestic, while the casual intimacy of the Polaroid gets pointed at the realm of the impersonal news broadcast. This levels the values and attention usually ascribed to the realm of news events compared with everyday domestic moments. The photographs taken around Opie’s home in her local neighbourhood focus on wall murals, signage, and a discarded television as well as moments where local community members have come together either in celebration or in protest. The photograph Abandoned TV (2005), which features a wood-panelled, large, and boxy television left next to the footpath (its curved screen capturing the reflection of the street), is a chain of connection to the Polaroids taken from Opie’s own television inside her own home. The diptych Two News Reporters (2005) in this series, featuring two news reporters outside local homes, microphones in hand, their eyes averted, preparing to present news to the camera, is another connection to the public events that seep into Opie’s home through the television. These two news reporters, with their accompanying camera-persons, lights, and light diffusers, are producing material that will flow through the homes around the area, fraying the boundaries between public news and private lives and reflecting Opie’s specific interest in “the idea of the private in relationship to a public politics” rather than “those lines of purely public or private.”6 In and Around Home positions home life as porous, connected to exterior relations and events, while at the same time charged with the small intimate moments of daily life with family. Domestic connections I’ve ended this book with Opie’s photographs from In and Around Home because her work encapsulates several themes explored in each of the previous chapters. Opie’s domestic scenes document the material objects that track across daily home life, which connects to my focus on domestic objects in Chapter 2. She shows us, for example, the life of the television as it moves from loungeroom transmitter of important news to a piece of electronic junk on the sidewalk in Abandoned TV (2005). In Sunday Morning Breakfast (2004), Opie frames her son Oliver from the distance of the kitchen looking into the loungeroom (see Figure 6.2). This positions Oliver as part of a wider realm of domestic materiality that includes the fridge, the table, and kitchen paraphernalia. The diaristic documentation of life within the close radius of Opie’s home and neighbourhood in In and Around Home prompts questions about self-representation, habits, and domestic time, which I explore in Chapter 3. Opie brings together the time of the public event and the time of the news cycle with the rhythms of baths, breakfasts, and care of a child. These temporalities are also framed by a sense of political time in the leadup to, and aftermath of, the 2004 presidential election. Opie’s attention to intersubjective relationships and relational self-representation in the portraits in both Domestic and In and Around Home trace similar territory explored in Chapter 4 about domestic portraits and the co-implication of self and other in photographic life stories. Opie’s portraits in this series document the chain of looks and connections between Opie and those close to her as she moves in and around the domestic with her camera. Finally, Opie’s use of the small handheld Polaroid format to document news broadcast on her television screen raises questions about the role of tactility, scale, and intimacy in

Conclusion 155 how photographic art is displayed and received: questions I examine in relation to the role of handheld formats and domestic modes of display in Chapter 5. My study of a diverse range of artists – Catherine Opie, Sian Bonnell, Elaine Campaner, Motoyuki Daifu, Hong Hao, Zoe Leonard, Moyra Davey, Elina Brotherus, Anna Fox, Nigel Shafran, Rinko Kawauchi, Takahiro Kaneyama, Dayanita Singh, and Simryn Gill – argues for the importance of the domestic in photographic histories and contemporary photographic art practice. These photographers harness photography’s ability to develop new relations between selves and objects and between viewers and photographs. Taken together, they present the domestic as a contradictory site: of intimacy and distance, of comfort and unease, and of relations and disconnections. While I’ve positioned artists in each chapter around specific themes, there are further connections between these artists and their engagement with the domestic. Many of the artists I’ve discussed have examined ideas about domestic life from unexpected angles, telling stories less visible in the history of photographic art focused on the home. Opie’s attention to lesbian home life, Kaneyama’s focus on his mother’s experience of schizophrenia, and Brotherus’ portrayal of infertility all do critical work in fleshing out the complexities and contradictions of lived domestic experiences. Other artists use the everyday domestic to articulate relations between family members. Shafran’s many photographs of Ruth, Kawauchi’s photographic chains of looking, and Kaneyama’s depictions of his mother and aunts all use, in different ways, the frame of the domestic to develop cumulative portraits. In a related manner, Fox also produces a cumulative portrait of her parents via photographs of her mother’s cupboards and the recorded words of her father. Campaner’s domestic dioramas, the still-life aerial photographs of Daifu’s table, and Hong Hao’s scanned collages of everyday things each provide new angles from which to consider domestic objects. Hong’s scanned collages and Daifu’s table-top photographs are each overwhelming in their amount of matter: Hong’s neat and careful arrangements present domestic consumption in a different manner to the haphazard clutter of Daifu’s photographs. The domestic, for many artists in this book, is not disconnected from the exterior world: the exterior pulses through the domestic, just as the domestic extends out beyond the boundary of the interior. This is seen of course not only in Opie’s work, which I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, but also in Bonnell’s photographs of kitchen tools and paraphernalia pictured amidst fields, gardens, and even by the sea. Throughout this book, many of the examples I’ve discussed have also raised questions about the relationship between photography and mobility. Think, for example, of Kaneyama’s journeys to Japan to visit his family and their various trips within Japan documented in While Leaves Are Falling .  .  . Think too of Opie’s road trip collecting photos of lesbians in their home spaces which culminated in Domestic, of Gill’s road trip that create her series Inland and Leonard’s photographs, which track the transnational movements of clothing and used items. At the same time, many of the photographs I’ve discussed are themselves mobile. For example, Davey’s photographs travel on their journeys as mailers, and Singh’s book objects are often designed specifically with travel in mind – this is especially the case with her Suitcase Museum (2017–2018), a collection of framed book objects with a specially designed suitcase that becomes part of the display as well as the storage for travel. Paying attention to the intersection of photographic art and the domestic can alert us to new ways of thinking about the self and the domestic interior. Each of the artists

