ESSAY: Photography and Domesticity

The role of photography has altered largely over the course of the past century, particularly in reference to our understanding of domesticity. In this essay I will explore how documentary photography evolved from the late 19th to 20th century, focusing only on artists who utilise analogue photographic mediums. I have chosen to focus on this medium for continuity, as the disparity between the analogue and digital photograph is too great, and the analogue photograph provides a more consistent foundation for the exploration of this topic. Analogue photography refers to the practice of using photosensitive silver gelatine film to produce a negative that can then be reproduced as an image using chemical darkroom processes. The underlying themes of this essay include those of poverty, class, the roles of women in society, and the expectations of motherhood. I will examine the work of 5 key artists to determine their impact on our understanding of everyday experiences through their photographic practice, and examine how photographic corporation Kodak constructed a narrative through the use of their marketing materials. 

The origins of photography as a medium for social commentary can trace back to the late 19th century, when Danish-American photojournalist Jacob Riis published ‘How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York’. This book used photography as a medium to document the poverty-stricken living conditions of working class and immigrant communities in New York City, and advocate for social reform. Motivated by his own experience as an immigrant, the choice to document these neighbourhoods was paired with public presentations paved the way for the destruction of tenements (housing structures that are overcrowded and poorly maintained) and the subsequent spur in social reform efforts improved the lives of many (Ryan, 1997). This example of photography being instrumental to social commentary and subverting the public perception is not the last of its kind. From 1938 to 1957, the United Kingdom saw a similar phenomenon with the photojournalistic publication ‘Picture Post’. Holding an anti-fascist, liberal and populist stance, the magazine utilised candid 35mm photography as a tool through which to communicate to its audience, which at the height of popularity was reported at over 80% of the British population (McDonald, 2004). Working with many esteemed journalists and photographers to produce a variety of stories through the second world war and beyond, the number of unpublished stories eventually outnumbered those that made it to print.

Amongst the unpublished stories was one akin to Riis’ work: Thurston Hopkins’ 1956 documentation titled ‘The Slums of Liverpool’, a story spotlighting the poor living conditions that many working class families inhabited. This was later published in Picture Post on Liverpool (Wilkinson, 2011) alongside photographs depicting the domestic lives of locals. Recalling the week spent in Liverpool for this story, Hopkins recalls “as soon as we uttered the words ‘Picture Post’, doors flew open and a cuppa was produced” (Hopkins, as quoted in Wilkinson, 2011), proving the high status of the publication and the subsequent impact it had on the public perception of current affairs. The photographs selected for this story highlight a variety of aspects of the domestic routines that would have been the norm for these families, including childcare, laundry, household chores, and cooking. Many elements of this can be seen in Fig. 1, where a woman is depicted comforting a child whilst another child plays nearby. In the background is a hearth, likely providing warmth for the woman and children, as well as drying the clothes hung just above it. In the foreground, there are dishes that appear to be unwashed – a marker of the chores that await. It can be surmised that the woman in the photograph is the mother of these children, or grandmother, seeing as the families described in the story would not have been affluent enough to outsource childcare. All of these features combine to create a snapshot into the lives of residents in these ‘Liverpool Slums’, a small feature of the larger story that exposes the downfalls of social bodies and brings them to the attention of the wider population, hoping to incite a social change.

Whilst examining these early instances of domestic photography, we can also analyse the way in which they portray gender roles within a domestic setting, and how these have evolved over time. Fig. 1, along with many other images in the unpublished ‘Slums of Liverpool’ story, is an insight into the daily duties and routines of a housewife. It seems ironic that these working-class women are the subject of such images, routinely documented by likely middle-class photographers making a spectacle of their lifestyles, while at the same time, middle-class women were the subject of marketing campaigns relating to photography. In 1912, Kodak published How to Make Good Pictures, a photographic guide aimed at amateur photographers, and it quickly became the global standard for snapshot photography (Patton, 2014). This book and other Kodak published texts established another key role for women, particularly housewives: being the family photographer. Immediately established by the cover image of a female photographer, this narrative was continually reinforced by a series of thirty-two example photographs depicting a father and his young daughter, inferring that the mother is responsible for operating the camera. The didactic discourse of the mother photographer presented by Kodak eventually became normalised, supporting Foucault’s theories of discourse and power: “the transcription of something that it both conceals and manifests” (Foucault, 2002). Kodak does not overtly assert that it is a mother’s job to photograph, yet repeatedly positions mother figures as the camera operative. This ideology played into the rhetoric that photography was a necessity when it comes to remembering, positioning itself as an arbiter of reality to drive sales (Patton, 2014). The language that Kodak used in advertising materials and published guides relied very heavily on a rhetoric of guilt, particularly surrounding children, growing up, and missed opportunities, before converting this into a need for consumption by offering a solution.

