Snapshots into a world of laundry

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Two lines of washing flap in the wind against a moody sky. Text within the image reads "I have not used a launderette for many years, since being a student or a teen. They were a warm place for my friend and I to hang out and eat pop and sweets from the off-licence next door. But thinking about this...it is something I associate with poverty as I think about when I lived in Wales, and had no money for a washing machine. Clothes were washed in a bath and hung on a hand-drying rack made of wood sticks over the range.

In thinking how to present the stories, experiences and anecdotes that participants shared with me, I wanted something that brought together their words, with evocative images, and the social engagement process itself. Still self-isolating, my shooting location had to be at home rather than at a launderette. So My initial thoughts had been around a series of images of the little laundry items with the stories written on the back, flapping in the wind. 

Line of washing silhouetted against the sky with text that reads "Launderettes are a nightmare if you can't see. Getting around them is fine because you can learn the layout, you can also learn how to use the washing machine, for example, on our machine at home I just remember the position of the washes on the dial and the position of different buttons, but as machines become more touchscreen, this becomes more difficult to do."


I took a number of shots outside with the laundry almost in silhouette against a cloudy sky. It was windy so a good day for drying, but it was about to rain and the last of the summer's warmth had eeked away. The dismal, dreary cold of autumn was tangible in the images. Probably a good fit for some of the more serious or poignant stories, but less fitting with some of the funnier more light-hearted ones. 

Two lines of colourful washing. Text reads "On my way back from the launderette with 20 minutes spare before the machine finished, I found a trail of dirty knickers on the pavement, it took me a while to realise they were mine."


So I also took indoor shots showing the outfits in all their bright colours, and it offered a nice contrast to the others. It became apparent quite quickly that the fluid, loops of handwriting on many of the clothes was difficult to read in the photographs, so I decided to add typed text to the images, and let the sentences follow the drooping line of the washing, which made the words become more embedded in the images.


Washing line of tiny clothes. Text reads "As lazy young adults my housemate and I ran out of clean knicks. We put on chaps and long jumpers and walked down Streatham High Street with no one knowing we'd got no pants on"

Having developed a few more images, I realised I'd have to have a huge stack of them to be able to share the breadth of engagement I'd had, and that short of looking through an album or watching a slide-show, that wasn't necessarily going to work. So I decided to choose a wider selection of viewpoints and bring them together a video. The sharing for that will come this week and it will be the focus of my next blog.

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