Parenting

'Even dust can be interesting': the woman who photographs housework


‘I hate housework!” the American comedian Joan Rivers quipped. “You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.” In her intriguing photobook, The Second Shift, Clare Gallagher places that quote next to an altogether more serious one by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who famously compared the repetitive grind of housework to “the torture of Sisyphus”.

Several years in the making and self-published in a limited edition of 500, The Second Shift is an artist’s book that, despite its apparently mundane subject matter, often approaches the sublime. Gallagher captures the familiar workload of family life (piles of laundry, baskets of unironed clothes) as well as the constant creeping chaos that attends it (dirty dishes, food scraps, sinks blocked with slimy domestic detritus).

Throughout, these quotidian still lifes are punctuated with tender portraits of her young sons at rest, at play and asleep. All human life is here, the menial and the transcendent. “I want to draw attention to what is not shown about home,” she says, “the everyday things that are right in front of our eyes, but go almost unnoticed and uncommented on.”

‘What’s really annoying is that you become good at it’ … the laundry awaits in an image from The Second Shift.



‘What’s really annoying is that you become good at it’ … the laundry awaits in an image from The Second Shift. Photograph: Clare Gallagher

The book’s title refers to “the second shift of housework and childcare carried out mainly by women on top of their paid employment”. In 2016, a report by the Office for National Statistics estimated the value of unpaid housework at a staggering £1.24 trillion each year.

“Our economic system would simply not function without all this hidden, unpaid labour,” says Gallagher, who also teaches photography at Ulster University. “If you work full-time, as I do, you come home to this other job that is mind-numbingly repetitive and utterly unacknowledged. As a feminist, I find myself wondering, why are we still doing this and why are we still annoyed with ourselves for doing it?”

She describes The Second Shift as “a quietly angry book”. Amid the flow of poetic imagery, though, it is a poem by the Irish writer Leontia Flynn that speaks most angrily about the gender inequality that underpins housework; her words blaze off the page with an accusatory charge. In contrast, Gallagher’s photographs are almost dreamlike in their evocation of the domestic everyday, her discontents rendered in a deft visual poetry of small, telling details, muted colours and soft shadows. It is as if, in the very act of photographing, she has imposed a degree of calmness and order on the relentless domestic rituals that so unsettle her.

Housework takes up an inordinate amount of Gallagher’s time, not just the doing of it, but photographing it and thinking deeply about it (her ongoing PhD addresses “the hidden work of home and family”). Even before her gaze shifted to the overlooked rituals of life, she was an artist preoccupied with the everyday in all its unkempt and often overlooked beauty. For her first series, Verges, she photographed weed-covered waste grounds, those liminal spaces where our relatively ordered urban environment gives way to natural disorder.

‘I think it is tied into the relentless drive of capitalism’ … time to empty the bin again.



‘I think it is tied into the relentless drive of capitalism’ … time to empty the bin again. Photograph: Clare Gallagher

It was followed by Domestic Drift, a more tentative precursor to The Second Shift in which home was evoked as a kind of heightened meditative state: sunlight falling on an unmade bed, a child’s hand silhouetted against a windowpane, a mound of newly mown grass. Here and there, her images recalled the daydream intensity of the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, who is similarly drawn to the everyday sublime.

“Domestic Drift was the first time I felt compelled to look at what was in front of me,” Gallagher recalls. “Back then, I had two young kids, and what was in front of me was pretty messy and chaotic. There was a tension between addressing the stuff that constantly needed to be done and finding the space to just observe the overlooked beauty of things as they are.” Since then, her work has been informed by that dynamic to some degree.

Her unconventional approach to photography, which is still predominantly a male medium, is an act of creative rebellion. “I started off by being wilfully amateurish and lo-fi,” she says, laughing. “I’m not into all the masculine stuff of big, expensive toys. I could as easily make work on a phone with a camera. Essentially, I want a tool that doesn’t get in the way. I’m really not interested in the status of the camera.”

Gallagher’s creative process is slow and she often spends hours making big scans of negatives and searching meticulously for dust spots that she can correct with a brush and ink. “It’s an exercise in patience and attentiveness that takes up so much time but is absolutely necessary. I can’t not do it. It’s about getting to know the image intimately. You realise,” she says, relishing the irony, “that even the dust is interesting.”

Clare Gallagher.



Women are ‘constantly being measured and judged’ … Clare Gallagher

Revealingly, her influences tend to be literary and theoretical rather than photographic. In 2012, when one of her photographs from Domestic Drift was featured in the Guardian’s My Best Shot series, she explained how she had “repurposed French thinker Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive or drift” and, in doing so, “challenged myself to break out of the routine of home: cleaning, cooking, charging around. I wanted to photograph the things I struggled with.”

She cites Junichiro Tanizaki’s classic essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, as a touchstone. Her work also draws on the long history of feminist explorations of the tyranny of the domestic, from artist Martha Rosler’s conceptual explorations of women’s prescribed roles to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 19th-century novella The Yellow Wallpaper, in which a woman goes mad from being confined to her room without work or social stimulus.

“Although there has been progress, women still resent the day-to-day reality of housework, its draining repetition and the anxieties it breeds,” Gallagher says. “The more I research the subject, the more I think it is tied to the relentless drive of capitalism, and informed by deeply embedded notions of female duty and respectability. What’s really annoying is that you become good at it – cooking dinner, cleaning, coaxing the kids, doing the laundry and making sure it dries fast. And then you go to your actual paid job. In both contexts, you are constantly being measured up and judged.”

For a moment, Gallagher’s calm demeanour gives way to a palpable sense of exasperation. “I grew up in the 1970s. My generation were told that we were equal and that, if we worked hard enough, we would be as good as anyone, so we applied ourselves. Instead, we have the illusion of equality. There is a silence about that still – not least because it suits half the population to help prop up a system that maintains that illusion.”

The Second Shift is out now.



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