156  Conclusion featured in this book has produced work that shifts attention to the realm of the domestic, a realm I position as an unpredictable zone of gestures, traces, things, and objects that is continually shaped and remade through material and social relations both inside and outside domestic spaces. Notes 1 Peter Galassi, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991). 2 Jessica Hough, “Rainbow Kite,” in Catherine Opie: 1999/In and Around Home, ed. Catherine Opie (Ridgefield, CT: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2006), 119. 3 Often serial in composition, Opie uses these small frames to create connections between different news stories: or to present multiple images of the same story. For example, in Bush Smiling, Help Us (2005), a Polaroid of George Bush smiling on the television screen above the headline “Responding to Hurricane Katrina” is juxtaposed against a Polaroid of the televised image of two New Orleans residents holding up the hand-written sign “Help us.” This replicates patterns and themes from the rest of In and Around Home: the emphasis on multiple viewpoints and the difference between looking in (George Bush looking at the fallout from Hurricane Katrina from his position outside New Orleans) and looking out (the New Orleans residents looking beyond the city asking for help). 4 See, for example, Peter Buse, The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 5 Peter Buse, “Photography Degree Zero: Cultural History of the Polaroid Image,” New Formations 62 (2007): 42. 6 Catherine Opie cited in Juliette Mélia, “Creating a New Iconicity: An Interview with Catherine Opie,” Transatlantica. Revue d’études Américaines. American Studies Journal, no. 1 (September 9, 2013): 3, https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.6430.

References Buse, Peter. The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. ———. “Photography Degree Zero: Cultural History of the Polaroid Image.” New Formations 62 (2007): 29–44. Galassi, Peter. Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991. Hough, Jessica. “Rainbow Kite.” In Catherine Opie: 1999/In and Around Home, edited by Catherine Opie, 117–21. Ridgefield, CT: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2006. Mélia, Juliette. “Creating a New Iconicity: An Interview with Catherine Opie.” Transatlantica. Revue d’études Américaines. American Studies Journal, no. 1 (September 9, 2013). https://doi. org/10.4000/transatlantica.6430.

Index

41 Hewitt Rd (Fox) 9, 58, 71, 75 – 7, 80 absurdism 23 aerial perspective 20, 32, 37, 46 Albers, Anni 44 – 5, 52n110 amateurism wilful 23 – 4, 26 – 7 amateur photography 56 Analogue (Leonard) 8, 20, 36, 41 – 4, 46, 51n98, 52n119, 81n27 analogue photography 1, 41, 81n27 Annonciation (Brotherus) 8, 56, 58, 63 – 71, 80 anti-monumental 139 Araki, Nobuyoshi 32, 40 archive 125, 136; of attachments 96; domestic 11n24, 77; of feeling 64 Archive of Feelings 36 art market 123, 129, 135 as it is (Kawauchi) 90, 97 – 9, 101 – 3 assemblage 3, 36, 37, 112 autobiography: as objects 36 – 7; of objects 13n38; relational 59, 88; of seeing 98, 101; see also life narrative Autobiography (LeWitt) 36, 40, 50n65 Azoulay, Ariella 89, 111, 113n6 Barthes, Roland 57, 61 beachclean (Bonnell) 23 Becher, Bernd and Hilla 43, 131 Bonnell, Sian 8, 18 – 19, 20, 22 – 7, 43, 46, 48n28, 120, 155 books: bookmakers 8, 124; cut up 133, 137; in photographs 40 – 1, 51n87, 58, 131, 134; remade into objects 134; small press 134; see also photobook bookshelves 40, 90; shelfies 22 boredom 56, 72; aesthetics of 72 Brotherus, Elina 8, 56 – 8, 63 – 71, 79 – 80, 83n68, 120, 155 Brown, Bill 37 Bryson, Norman 21, 31, 32, 49n49 Burn the Diaries (Davey) 60, 63 Burton, Antoinette 11n24