A great example of a photographer who appears to fit the Kodak narrative is Vivian Maier. During her lifetime and career as a childminder, her work was unknown and unpublished, only being discovered posthumously by collectors. Her work often depicted every day life on the streets of Chicago in the 1950s, including many domestic scenes of women and children in a raw, candid, and intimate manner. Superficially, her images of children playing could be mistaken for her role as a mother figure desiring to capture fleeting moments, however a closer examination of Maier’s repetitive tendencies reveals a much more considered approach to photography. With an eye for the human side of the city, her work captured a multitude of characters across different breadths of fortune and walks of life. She was unafraid to document the harsh realities of poverty and homelessness around the city, whilst having an empathetic approach to the topic (Maier, Cahan and Williams, 2012). Considering this, it’s impressive to see how someone who fits the blueprint of the targeted Kodak consumer also flips the expectations on their head, as she is capturing far beyond the family realm. There are many similarities between the work of Maier and the unpublished photographs from the ‘Slums of Liverpool’ story, but the biggest difference by far is the motive behind capturing. Despite being a private person, Maier’s choices were defined by her attraction to the public (Maier, Cahan and Williams, 2012), whereas the work of Hopkins embraced his role as a photojournalist, thus endeavoured to capture the private lives of others in order to present them to the public eye.

To further understand the evolution of the domestic photograph, we can analyse the family photograph and its role in portraying the family dynamic. An artist whose work threw the family dynamic into question is Sally Mann. In the 1980s, Mann began documenting the mundane activities of her three children, publishing a complete collection of the subsequent images in a book titled ‘Immediate Family’ in 1992. This became known as one of the most ground breaking, controversial cases of domestic photography of its time for containing nude and semi-nude images of her children, facing heavy criticism from the public, with some even accusing Mann of sexualising her children (Parsons, 2008). Whilst it is important to address the nuanced and well-considered controversies, this essay will focus more on the impact ‘Immediate Family’ had on the genre of domestic photography. The depiction of children as complex individuals, rather than sanitized tropes, uprooted the conventions of family portraiture as it was known (Magda-Ward, 2019). The images in this project are an honest reflection of childhood, with the children playing, sustaining minor injuries, swimming, and resting. Mann used her camera as an instrument to sustain memories, reflect the astonishment and gratitude she held towards her children, and hone a maternal desire (Mann, 2015). 

Tracing back to earlier discussion, Mann is another example of a female photographer, and mother, fitting the perpetuated ideal consumer of the Kodak discourse. Her images are captured with the eyes of a mother, who is not shocked by the ordinary things she has seen (Schulze, 2019), and therefore reinforcing Foucault’s idea of discourse’s ability to manifest a reality (Foucault, 2002) even further. Fig. 2 shows Mann’s daughters playing maternal roles, with baby dolls and a pram, something that most young girls do – behind the camera, Mann is assuming the role of a photographer, distinct from her role as a mother, to reinvent the classical relationship between mother and child (Schulze, 2019). This role inversion is another example of Immediate Family changing the public’s understanding of children, and in turn, the understanding of the uses of domestic photography. It is interesting to note that the majority of Mann’s images were taken outdoors, perhaps signifying that the act of photographing her children was Mann’s own version of play. The small amount of indoor photos could perhaps insinuate that whilst Mann was indoors, she was tending to other matters, fitting the traditional expectations of a motherly role, such as cooking or cleaning.