calendars 58, 61, 64 – 7, 69, 71, 75, 77, 80, 83n69, 110 – 11 camera: as conduit 112; large format 1, 23; Polaroid 150, 152 – 4, 156n3; as relational tool 90, 93, 95, 98, 101 – 3, 107, 110 – 12, 123 Camera: How to Be Holy (Bonnell) 26 Campaner, Elaine 8, 19 – 21, 27 – 31, 46, 49n52, 155 Carland, Tammy Rae 36 Carpe Fucking Diem (Brotherus) 8, 58, 63, 70 – 1, 80 Casabere, James 1, 27 – 8 children and home life 4, 58, 75, 80; and art making 19, 25, 58; in photographs 1, 9, 57, 77, 80, 98, 101 Chinese maximalism 37, 40, 50n80 cleaning see housework cleaning objects 23, 43, 78, 79 clocks 57, 61, 65, 77 close-up 19 – 20, 22, 24, 32, 41, 44, 46, 48n18, 59, 96, 102, 109, 123 Cockroach Diary (Fox) 9, 56, 58, 71 – 7, 80 Compost Pictures (Shafran) 32, 90 consumption 32, 34, 36, 40, 51n88, 61, 155 contact prints 133 contemplation 93, 98, 121; politics of 41; slow 138, 139 correspondence 9, 59, 75, 120, 126, 135, 139n6 couch 1, 25, 44, 46, 60, 64, 68 – 9, 71, 96 – 7 craft 5, 127 critical proximity 6 Cui Cui (Kawauchi) 9, 90, 97 – 103 cumulative portraits see slow portraiture Daifu, Motoyuki 8, 19 – 21, 31 – 6, 46 – 7, 49n59, 76, 120, 155 Dalam (Gill) 129 – 32, 133, 134 Dark Rooms (Shafran) 9, 89, 90, 96 – 7 Davey, Moyra 7 – 9, 40, 56 – 63, 73, 75, 79 – 80, 81n25, 81n26, 81n27, 82n32, 82n39, 88, 119 – 20, 122, 123, 134 – 7, 138 – 9, 139n6, 155

158 Index defamiliarisation 21, 29, 46 description 6 – 7 detritus 20, 37, 50n75, 71, 72 diary 7, 7 – 75, 9, 20, 35, 36, 42, 56 – 8, 59 – 60, 64 – 5, 67, 77, 80, 107, 120; and confession 57; travel 125; as unmediated 56; as way of life 60 Dictionaries (Davey) 61 – 2 dioramas 8, 20, 27 – 30, 32, 42, 155 Disciplines (Bonnell) 26 display of photographs 119 – 23; see also exhibition space; photobooks Distance (Gill) 134 domestic: as antithesis of art 5; coded as feminine 12n28, 121; as monumental 19; as porous 3 – 4, 10n13, 18, 150, 154 Domestic (Opie) 1 – 3, 9n3, 9n4, 150 domestic ethnography 115n72 domestic labour 5, 18, 26, 57, 60; see also housework domestic rhythms 57 domestic space 63, 77, 92, 95, 96, 104 – 5, 108, 115n71, 120 – 1, 126, 128, 138 – 9 domestic technology 58, 80, 112, 150, 154; see also fridge; telephone; television domestic temporality see time doorways 107, 112, 150 – 2 Dr Y, Dr Y (Davey) 60 duration see time dust 60, 71, 82n46 Empties (Davey) 61, 135 – 6 epistolary practices see letters everyday: aesthetics 6; life 4 – 6, 7, 27, 32, 35, 48n28, 69 everyday dada (Bonnell) 25 exchange see correspondence exhibition spaces 9, 119, 122, 125, 126; and seating 119, 122, 126, 133, 141n28 exteriors 23, 31, 41, 46, 133; domestic objects in 18 – 19, 20, 22, 25, 41, 43; see also landscape fabric 41, 43 – 4, 46, 127, 142n78 failure 8, 58, 60, 62 – 3, 67, 70, 75, 80, 92 family photography 5 – 6, 57, 70, 81n17, 89, 103 – 4, 112, 152, 154 feminist: approaches to home 4, 57, 138; art 5, 12n33, 23, 72, 116n79, 140n22 fertility tracking 58, 65 – 6 Fifty Minutes (Davey) 60 Floor (Davey) 60 Flowers for___ (Shafran) 96 food in photography 21, 23, 25, 31 – 4, 37, 70, 84n95, 91 – 2 forensic gaze 72, 76, 90 found objects 8, 20, 26 – 7, 32, 41 – 2

Fox, Anna 8, 56 – 8, 71 – 80, 84n89, 84n95, 88, 90, 120, 155 Fraiman, Susan 5 Fridge (Davey) 58, 63, 80 fridge in photographs 58, 63, 152, 154 Galassi, Peter see Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort Gill, Simryn 9, 120, 122, 129 – 34, 135, 137 – 9, 140n8, 143n94, 144n113, 144n119, 155 Glowing (Bonnell) 24 – 5 Groover, Jan 22 Groundings (Bonnell) 18 – 19, 22 Habitation is a Habit (Leonard) 20, 41, 44 – 6 handheld 9, 29, 119 – 22, 132 – 4, 137 – 8, 150, 154 – 5 Health & Safety (Bonnell) 26 Highmore, Ben 6, 7 Hill Collins, Patricia 4 home 4 – 5; and homelessness 4 Hong, Hao 19 – 21, 35 – 41, 46 – 7, 155 hooks, bell 4 hotel 104 – 5, 107 housework 12n33, 25, 40, 57, 60, 75, 79 In and Around Home (Opie) 2, 9, 150 – 4, 156n3 Index Cards (Davey) 58 infertility 8, 58, 64 – 5, 67, 70, 83n64, 155 Inland (Gill) 9, 120, 129, 132 – 3, 138, 144n113, 155 intersubjectivity see relationality intimacy 2, 7, 9, 23, 112, 115n71, 119, 120, 122, 150, 153 – 4; and distance 95, 103, 155; intertextual 44, 59; public 121; queer 44 in vitro fertilisation (IVF) 64, 68 – 9, 70 Jain, Kajri 7, 125 – 6, 128, 139 Kaneyama, Takahiro 9, 88, 90, 103 – 12, 114n57, 115n63, 115n71, 120, 155 Kawauchi, Rinko 9, 88, 97 – 103, 112, 114n47, 120, 155 kitchen 19, 23 – 5, 68 – 9, 90, 92, 95, 98, 152, 154; table 1, 8, 20, 25, 31 – 5, 46, 64, 75, 152 landline telephone see telephone landscape 18 – 19, 23, 27, 29, 42, 47n1, 71, 83n68, 132 Lee, Yoonjean 22, 40 Leonard, Zoe 8, 19 – 20, 21, 36, 41 – 7, 52n119, 58 – 9, 81n27, 120, 155 lesbian homes 1 – 2, 57, 150, 155