Another concept that domestic and documentary photography has challenged is the division of the indoors and outdoors, drawing ambiguity towards what is considered private or public. An artist whose work deals with these themes is Catherine Opie, who in 1998 set off on a road trip with the intention of documenting lesbian households in the USA to produce a more authentic image of domestic life (Simon, 2024). Immediately, this challenges the understanding of a typical family dynamic, by favouring a model other than the nuclear family, heterosexual relationships, and the assumption of a family requiring children. The result of this trip was her project titled Domestic. At the time, and likely still today, the lesbian community in particular were vastly underrepresented in fine art photography, and so this project was unique in its approach to domestic life (Greene Harney, 2013).

The images taken for Domestic were separated into three categories: families, couples, and groups. The ‘family’ category involved a child or children, with the ‘couple’ category being a self-explanatory display of two people in a romantic relationship. The ‘group’ category depicts three or more women living in the same space, with no clear family ties (Greene Harney, 2013). Fig. 3 depicts a couple, Eleanor & Megan, separated from the viewer by the window pane. The reflections in the window paired with hazy sunshine abstract the figures slightly, but not enough to detract from their gaze towards one another. This sense of separation highlights the gaze of the camera, and makes the viewer feel like a voyeur as opposed to a part of the image. This brings into question the separation between public and private, with parts of the subject being out of frame and invisible to the audience, creating space for intrigue. This throws into question the expectations a viewer might have, including those around the ‘average’ domestic home, such as gender, class, race, and extends upon decades of feminist practices (Simon, 2024). Opie’s subsequent project, In and Around Home also regularly features windows and doorways, setting up a natural frame to highlight the viewpoint the photograph was taken from. In many of the photographs there is visible elements of the inside and outside, creating an image with challenged boundaries, which may be a purposeful reflection of the themes Opie portrays.

Overall, the works of Riis, Hopkins, Maier, Mann, Opie, and the marketing materials of Kodak, are instrumental to the perception of the domestic norms through their challenging use of photography and language. The exploration of adjacent themes, such as politics, class, and feminism, are briefly present in this essay, and could be explored in far more detail through the work of each artist, though would detract from the main points of the essay. Another element unexplored in this text is that of the digital age – the way in which we handle media in a daily context is vastly different to that in the traditional photographic context, especially analogue photography, and would be a different essay entirely. The works of all the mentioned artists challenged the perceptions of domesticity, and highlighted different perspectives on important topics. With Riis, Hopkins and Maier tackling poverty and poor living conditions, their work lead discussions that resulted in social change and altered perspectives. Maier also documented the lives of women, similar to Opie, who also explored gender and sexual identities, whilst Mann faced controversies for her perspectives on childhood innocence as a mother. The evolution of domestic photography has proved to display recurrent themes globally, and the desire to document the domestic is still present today, proving it to be an important method of expression for many artists.

Bibliography

RYAN, S.M., (1997). ‘"Rough ways and rough work": Jacob Riis, social reform, and the rhetoric of benevolent violence’. American Transcendental Quarterly, 11(3), pp. 191-212.

McDonald, S. (2004) Hulton Archive- History in Pictures. 

Wilkinson, C. (2011) Picture Post on Liverpool. Bluecoat Press.

Patton, E. and Choi, M. (eds.) (2014) Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework and Modern Relationships. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Foucault, M. (2002) Archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge.

Maier, V., Cahan, R. and Williams, M. (2012). Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows. CityFiles Press.

Magada-Ward, M. (2019) “Immediate Family: On the Consolation, Embellishment, and Distortion of Memory,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 33(2), pp. 311–323.

Schulze, M. (2019). Why was Sally Mann’s Immediate Family so controversial?

Parsons, S. (2008) ‘Public/Private Tensions in the Photography of Sally Mann’, History of Photography, 32(2), pp. 123–136. 

Mann, S. (2015). ‘Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs’. New York: Little, Brown.

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Standard Edition, Vol. 18, pp. 7-64). London: Hogarth.

Simon, J. (2024) The Domestic Interior and the Self in Contemporary Photography. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Greene Harney, S. (2013) Catherine Opie’s Domestic Series

Figures

Fig. 1 – Hopkins, T. (1956) By the Hearth. Analogue photograph.

Fig. 2 – Mann, S. (1989), The New Mothers, Silver Gelatine Print.

Fig. 3 – Opie, C. (1998), Eleanor & Megan, Analogue photograph.