Index  159 Les Goddesses (Davey) 58, 82n33 letters 59, 60, 119, 135 LeWitt, Sol 36, 50n65 life narrative 3, 6, 70 – 1, 77, 93; objects in 19; of objects 36; as relational 59, 93, 99, 107, 112, 197 Lindström, Tuija 22 lists 37, 59, 70 longing 2, 9n4 Long Life Cool White (Davey) 8, 56, 58, 60 mailers 82n39, 120, 134 – 8, 155 maximalism see Chinese maximalism miniature 27 – 31, 49n44 minor affects 58, 63, 72 Mitchell, W. J. T. 6 mobility: of photobooks 122, 123, 125 – 6, 127 – 8, 138 – 9; of photographs 91, 125, 135, 137, 138, 155 mother: figure of 9, 25, 31, 34, 58, 90, 103 – 11, 115n63, 115n71 motherhood 4, 25, 59, 101, 112, 116n79 Museum Bhavan (Singh) 9, 120, 126 – 9, 134, 142n80 Museum of Shedding (Singh) 126 My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (Fox) 9, 56, 58, 71 – 2, 77 – 80, 88, 155 My Things (Hong) 20, 35 – 41, 50n71 Ngai, Sianne 63 non-places 96 – 7, 105; escalator 96, 105; supermarket 37; see also hotel obsolescence 42 Opie, Catherine 1 – 3, 9, 9n4, 120, 150 – 5, 156n3 paper 134, 135 Paw (Davey) 60 – 1 Pearl (Gill) 134 Petri-Dish (Campaner) 27, 31 photobooks: circulation of 122, 123, 125 – 6, 127 – 8, 138 – 9; and deceleration 123, 138; design and form 99, 104, 112, 119, 122 – 3; and intimacy 123, 126, 139; as love poem 92, 93; and scale 78, 119, 120, 122, 133, 134, 138; sequencing of 90, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102 – 3, 104 – 5, 112 photography: as autobiography 84, 98; as event 89; as gestural practice 89; and relationality 80, 89, 110, 113n9, 124; and scale 21, 23, 25, 27 – 31, 37 – 8, 40, 43, 46, 59, 119 – 23, 133, 138, 154 Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort 1 Polaroids 150, 152, 153 – 4, 156n3

political ephemera 41 Power Stations (Gill) 132, 133 privacy 7, 9, 56, 150 Privacy (Singh) 124 Project Family (Daifu) 31, 34 proximity: between interior and exterior 2 – 3, 27; between viewer and photographs 7, 119, 122, 131, 133, 138, 140n20 psychological interiority 5 queer homes 1 – 2, 4 relationality: across photographs 99, 124, 126, 131; familial 9, 89, 96 – 7, 99, 101 – 3; human and non-human 19 – 21, 22, 27, 32, 41, 110; and life narrative 88 – 9, 93; selfhood 7, 9, 89, 112, 154 religious motifs 26 – 7, 64, 76 – 68 road trip 1, 9, 129, 132, 150, 155 rubbish see detritus Ruthbook (Shafran) 9, 89 – 90, 92 – 4 Ruth on the Phone (Shafran) 9, 89 – 96, 109 scanning 36 – 7, 40 schizophrenia 9, 90, 103 – 5, 107, 155 self-portraiture 8, 36, 48n25, 56, 64 – 5, 67, 70, 80, 96 Sen, Aveek 8, 13n57, 126 Sent a Letter (Singh) 120, 125, 135, 142n78 seriality 44, 46, 90, 135 Shafran, Nigel 9, 32, 88 – 97, 103, 105, 109, 112, 113n17, 120, 155 Simmons, Laurie 27, 28 Singh, Dayanita 7, 9, 120, 122, 124 – 9, 130, 131, 133, 134 – 6, 138 – 9, 142n78, 143n86, 143n88, 155 slow portraiture 9, 88 – 90, 93, 95 – 7, 98 – 9, 100 – 3, 105, 110, 112 snapshot see vernacular photography sofa see couch solitude 96 – 7 souvenirs 20, 27, 29 still-life: painting 21, 31, 32, 42, 47n14, 49n49; photography 8, 18 – 22, 34, 37, 41 – 2, 44, 46 – 7, 47n1, 48n15, 48n18, 48n25, 56, 88, 92, 97, 155; selfie 22 Still Life (Daifu) 8, 31 – 5, 36, 46, 76 Still-Life (Lee) 40 street in photography 81n27, 101, 152, 154 telephone 89, 95, 109 television: in photographs 41, 105, 108 – 9, 110, 115n71, 115n75, 152 – 3, 154, 156n3; as portal 109, 150, 154; as relational device 110, 112

160

Index

temporality see time thing theory 21 time: archival 77; art historical 67; claustrophobic 80; collective 67, 75; diary 57, 73; domestic 57 – 8, 60, 62 – 3, 70 – 1, 72 – 5, 77, 79 – 80; generational 70; infertile 8, 63 – 5, 67; lived experience 65, 67; suspended 63, 80 toys 1, 18, 27, 30, 77, 131 travel 9 – 10n4, 105, 111, 114n55, 125, 155

vernacular photography 6, 72 – 3; see also family photography waiting 8, 58, 63, 67 – 9, 71, 72, 80 Washing-up (Shafran) 32, 90 – 2 when the domestic meets the wild 22 – 3, 43 While Leaves are Falling . . . 90, 103 – 11, 114n55 white cube 119, 120 windows 95, 98, 105 – 7, 108, 115n63, 137, 150, 152